Category: Games

There are a lot of things about the Indiana Jones movies that make for good video game fodder: a hero who occasionally cracks wise, fascinating historical settings, Nazis and other evildoers to fight, and big action set pieces in which the heroic Indy takes on a tank or escapes ancient traps. Indiana Jones translates so well into video game form that a few other franchises, most notably Uncharted and Tomb Raider, have already more or less lifted key elements from the iconic movies.

That leaves the upcoming Indiana Jones title from current Wolfenstein developer MachineGames facing an uphill battle. One of its bigger challenges is distinguishing itself from the games that have already riffed on some of the essential elements of the Indiana Jones formula. Nathan Drake and Lara Croft are archaeological killing machines and treasure hunters, gunning down whole armies of mercenaries as they fight to keep lost cities and powerful relics out of the hands of bad guys. Some online reactions have already suggested any Indiana Jones game might wind up being an “Uncharted clone” on account of the ideas being so similar.

So how do you make an Indiana Jones game that doesn’t feel like it’s borrowing from the games that have borrowed from Indiana Jones? It might actually not be as difficult as it sounds, at least conceptually. The key is creating a game that is more like the movies than slotting the franchise into the Indiana Jones-shaped framework set out by the video games it inspired.

1. Indiana Jones Can’t Be A One-Man Army

First and foremost, you can put a serious amount of distance between Indy and his competitors by thinking about how Indy engages with his enemies. Yes, he carries a gun and a whip and does a fair amount of fistfighting in any given Indiana Jones movie. But where Nate Drake and Lara Croft sneak around breaking necks, shooting rockets at guys carrying miniguns and swinging around battlefields, Indy rarely does those things. He gets into brief fights with random dudes in most of his adventures, and he always gets his ass kicked. I’d say one of the most essential parts of Indy’s character is that he can take a punch as well as give one, but in most fights he’s on his back foot.

A lot of Indy’s adventures, particularly in the first three movies, find him avoiding conflict in situations where he’s vastly outgunned. If you translated Raiders of the Lost Ark into a video game, it would mostly focus on stealth. When Indy does get into fights, they’re often against huge guys who handily beat the hell out of him, and he only just barely makes it through. In most of his movies, Indy spends his time not fighting bad guys, but fleeing from them in dramatic, intense chases.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade has probably the most video game-y combat of any of the films, as he fights Nazis on several occasions, even jumping up on the back of a tank to punch a whole bunch of them. This is the most protracted of Indy’s fights, but what works about it is not that Jones beats up a bunch of guys–it’s that he barely beats up a bunch of guys. Chaos is mostly on Jones’s side, and he spends half that fight trying to save his father from getting pulled under the tank treads and getting absolutely walloped for it.

So don’t give Indiana Jones a Tommy gun and send him against hordes of Nazis, like you might Nathan Drake. An Indiana Jones game should not be mostly a shooter, or even a brawler, and when it does throw its hero into combat, the fights should be intense, protracted, and difficult to win (something MachineGames is admittedly great at in Wolfenstein). Rather than putting Indy up against waves of soldiers, the game would do well to make whatever enemies it includes fewer, but tougher. Jones can handle himself in a fight, but he largely wins through sheer force of will, good luck, and one other key element: intelligence.

2. Indiana Jones Mostly Survives By Being Clever

A lot of Indy’s adventures see him running for his life, outnumbered and outgunned. These are some of the best moments in the Indiana Jones movies because they’re high-stakes and don’t rely on Jones being able to punch good, but on him being a brilliant improviser.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is a great template for this. Most of the set pieces in that movie see Jones and his father, Henry Jones Sr., fleeing Nazis in spectacular fashion. One escape sees Indy and Henry jumping onto a motorcycle and its sidecar, and Indy dispatches the motorcyclists that follow not by shooting or whipping them, but with items from the environment, like a well-placed flagpole in a motorcycle’s wheels. Back during the scene on the aforementioned tank, Indy defeats a tank gunner by jamming the barrel of his cannon with a rock. And in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jones distracts a hulking Nazi he’s fighting long enough for an airplane propeller to do the dirty work; in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, when Jones tries to fight two towering hulks, he handles a similarly huge opponent by tangling him up in a rock-crushing conveyor belt.

Mostly, Indy as a character is defined by how he pays attention to everything around him and uses anything at hand in clever ways to outsmart his opponents. That’s what an Indiana Jones game should be about–outthinking enemies, not out-headshotting them or even out-punching them.

3. Indiana Jones Must Be A Massive, Respectful History Nerd

Both the Uncharted and Tomb Raider franchises have taken heat over the years for glorifying the idea of, well, raiding tombs–invading the lands and cultures of other peoples to effectively rip them off. Indiana Jones does his fair share of exploring catacombs and wandering through ancient temples, but when he’s at his best, he’s not hunting treasure.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, in particular, has a whole host of problems with colonialism and racism, to be sure. A new game has a chance to improve on those fronts in ways the movies have fallen short, though, by further building on some of the best aspects of Indy’s character in the films. Especially as he develops over the course of The Temple of Doom, Indy shows respect for other people and cultures after winding up in India. He’s pulled into adventure when he finds out that the children of a village have been kidnapped by a nearby cult. Arguably, his arc in that movie comes down to how he describes the Sankara stones to Short Round as offering the potential “fortune and glory.” While he might have been after those things at the start of the film, by the end, he lets two of the powerful stones fall into the river in order to defeat High Priest Mola Ram, and he leaves the final stone with the villagers.

So if you’re going to do an Indiana Jones story, you should lean into the nerdiness and respect he brings to his job. He’s an archaeologist first and foremost, and some of his best moments are when he becomes visibly giddy at the possibility of discovery. Jones spends most of his time not raiding tombs, but rescuing artifacts from the hands of evil-doers.

There’s a whole lot of great material to pull from in the Indiana Jones movies that, while superficially similar to the Uncharted and Tomb Raider series, offer ways to differentiate a Jones adventure. Mostly, though, it comes down to how Jones interacts with the world–sometimes with his whip and his fists, but mostly with his brain. That doesn’t mean taking breaks from shooting guys to solve centuries-old puzzles; it means finding ways to make the player feel like their greatest asset is their brain, as Indy’s arguably is, whether he’s avoiding deadly traps or facing insurmountable odds.

In other words, make an Indiana Jones game that’s true to Indy’s character, and it won’t feel like a clone of anything–even the games Indiana Jones himself has inspired.

Despite GTA V’s massive success–or perhaps because of it–Rockstar has not indicated what form GTA VI will take, including when it’s coming, what city it will take place in, or who will star in it. The subject of the playable protagonist in GTA has been a topic of some discussion of late, with a rumor suggesting that a female character could headline the next game in the series. That would be a first for the long-running franchise, which to date has exclusively starred male characters, dating back to the first game in 1997.

With this in mind, we wanted to take a look back at the various playable protagonists to appear in the core Grand Theft Auto games throughout the franchise. Dating back to the nameless antiheroes from the early games to the personable hustlers of modern GTA, we’re shining a spotlight on the franchise’s key players and what this could mean for a potential GTA VI. We do go into some spoiler territory, so be warned about the info ahead.

Grand Theft Auto | The Protagonists

In the original Grand Theft Auto, players had a bird’s eye view of the action as they took part in missions to strike it rich and take out rival gang leaders across the explorable locales of Liberty City, San Andreas, and Vice City. While the franchise would eventually settle into telling stories with evolving characters, the mega-franchise’s first game took a more modest approach with a playable protagonist, allowing you to choose from a set of eight characters to serve as the basis for your anti-hero.

To date, the original Grand Theft Auto still has the largest roster of playable protagonists in the series. Throughout the years, Rockstar Games has snuck in different references to films, TV shows, and pop-culture icons, and GTA I includes references to characters like Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver and Foxy Brown from the ‘70s Blaxploitation film. The playable protagonists in GTA I include the aging gangster Bubba, the African-American femme-fatale Divine, and the Eastern-European gun-for-hire Kivlov–to name a few.

GTA: London 1969 | London’s Protagonists

In this expansion to the original game, players could explore a GTA version of 1960s London and run afoul of the city’s gangs. Like its direct predecessor, GTA London had a set of playable protagonists that also pull from films and cultural icons from the era. These antiheroes include Maurice Caine–a clear homage to Sir Michael Caine and his roles in The Italian Job and Get Carter–and Charles Jones, a British Hippie that evokes London’s strong counter-cultural movement. Like GTA I, these characters only served as stand-ins as the player’s choice for protagonists and didn’t really influence the plot in any way.

GTA II | Claude Speed

The first sequel to the original GTA was when the franchise began to focus more on the story. Instead of choosing from a set of templates as your protagonist, GTA2 put you in the role of Claude Speed, an up and coming criminal who gets in deep with Liberty City’s biggest gangsters and corporations. Using a mix of in-game storytelling and live-action cutscenes interspersed throughout, we saw Claude’s ascent up the criminal ladder as he takes on the police, Russian gangsters, and even the Yakuza. Though he was successful in his criminal enterprise, he’d eventually meet his end at the hands of an assailant from the Zaibatsu corporation, one of the earlier rivals throughout the game.

Grand Theft Auto III | Claude Speed, Again

The release of Grand Theft Auto III in 2001 was a watershed moment for gaming, and it would go on to set the standard for open-world action games. While it was the third core release of the franchise, GTA III was a reboot, focusing on a new storyline and cast of characters. However, it brought in a new interpretation of Claude Speed, now a mute bank robber who got double-crossed during a high-stakes job. After breaking out from prison transport, he set out for revenge against his former lover Catalina and made significant waves in Liberty City’s criminal underworld.

At the time, GTA III was the most story-driven game of the series. While Claude Speed was a silent protagonist and was largely just a hired gun for the city’s criminals, he came into contact with larger-than-life gangsters and scumbags that exuded charisma and presence. One such mob boss that players got to know was Toni Cipriani, who eventually made an appearance in a later GTA game as a protagonist. Unlike Claude’s previous incarnation, this version of the protagonist survived his time in Liberty City. In some regard, Claude is the quintessential GTA protagonist, and in other games there have been minor appearances as easter eggs that allude to him. Claude even showed up in the prequel GTA: San Andreas as a racing rival to GTA: San Andreas’ CJ.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City | Tommy Vercetti

Bringing the series to the 1980s for the first time, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City reinvented the original game’s Miami-inspired setting to bea vibrant and equally chaotic place to steal cars and commit crimes. The next playable protagonist was the aging gangster Tommy Vercetti, who was voiced by Goodfellas actor Ray Liotta. Like the previous anti-hero, the gangster was double-crossed and had to reinvent himself in a new city by taking on bold jobs and taking out ruthless crime lords. Unlike Claude, though, Tommy was a tough-talking and charismatic gangster who was quick to stake his claim on Vice City, and nearly 20 years later, he’s still regarded as a fan-favorite anti-hero in the series. And yes, there are TONS of Scarface references throughout Tommy’s rise to power, culminating in a mansion shootout that feels ripped straight out of the film.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas | Carl ‘CJ’ Johnson

As another prequel to GTA3, but following the events of Vice City, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas reinvents GTA1’s San Andreas as an entire state that encompasses the cities of Los Santos, San Fiero, and Las Venturas. While GTA I featured multiple cities, San Andreas marked the first time in the franchise where players could explore different locales seamlessly. The focal point for this chaotic journey across the state was Carl ‘CJ’ Johnson (voiced by 2000s underground rapper Young Maylay), the Grand Theft Auto series’ first fully-voiced African-American protagonist. Hailing from Los Santos, and with a background with the Grove Street Families gang, CJ eventually came to blows with low-level drug dealers, corrupt LSPD officers, and other criminal organizations. This rising conflict soon forced him on the run across the state of San Andreas. At the time, it was the most ambitious game of the series, and CJ’s confidence and poise made him not only the most capable protagonist the franchise had seen, but also the funniest and most personable.

Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories | Toni Cirpriani

Appearing first as a high-level member of the Leone Crime Family in GTA III, the prequel Liberty City Stories placed its focus on Toni Cipriani’s rise to power just three years before Claude tore his way through town. Set in 1998, Liberty City Stories’ plot is about the fallout from Toni Cipriani’s choice to kill a made man from a rival crime family. To win back favor with Don Salvatore Leone of the Leone Family, Toni is forced back into low-level work throughout the city. While taking on jobs across town, Toni deals with regular calls with his abusive mother, who has ties to the mafia and even called out a hit on her son. Towards the end of the game, Toni and his mother make amends, and she calls off the hit. Compared to other GTA protagonists, he’s been through a lot, yet despite it all, Toni is still an honorable character throughout the main story. Toni’s appearance and personality is modeled after James Gandelfini’s performance in HBO’s The Sopranos.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories | Victor Vance

Vice City Stories takes place two years before Tommy Vercetti’s arrival in the tropical setting. Playing as Victor Vance, the brother of Tommy Vercetti’s right-hand man Lance Vance, the prequel sees Vic’s fall from grace in the military and subsequent rise to running one of the city’s major crime organizations. Throughout his rise to power, Victor crosses paths with low-level gunrunner Phil Cassidy and the Cuban gang leader Umberto Robina, who would eventually meet Tommy Vercetti years later. Victor even had a stint working as the head of security for musician Phil Collins, culminating in a recreation of his iconic performance of In The Air Tonight during a Vice City concert.

Grand Theft Auto IV | Niko Bellic

In the franchise’s next evolution, Grand Theft Auto returned to Liberty City once again, and this time, with a new protagonist that had just arrived on American soil. The central anti-hero of Grand Theft Auto IV was the Eastern-European immigrant and Bosnian War veteran Niko Bellic. After arriving in Liberty City to meet his cousin Roman, who embellished his tales of success in America, Niko eventually falls into a life of crime. He gets into conflict with gangsters in the Italian mafia, befriends a family of Irish bank robbers, and even encounters the Eastern-European mob who have ties to his past. Niko’s story took him across the city’s different boroughs, and over the course of Niko’s story, we saw a glimpse of rare diamonds that would trade owners throughout the story. This set of jewels would end up being the core item connecting other protagonists in the larger story of Grand Theft Auto IV.

Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned | Johnny Klebitz

In the first expansion for GTA IV, players stepped into the role of biker Johnny Klebitz, who was also The Lost Motorcycle Club’s vice president. While trying to keep his family and motorcycle club together, along with taking care of his addict girlfriend, he’d occasionally work with Niko on minor jobs and errands to provide for his club. Eventually, Johnny and his gang made their way to Los Santos’ outskirts, where he would meet his end at the hands of another anti-hero–Trevor Phillips.

Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony | Luis Fernando Lopez

In the final expansion for GTA IV, players controlled Luis Fernando Lopez, a former drug dealer turned bodyguard for Tony Prince, one of Liberty City’s nightclub owners and a significant influence in Liberty City’s social scene. When Luis wasn’t managing his boss’ anxiety and keeping him and his business out of trouble with the mob, he’d assist his old friends from the Northwood Dominican gang to expand their operation. Along the way, he’d cross paths with Niko and Johnny, robbing them of a deal to secure a set of valuable diamonds. Luis’ exploits in Liberty City featured some of the most outlandish and over-the-top moments of Grand Theft Auto 4, which set his story apart from the more dramatic plot with Niko and Johnny.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars | Huang Lee

In the first and only GTA game for the 3DS, this side-story brought in the first Chinese protagonist, Huang Lee. Like Niko’s story, Huang Lee’s experience and subsequent growth in Liberty City are from the perspective of an immigrant. After facing betrayal that results in the theft of his late father’s ancestral sword, Lee works his way through Liberty City to secure more power and resources to face off against the town’s most ruthless gangs. Along the way, he partners up with other individuals in the city to expand the Triads’ operations, eventually becoming the organization’s new leader.

Grand Theft Auto V | Michael De Santa and Co.

Taking cues from Grand Theft Auto IV, the GTA series’ latest game has a sprawling storyline with three core protagonists. Letting you jump between each character at any time and see the city and surrounding region of a revitalized Los Santos through their eyes, Grand Theft Auto V is still an ambitious entry in the series even seven years after its release. When looking back at each of these characters, a common thread among the trio is that they have a level of self-awareness that feels more palpable than other characters in the series.

The figurehead of GTA5’s main story is Micheal De Santa, voiced by Ned Luke. As a former bank robber turned reclusive in Los Santos, he longs for the days when he can get back into his career as a professional thief and burglar. He’d eventually get his wish when Franklin arrives in his life. Taking cues from movies about bank robbing and the criminal lifestyle, he’d adopt cheesy one-liners and ideas he saw from films into his professional life. When Michael wasn’t planning the team’s next score, his missions were centered around keeping his family safe and happy, even if they were ungrateful for all his efforts.

Grand Theft Auto V | Franklin Clinton

The second protagonist of GTA V was Franklin Clinton (voiced by Shawn Fonteno), a former repo man who eventually teamed up with Michael and Trevor to pull off daring heists. When he wasn’t getting clowned on by his friend and associate Lamar, who was quick to call him out on his bad haircuts, he’d spend most of his time trying to improve his living situation by moving out of his aunt’s house. Though he’s the youngest of the trio, Franklin is the more reserved and pragmatic, and he’s the first to realize who quickly their exploits escalate out of control. Along with having the best understanding of the city, he’s also the most skilled driver of the three.

Grand Theft Auto V | Trevor Phillips

The third protagonist of GTA V is the embodiment of all the chaotic energy, bloodshed, and ruthlessness of the series. Trevor Philips (voiced by Steven Ogg) is chaos incarnate. His shocking introduction in the game, where he brutalizes Johnny Klebitz and wipes out The Lost MC in his first mission, is an effective opener for his rise in Los Santos with Michael and Trevor. While the other two characters often put up with his antics, they’re still quick to rely on his blunt and brutal approach, considering how effective it usually is. To further cement his chaotic presence, playing as Trevor gives you access to the game’s Rampage side missions–which were previously left behind in 2002’s Vice City.

Grand Theft Auto Online | The Online Protagonist

While GTA V’s main story focuses on three anti-heroes, the online mode has its own playable character of your own making. Though GTA IV’s online mode allowed for players to make their own characters, the protagonist of the current GTA Online embarks on their own story within Los Santos, even rubbing shoulders with characters present in the main story. Once your character has been established, you’ll embark on a set of missions ranging from low-level heists to large-scale government-backed operations taking you to the most secure areas of Los Santos, and even beyond. Given the expanding scope and stakes in which GTA Online continues to see, it’s fair to say that The Online Protagonist has had the most exciting, death-defying, and thrilling criminal career of any other protagonist in the series.

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The time has nearly arrived. In mere days, the first Marvel Studios project in over a year will be released when the first two episodes of WandaVision premiere on Disney+. This isn’t your run of the mill MCU movie or TV show, though. As the first entry in Phase 4, it’s setting aside Marvel’s traditional comic book style to instead pay tribute to the great sitcoms throughout TV history.

From classic sitcoms Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, all the way through The Brady Bunch and even Full House, WandaVision goes out of its way to recreate the style of those iconic TV shows as closely as possible–right down to the visual effects.

Of course, one of the things the MCU is most synonymous with is cutting-edge visual effects, which attempt to make the extraordinary seem commonplace–be it men in robot suits fighting men exposed to radiation that makes them gigantic or massive purple alien monsters snapping humanity out of existence on a whim. Those don’t exactly fit in with the ’50s sitcom aesthetic, though. In those shows, nearly all special effects were smaller in scale and done practically, for better or worse.

For WandaVision director Matt Shakman, there was only one way to stay true to the show’s conceit: to do visual effects the way they used to be done in sitcoms. “I love the practical effects for I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched,” he told GameSpot. “They’re so charming and I think we knew right from the get-go that we should really embrace that.”

Whether it was hanging things on fishing wire to make them appear to float or using some of the most basic animated effects to show off Wanda’s (Elizabeth Olsen) powers, it was no easy task to recreate things practically as they would have been done originally. In fact, the process left Shakman even more impressed by what visual effects artists were able to do back then without the tools used today.

“It’s like marionettes and puppeteering,” he explained. “[We’re] trying to capture that spirit and do what they did on that show. They did an amazing job on Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie doing what they did. It’s hard, I know, to do what they did. Even now, with all of our tools, It’s hard. So hats off to them.”

While it might seem strange that such simple effects would be difficult to pull off given what’s possible now, keep in mind that doing the effects as practically as possible leaves room for things to go wrong or look bad–especially if you don’t have the right person leading the special effects team. Luckily for Shakman, he had special effects supervisor Dan Sudick, who’s worked on practically every MCU movie thus far, leading his team.

“I went to my special effects maestro Dan Sudick, who does all the big movies and is amazing at blowing everything up and building these fantastic spaceships and stuff,” the director remembered. “I was like, ‘Hey, Dan. So I think I just want to put everything on a wire.’ I was ready for him to be like, ‘What are you talking about?’ and laughing me out of the room.”

That’s not what happened, though. As Shakman recalled, “Dan said, ‘You know, I came up under the guys who did Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, I used to do this stuff.’ So for him, it was like finding an old vintage musical instrument that nobody remembered how to play, bringing it back and tuning it.”

Beyond revisiting his own past, though, Sudick was able to pass on this vintage style of special effects to a new generation. “He was teaching all his guys how to do it and it’s an art form,” Shakman remembered.

Now, with that training under their belt, perhaps they should put those new skills to work for another vintage-style MCU show. Dare we say, it’s time for the Steve and Peggy variety hour set in the ’50s. After all, we have got to get Chris Evans back in the MCU somehow, right? Why not make him sing and dance in black and white?

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4. The Plot

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Cobra Kai Season 3 ended with a showdown at the LaRusso household pitting Cobra Kai against the combined forces of Miyagi-Do and Eagle Fang Karate. This led to Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) and Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) teaming up with their combined students, as they will face Kreese and Cobra Kai in the All Valley Tournament.

Dave and Chris look ahead to Cobra Kai Season 4 and give their predictions and theories on what’s to come next. Will Johnny and Daniel be able to agree on how to teach karate to their students? What will happen in the All Valley Tournament? What does Robby’s future hold? Will Cobra Kai seek revenge on Hawk for switching sides? Will Sam and Tory’s rivalry ever end?

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