Let’s be real here. Captain Sidewinder has no equivelent, no equal, no one to answer to. However, this story itself within which he is the main protagonist can be compared to other medias on the interwebs.
1.) Red vs. Blue: Rooster Teeh Productions has of late become a multi-mdeium production and writing team by creating comics, tv series, short films, etc. and more. Their first claim to success is the machinima series Red vs. Blue. In this postmodern story the characters of the Halo series games, instead of shooting each other mindlessly, get into wacky adventures and talk to one another about ‘the meaning of life’. In this aspect our project and Red vs Blue are quite similar. Both have characters who know to one degree or another that they are in a video game (while the characters themselves are not partiuclarly aware of it, the jokes within the show shed light on the fact to the audience.) Both also parody and relish in said medium.
However, these two definitely have drastic differences. The first being narrative coherency and continuation. Red vs. Blue is an ongoing series while our project is a short. Also, Red vs. Blue has voice actors. Ours originally had voice acting by the great Nick Tanner, but on a quick self reflection of the project this idea was abandoned. Our project is perhaps closest to the first very episode of Red vs. Blue which, while funny, definitely suffers from audio problems.
What is different about ours, or rather, what we introduce to the machinima world is the ability to see the character in the machinima then play as said character. While one can play Halo, they cannot literally play as the characters Griff or Church. Meanwhile in our project you can play as Sidewinder after the video in one of his amazing adventures.
2.) Cantr 2: Cantr 2 is defined by its makers as a ‘Persistent Massive Multilayer Online Game.” In this text based game you can create a number of characters throughout this fictional world. The game is role playing intensive and is viewed by many as a kind of political and society simulation game in which players attempt to run their own countries and towns filled with other human players (there are no npcs.)
Obviously our text is similar because it is also text based. While the commands may be different the main aspect of the medium is the same. Both interact with their fictional world through commands and prompts. They are different however in numerous ways. Cantr, while being text based, has simplified its command system by making commands like “attack” and “look for” already up in the player’s option bar. The player does not have to search for the right command word because it is right there. Another difference between the two is their longevity. Similarly to Red vs. Blue, Cantr is ongoing and has no forseeable end. Our projects game however ends when you defeat Steve Jobs the Dragon.
3.) My original mash up video and our projects seem to have alot of similarities I think (at least initially they did.) Both originally had voice narration which put a twist on the media it was talking over. Niether Half Life 2 or Lost intended for their videos to be voiced over by Nick Tanner and for the message of their stories to be changed completely. Both projects take the original text and change the way in which they are delivered to the audience and thus, the way they are interpreted.
However their are clearly differences between the two. For one, Nick Tanner can only be found on one. This isn’t really that big of a deal though. While our collective effort takes the very beginning of Half Life 2, my mash up video is a bit more far reaching as pieces from throughout the Sayid episodes are incoorporated into the video. Also, the Half Life video can be seen as a more introductory text and more importantly a more narrative based text. The mash up video, while it has coherency to a degree, is more of a trailer parody than anything (a trailer not for the show but for the character of Sayid.) The Half Life 2 video (while with its faults) attempts a coherent story line which leads the audience into the interactive text based game.
My mash up video does not add much to the genre of spoof trailers. It takes audio that originally had nothing to do with the film and added it to said film. It then took said film and reedited it for a different intent. However, my video is new to the trailer spoof in the sense that it is not simply changing the perspective in which the audience sees the narrative. Instead, it shifts the whole focus of the story onto a character. Same idea (chaning your perception of the story) but through a character instead of genre change (like the Shining trailer.)
