When I fly alone, I put on a sleep mask and a pair of earplugs to eradicate my awareness of living through time. Then I travel through the sky, lost in my own head, where at least the food is better. Walking the floor of E3, the enormous video-game expo in Los Angeles, is the exact opposite: Sensory overload forces you out of your skull and you are compelled to engage with every palm-sweat-sticky controller that comes your way.
One such controller was attached to Taxi Driver, Majesco’s new game based on the film. Video-game publishers have announced many such projects recently, and games based on The Godfather, Jaws, and even From Russia with Love are all on their way. After playing Taxi Driver for 15 minutes at E3 I just want to say: Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. If ever there was a game to inspire real-world violence, it’s this one, because it is such a leaden, uninspired piece of cynical crap that it flushes you with a blood-dimmed tide of loathing for the game developers at Papaya Studio who pinched off this licensed loaf. It’s a cash grab, a drugstore stickup, but the idiots made their gun out of a bar of soap.
Fortunately, there were better games. Vivendi’s Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction embraces dumb fun with Hulk antics like doing skateboard-grind tricks using a massive city bus. THQ’s Destroy All Humans! puts you in a cartoon flying saucer armed with a death ray and an anal probe, stealing DNA from humans and reading their ’50s B-movie thoughts. Wideload’s Stubbs the Zombie does a similar turnabout with you as a zombie Willy Loman, ever-burning cigarette dangling from your rotting lip as you plod through your dreary new unlife in pursuit of brains. Stubbs uses desaturated colors and a constant film grain to put the game in its late-night zombie-movie context, while Capcom’s Okami uses Japanese woodblock-print styling and a watercolor paper texture to achieve its goal of bringing Japanese folk myths to beautiful life.
Atari’s Indigo Prophecy is fascinating. They’re trying to update adventure games with Dragon’s Lair/Shenmue-style controls and a branching crime-story plotline. The result is the kind of interactive movie that’s been just over the horizon for the last decade, but with a lot more player control than I would have expected and a dense, multi-character perspective on the same series of events that raises the bar on game storytelling. Nintendo’s Chibi Robo! baffled me at first glance: You play a tiny robot with a power plug hanging out of your ass. Turns out you’re a household cleaning robot, scrubbing up dog prints from the kitchen floor and accumulating little props and costumes. Climb under a coffee mug for protection and spin it so the handle knocks out nearby spiders. Gather up cookie crumbs and feed some tropical fish. Wear a frog costume to charm a little girl. The game’s combination of exploration, experimentation, and joyful whimsy won over my hardened heart. I was Travis Bickle no more. ■