by ·Comments Off on Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine Review

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine is a third person action shooter / brawler which does exactly what you would expect in that you play a Space Marine in the Warhammer 40,000 universe.  This is a very simple premise the bellies a much more complicated background.

You take control of Captain Titus of the Ultramarines as you attempt to liberate a forge world from an Ork invasion with the help of two of your battle-brothers by murdering as many invading aliens as possible.  The plot then opens up into the investigation of a doomsday-like device that the Inquisition have been working on in secret that harbours powers of the warp.

There will be parts of that last paragraph that you will not understand unless you are familiar with the Warhammer 40,000 setting, something that I think THQ are going to have a hard time with because there’s a problem here.  The Warhammer 40,000 setting is weird.  Brilliantly weird, but still weird none the less.  There will also be more than one person giggling that the big blue space marines are called Ultramarines.

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Any careful development or thoughtful planning on the part of anyone making games can be undone in one fell swoop from every game’s worst possible enemy.  Their nemesis.  Their one stumbling block on the way to greatness.

The player.

Any player has a unique ability to completely and utterly destroy any game.  There are several ways they can do this with some of the most popular methods being to play another game along the lines of making sure everyone else isn’t having fun, but the one that can scupper just about anything, online or offline, is where the player is given free reign to exercise their creativity.

Playing Space Marine at the preview event I went along to the other day (and look, here is my write up over at Bit-Tech), I started thinking about how the developers must dread players when we started playing the multiplayer part of the game.  Space Marine comes with the option to customize your power armoured super soldier down to the colours of individual parts of armour.  The intention here is that you can create unique designs or anything you might have painted if you happen to have been a fan of the miniatures.  The reality in most cases is however wildly different.

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by ·Comments Off on Space Marine: How to treat your source material

It’s inevitable that in this modern era, a lot of media that gets green lit and produced is going to be based on a franchise.  This is for the simple reason that the sheer amount of time effort and money that goes into these projects is enough to make you sink into a little inadequacy filled puddle of awe and they have to stand a decent chance of making a profit or at the very least not cause a loss.  If your project is based on a pre existing franchise with a pre existing fan base, then some of your work is done for you.  You don’t have to market the thing quite so aggressively, you’ve got people providing the hype for you, and you’ve got a large group of people who will pay you for your work regardless of the eventual quality.

It can be heartbreaking to see something handled badly.  There is a lot of resentment towards fan-loved properties that are somehow distorted beyond recognition by a translation to a different medium.  Sometimes it even comes from the original creators and you suddenly realise that you attached more significance and meaning to something that was somewhat a fluke.  Although it happens a lot with sequels and reboots, it’s even more common when something goes from one form to another, for example a line of toys to a line of blockbuster action films that seem to be focused on borderline racist one liners and extended screen time for American military types.

Every now and then though, somebody gets it right.  Somebody manages to take something that is complicated, dense, rich and sometimes awkward, and usher it into a new form.  The world of franchise translators and rebooters and sequelisers should take notes from Relic Entertainment for their work on the upcoming video game Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine.

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