Stranger 109

Before delving into this week’s spotlight, I want to put forth a caveat so that my biases are clear. As I have previously mentioned, I think that we tend to gravitate towards machinima that are created in games we enjoy. Which is why I particularly enjoy films based in Half-Life 2. Having said that, I am a huge God of War fan and would place the series in my top three favorite of all time. I have been a long time fan of Greek mythology and often wish I could have Blades of Chaos chained to my wrists. So that’s out there now. I came across this week’s spotlight doing a search for God of War machinima and followed the hyper link trail that eventually led me to the God of War: Chains of Olympus website. Turns out they have created an interface that allows you to cut clips from the game together, add voice over, subtitles and music to create your own machinima for a contest called Become a God of Machinima. Machinima on the Sony PSP tends to be pretty far and few between because its hard to get much control of the game engine and only recently could you actually output the video for capture. But what is most interesting here is that the folks over at Sony have recognized the growing popularity of machinima and have tapped into the craze by creating this contest, which even as a devout fan I can see as an obvious marketing ploy. Regardless, some of the videos up on the site are quite impressive and I found today’s spotlight choice particularly enjoyable. Simply called God of War–Machinima, this 48 second short does a nice job of showing off the rather impressive graphics of the prequal to the God of War PS 2 series, Chains of Olympus. And the voice acting is very exceptional.

As is often the case in most humorous machinima, the characters are imbued with this existential awareness of themselves as videogame characters. Only this time Kratos, the game’s main character, is voiced by a British actor instead of the raucous TC Carson, and he immediately comments on the fact that he is being appropriated for a machinima film. So in part the film serves as both a promo for God of War and machinima itself as a unique art form. So I think it is well worth giving a look. However, I have to say that the production quality of the voice acting certainly seemed to veer on the professional side. Even to the point that I have to wonder if this particular video was created in-house by Sony and then uploaded as “user created” content, a guerrilla marketing strategy that seems to be growing in popularity as advertisers try and navigate the murky waters of Web 2.0 culture. I will leave it up to you to decide if this is some gem of talent out there on the web or Sony being wily. I think if Kevin Pereria over at AOTS had a chance to assess the film, he would most certainly declare Shenanigans!