Is the First-Person Shooter Genre DOA?

I love me a good first-person shooter (FPS), that's the God's honest truth. But there's nothing I detest more than the idea of another FPS movie. Regular video game adaptations are bad enough, but FPS movies are the worst of the lot. Doom was a perfect example of why it shouldn't ever happen again. The Resident Evil movies serve as supporting evidence (despite not entirely being completely FPS to begin with). Halo was set to be a big splash, but was prematurely fragged in preproduction. Why? Well, a bevy of reasons.

First of all, video games in general lack truly involved, inspiring plots. Oh sure, they SEEM involved when you're playing them. Mostly because that five-minute cut scene perfectly sets up your next twelve-hour killing spree, but that doesn't mean it would really be satisfactory if you were simply watching rather than playing. What you'll tolerate when you are actively involved and what you will watch as an observer are two completely different beasts.

And when they aren't thin, those stories are contrived or comprised entirely of other source material. Halo, after all, is just what happens when you cross the suits from Starship Troopers (the book, not the movie -- the suits were too expensive at the time and scrapped from the film) with Aliens and any zombie movie. Halo 2 ratchets up the ante by ripping off Predator and making the predator-like creature a playable character. Original? No. Fun to play? SURE! If I'll watch Aliens a million times, why wouldn't I want to play through it, or something that evokes that same feeling?

Problem is, so much gets lost in the translation. It's like running poetry through Babel Fish. It ain't gonna come out the same. At all. Go ahead, take your favorite poem or passage from a book, translate it into another language, then run that back through into English. The result will be a confusing garble of ideas you recognize, but will fail to have the same elegance as the original source. It might not even make a lick of sense any more. Now, take the idea of your favorite sci-fi film. Translate it into a game designed to entertain you by giving you a reason to kill dozens of creatures at once. Then translate that back into a science-fiction film.

Starting to wonder why you don't just focus on making a good science-fiction film rather than translating it back? Welcome to my world.

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