Today we are going to discuss a subject very close to my heart. We are going to talk about intellectual property. We are going to talk about film rights. We are going to talk about the ever-increasing pan-media brand recognition that a growing number of successful games enjoy. In short, we are going to talk about ?Dr.? Uwe Boll.
Or, as he is properly known, Uwe "I would be no less deserving of horrible death if I orchestrated the terrible and gruesome death of a billion innocent puppies" Boll.
For those of you who don?t know, Uwe Boll is a German. Furthermore, he is a German with an almost pathological need to buy the film rights to as many PC and Video Games as the seemingly endless credit limit on his student Barclaycard will allow. This is the man who bought the film rights to the utterly innocuous, perfectly sweet ?House of the Dead? series of Sega lightgun shooters; games which have never done anything to hurt anyone (except zombies). Yet he managed to make it into a film so God-botheringly awful, so utterly execrable, that people left the cinema physically blind. You may well think to yourself ?Well, that?s a shame, but I?m not too fussed. While the House of the Dead games were well received in the arcades, I always found their Shotgun/Handgun dichotomy to be strangely unappealing, and as an evolving story they were a non-event.?
But to think this is to miss the point! While you sit, flaccid, in your favourite comfy chair, powerfully unmoved by the plight of Sega?s shooter turned into a hideous, celluloid zombie, other games are falling under his night-dark cowl of purest eeeeevil. Bloodrayne, a simple tale of a leather-clad vampire vixen slaughtering hordes of Nazi officers, was one of the first to fall. This may not concern you particularly ? until you learn that some malign force has pinned Sir Ben Kingsley into the part of something called "Kagan".This man was Ghandi, people.
Yet more follow. Silent Hill. Far Cry. Alone in the Dark (There! Listen close, my friends, and you will hear the combined wail of every 20-something PC gamer in the land, as their childhood sweetheart is rent asunder!). No game is safe. He is spawning these atrocities so fast, that in 7 years, it will be impossible to go to the cinema without sitting through a 3-hour epic portraying Bubble Bobble as some sort of horrendous lesbian cultist bubble-popping holocaust. With Dame Judy Dench as the pink dinosaur thingy, and Anthony Hopkins as the blue one, whose father used him for genetic experimentation.
Resist this man and his gruesome progeny at all costs. The consequences if you don?t are too dire to even contemplate.
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