The Stupidest Thing Ever

[davidn]

As I've had occasion to show this around recently, I might as well make a complete post about it - here's a shining example of how games are still represented on TV.

Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones - appearance on Life

Life is one of the American criminal dramas that Whitney watches that I can't really separately identify - the most obvious difference that I can make out in it compared to the others is that it stars Damian Lewis in what seems to be a popular situation for British actors at the moment, having to learn to speak American for a role so that they can understand him. In this clip, after expositing to some assistant or other who I'm sure will be a dead cert for the Most Stoned Acting award this year, the group of investigators have to play through to the entirely imaginary Level 10 of the game.

In the unintentionally comical semi-advertising montage that follows, they reduce what is quite a reasonably told story into "The object of this game is to save the Princess" (what are we playing, Super Mario?) and shoe-horn in a concept of level progression, Photoshopped over the top of the game in a Papyrus font that announces when "You have died - play again?" or "You win - advance to level 2". Is there some requirement in the head of whoever put this together that games must only speak in very broken English? Considering it must take an enormous amount of effort to get things so wrong, what I'm guessing happened here is that they secured which game they were using very late on, and then tried to cram this hexagonal peg into the semicircular hole in the script left by somebody's 1980s-styled impressions of what games are like.

You also have to wonder what's stopping them from cracking whatever security has been put on to the console and just get to the files that way - something that I would imagine would be rather easy seeing as at the climactic moment the doors split open at the end to reveal reams of what appear to be spreadsheet windows spitting out file names - it would seem that this Xbox is just running Windows.

Is it difficult to get how computers work right on TV? It's an understatement to say they've been around quite a while now, and yet every time they ever come up on one of these programmes it's a sure sign that something stupid's about to happen.

Comments

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

Oh good, so it's not just me to notice that this game does not have levels. Or that this makes no sense.

Another reason for not watching TV.

[kjorteo]

Right, I didn't want to have to do this, but you've left me no choice.



And even this actually deliberately ignores several video game-related plot holes (such as already knowing about the extremely unintuitive warp in Mario Bros. 3 when it was a major plot point that the game hadn't yet been released) just to focus exclusively on the actual video game factual errors. Even then misses a couple, such as showing footage of level 1 of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and claiming it's level 3. (Given how each "level" is an absolutely massive overworld-style area with several sub-areas and how there are therefore only six areas in the entire game, confusing areas 1 and 3 is sort of like confusing DLY chapters 1 and 3.)

[davidn]

He certainly missed out the caption "In real life, the Powerglove can't actually be used to effectively control a game"...

It could be simply because I myself am unfamiliar with a lot of these games, but I minded a lot of these rather less - perhaps I feel that as the game industry was in... not its infancy but its awkward first-day-of-school moment, that other media didn't really understand them. The film appears to share a theme with the Prince of Persia video of trying to force a vaguely named game concept on to a game that it's unsuited for - score for Super Mario, which is technically there but not really a primary concern of the game, and levels for The Two Thrones, which you would be hard pressed to even identify.

It's strange that - as shown on the TV Tropes page you already know about and that I won't look up the link for for reasons of self-preservation - in about twenty years, the depiction of games hasn't really got any better.

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

This is win for giving me another opportunity to hear the words:

"I love the Powerglove. It's so bad."

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

I've been hoping to unlock that Spreadsheet Achievement for months now, and they revealed how to do it in a pissant CSI-style show?