[Gaming] A different kind of trailer

A common trend in trailers from upcoming videogames is the fact that most of them are fairly insubstantial. Superficial, if you will. They usually emphasize on showing off some sparkling new graphics, combined with text promising "exciting new features" such as 512-player multiplayer and so on.

Another common element in videogame trailers is an almost insufferable amount of masculinity, or what I like to call the "RARGH!" factor. Think of the movie 300, where the protagonists apparently couldn't speak like normal people, and instead had to scream at the top of the langs, presumably because their hemorrhoids were flaring up. It's fine for a while, but it gets boring before long. Going back to videogames for a moment, it's exactly this line of thinking that lead to such cockeyed advertisment as that old Ocarina of Time which boldy declared:

"Willst thou save the girl, or play as one?"

GG, as the clueless whippersnappers say. Also, I believe it should have been "playeth" for added cheese factor.

Note that there's nothing wrong with masculinity, nor with a testosterone-filled, action-packed trailer. Hell, the Street Fighter IV trailer I praised so much last Monday is exactly that. Which makes sense in this context, since it's a trailer for a game where people beat each other up senseless. You pretty much need these elements in such cases.

But if games are ever going to evolve as a medium*, they need to provide with something more than just people on steroids killing stuff dead. You may be wondering what this has to do with trailers, yet aren't trailers usually the first impression one gets from something? Not necessarily, of course, but that is often the case. Furthermore, as I mentioned in Monday's post, a good trailer can be reason enough to get someone interested in the advertised subject, even if the person in question isn't interested in the medium, in this case videogames.

At this point I'd like to present my favorite trailers of this different kind, which are more cinematic and artsy than their mainstream counterparts. Surprisingly enough, the first trailer comes from Gears of War, a game that takes the "RARGH!" amplifiers all the way up to eleven.

Still, the Gary Jules cover of Mad World combines beautifully with the action depicted through the game engine, and the result is very solemn, bleak even. Something that can't be said for the game itself** sadly, as such somber moments wouldn't have gone amiss. Enough mumbling though, more trailer embedding:



Speaking of elements from trailers that would have made the actual games better, the following trailer from Halo 3 baffles me. It manages, in a mere sixty seconds, to tell us more about the character of Master Chief (the protagonist) than all three entire games combined have! Not to mention it manages to combine both solemnity and badassery, something the games fail horribly at.

I honestly don't get why these aspects of the storyline was never explored or even hinted at in the games, that is, both the Chief's backstory and what it meant for humans to come in contact with a different civilization, only to find out they were hell-bent on eradicating us. Instead, all we got was such hackneyed phrases as "Prepare for war!"

Still, the trailer is brilliant:



Which leads me to the most recent example of this kind of trailers, which was also the inspiration behind this post, the recent Prince of Persia trailer. I never expected I'd hear a Sia Furler song in a videogame trailer, so I was genuinely caught off-guard when I first saw this. As with the GoW/Mad World trailer, it works wonderfully, and is actually a pretty clever nudge to the new gameplay system, where the supporting character (the girl, Elika) will always save you when you miss a jump and plunge to your death, for example.

Since the game hasn't been released yet, there's no way of saying for sure if the mood of this trailer will be reflected in the actual game, but there's a better chance than the previous two games, as Prince of Persia isn't a fast-paced shooter. Instead, it seems like a more dream-like experience, a high adventure that could have been pulled straight from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, which unsurprisingly was the main influence behind the series.

In other words, it seems nothing like the atrocity that was The Warrior Within and Godsmack (RARGH!) are nowhere to be found, and that is definitely a good thing.

As for the trailer itself, you can watch it here:



TL;DR version:

There's an argument to be made against this artsy kind of trailers, and no, it's not "OMG thiz trailurz r so ghey LOL!", shut up please. What can be argued that these trailers are rather pretentious since they're not closely related to the games themselves, and for that reason quite derivative.

To that I would offer the following counter-arguments: first of all, being a little pretentious never hurt anyone, and art and pretentiousness often go hand-to-hand. Moreover, a trailer doesn't necessarily have to give you a specific idea of what the game will be like. Instead, giving a vague feeling of what the game could be about works just as well. Isn't a trailer meant to arouse interest in the finished product?

Lastly I believe that trailers should be able to stand on their own, in the sense that if say the game they're advertising never came out, the trailer should still be awesome in its own right. This subject goes beyond a little tl;dr sidenote, so I'll come back to it another time.

*Not going to go into the whole "games as art" argument just yet

** Definitely not a bad thing though, I love Gears of War and its world for what they are, and I'll go into further detail as we get near the release of its sequel