Press Start
If you're any kind of Ebert-fearing American, chances are you've already done your patriotic duty and plunked down some of your green to get a CGI-ful of either of this summer's lime tinted blockbusters where a fake-looking man flies through the air. Love 'em or hate 'em, I don't care about your opinion - save it for the messageboards, nerds. If you're disappointed, consider it a playable demo of how your parents and anyone you've ever dated feels. Of course, when the movies end, the marketing blitz begins, and both Bruce Banner and Thomas Anderson are shilling controllable commercials of their adventures for the small screen, complete with embarrassing digital plugs for everything from Powerade and Slim Jims to Mountain Dew and Motorola. Makes sense - with movies becoming more like videogames and vice versa, why shouldn't the box office war carry over to console soil? It's not like anyone's expecting anything but B-grade plot points and D cups from the ilk of the Tomb Raider sequel. However, the rule of thumbpad when Hollywood and Silicon Valley swap mediocre body fluids, it causes geeks to draw back in horror as though confronted by any shirt size that doesn't start with at least 2 Xs. Yet with recent multimedia hybrids, both industries have extracted their heads from between their hips to see that there is vast room for improvement as well as merchandising. The question is, do their latest efforts show it? To find out, I went Player 1-on-1 with both The Matrix and Hulk games, and was met with varying degrees of repetitive disappointment as an answer.

There Is No Fun

"Hulk bend spoon himself, without puny numbers!"

There's a moment in the Enter the Matrix video game where the character Ghost is talking to Trinity after a heated homage to Neo and Morpheus's first fight in the construct. "Made a mess of your garden," Trinity notes, looking out upon Ghost's digital Zen Buddhist refuge. "I kinda like it," Ghost responds, as he contemplates how to make a mess of Trinity's garden before Neo plows the field. This basic exchange in BASIC seems to be a quiet warning on what to expect from the rest of the game's saving graces. Created by Shiny Entertainment (used to turning their backs on good ideas by refusing to continue the Earthworm Jim series), founder David Perry nearly took the blue pill on the concept until the Super Wachowski Brothers threw enough money at them to give it the old college dropout try. The result is a very shaky Choose Your Own Adventure continuing the story of The Matrix Reloaded's monotone kung-fu fashionistas battling to save the world.

It appears that Shiny tried to learn from Neo's example; making an ambitious game with all the resources of the movie and ignore all preset limits. The problem is the limits are now glaring flaws in the final version, setting a precedent that every time you want to high-five the developers, you'd have to slap them twice. In the graphical arena, the motion capture attempts to duplicate the movies and does exactly that - no soul, no real interest; just a hollow doppelgangster that you pilot poorly through parallel events from the film. Both fighting and driving levels more than make up for repetitiveness in goofy physics so unbelievable they look like Gumby having a seizure while handling like piloting your abusive father home from a bar with pink elephants chasing him. Since the overall product plays like a half-hearted Mary Sue fanfic with few moments of true inspiration, it's barely worth a rental just to whet one's appetite for the One since he's Gone 'Till November. Or maybe I'm just saying that because of the best graphical enhancement ever: the make-out scene with Persephone (Monica Bellucci) and Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith) bound to fog up any fan's sunglasses. While the majority of the live-action scenes are horrid throwbacks to the long dead Sega CD, this scene alone comes close to being worth the price of admission: Bound to turn the dominant percentage of gamers into a Brotherhood of the Wolf Whistle. Woo, indeed.

Smash Somethin'

Is this moment worth full retail? Use both heads to think up an answer.

Meanwhile, the Hulk's game is refreshingly bereft of pretentions or constraints about its subject matter, as the Super Shrek's only motivation is to fuck shit up. And the game allows you to do that in spades: cars, people, anything not nailed down can be hurled or used as a weapon to leave Hulk's signature on the environement - a swath of destruction that'll never leave any confusion about which way the player's been. By far, the icing on the cake are the boss fights, recalling old school beat-'em-ups for a delightful clash of titans. Aside from the main story mode, several unlockable extras are offered similar to EtM's in all but content; various challenges to test your might reveal dvd-like bonus features about the making of the movie & game. Sadly, where the game trips itself up is in slamming the brakes on the gamma-powered Tyler Durden as an excuse to insert Eric Bana's Banner into the game to negotiate frustrating stealth puzzles. It's the equivalent of throwing a Rubix Cube into a wrestling match, and the fact that it's got frustrating reasoning (scientists will beat you up if an alarm is raised, defeating guards makes them disappear) only brings out the Hulk in the player to pitch the controller away like a tank and put in something else.

Banner Year
For someone who snarks about the poor choices Jennifer Connelly makes in movie boyfriends (so far she's been wooed by 2 comic book characters, a psycho mathematician, a psychic, a junkie, and David Bowie), I don't really have any room to complain about purposely trying out products from a genre so obviously awful. Yet if I was forced to choose between the two, Hulk Smash puny Neo; as only one game can replicate the joy of tossing a Buick onto a platoon of soldiers, then batting the lone survivor off the 3rd story of a parking garage with a drainpipe. It taps a primal urge within anyone who ever used their toys to reenact a Godzilla movie while making their own sound effects, and it gave me an excuse to act like a big green special ed student. Hey, it's the first good game about the Jade Giant going solo without fighting Capcom, well...ever; the only way it could be more fun is if you played it with those cool Hulk Hand gloves. And now to check out an actual good game - Soul Calibur II. As long as I've got Ivy and Taki, the soul still burns on the Stage of History.