Remember when these were a thing? Pretty sure I had all of the Doom and Resident Evil books back in the day. Do any of you still have yours?
The only vidya novels I have are the Warcraft ones, which range from poor to fantastic depending on the author.
>>3182215
All these people saying gameplay is more important than story, and you fags go and read books about video game stories.
>>3182305
This was back in the mid to late 90s. I couldn't afford to play all the games I wanted back then so I got the novelizations.
>>3182305
well thats why one is a book and one is a game.
Did anyone read the mgs2 book?
>>3182215
I bought the Doom books some years ago. They were actually quite a lot better than I expected them to be, I'll go so far to say that the first one is pretty good.
I wish the reprints didn't have those new covers, would have loved the old Brom and Punchatz art on them. And whoever the other two were.
>>3182305
Just because I prioritize gameplay doesn't mean I don't care about story.
I read the first 4 or so back in high school and I remember them being alright. The original novels varied in quality greatly (Caliban Cove was ok, underworld was shit) but overall they were quite faithful.
Turns out they were written by the daughter of the guy who wrote most of the good AVP books.
Don't forget the wildstom comics, they were fun (and very silly).
If anyone cares some guy has decided to make audio books out of them on youtube. He's done about 1 and a half so far and they've been pretty good, much better than most of the other audiobooks on yt.
oh shit I remember these
there was one that took place in, like, an underground research facility specifically for developing urban warfare monsters, and there were scorpions that looked all badass but then got rekt by a single grenade, and then goats that belched acid, and hunters with stealth camo
I remember being mad that there were no acid goats in RE after that
There were some good things in those novels, bringing some elements on the table which can't be brought up in the game, like the notion of smell of the zombies.
>>3182215
I have these OP, if these are the books you're talking about. Found 'em at Value Village a year ago
However, S.D. Perry didn't exactly try to translate survival horror gameplay mechanics to novel. IIRC they just smash a door instead of looking for the key? Makes sense I guess, even Barry smashes one open in a cutscene of the game.
But anyway - few people have really tried to translate survival horror mechanics to another media. They usually just give up, thinking it wouldn't work, except they don't really try. The Silent Hill movie has one puzzle the protag has to solve, but that's it.
The only time someone tried, that I know if, is the first Alone In The Dark comic book, the one from 1994. The protag has to solve various puzzles adventure game style, flee and hide from ghosts, use a mystical item to open a door, etc this is actually really great, only the art is average at best.
i've been translating both this comic, and the one that came around the time of The New Nightmare, from French to English (although the 2nd one did get an English release); it's actually 99% done, I just need to fix a few things.
>>3183628
>fighting Mancubi and Pain Elementals in space
>dodging Lost Souls and watching them sail helplessly through the void like Bender with his sack of swag
Why is this not yet a thing
>>3183674
If it comes at the cost of all that Mormon proselytizing it's not worth it.
>>3182215
Man those where so bad. SD Perry had an obnoxiously huge boner for Rebecca and would spend paragraphs about how awesome she was. I think in the first one she even got more attention than Jill.
>>3183724
6/10, snorted loudly
>>3183724
This meme is dumb, mormons are portrayed neutrally at most, they're there and not depicted in any particularly astounding or horrific light.. Hell, they're not even in half the books
>>3183997
>SD Perry had an obnoxiously huge boner for Rebecca and would spend paragraphs about how awesome she was
Well she IS the cutest one.
>>3182305
But what better medium to overcome the fundamental limitations of an early game system than a novel? Novels are uniquely suited for fleshing out narratives, they can provide context and flavor to an environment that you can't get when you talk about a video game, as game-play is the thing to actually hook people's attention before some of them will begin to care about the story, so people play games for different reasons than they read novels.
>>3182994
>I bought the Doom books some years ago. They were actually quite a lot better than I expected them to be,
The Doom novels were shit. Doomguy had a dumb name and gets friendzoned by the girl he spends the better part of the novel chasing down (don't you remember that part from the game?) They don't use weapons from the games and they use dumb names for the enemies, like pumpkin for cacodemons. Teleporters send them places without their clothes for some inexplicable reason, not that the main character actually gets any from the female character. And actual in-game hints at a story like the UAC were nowhere to be found in the narrative, the author just runs with his own shit.
And later novels get even worse. In Hell on Earth he spent more time talking about the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the female character's new boyfriend than he does describing the fighting. The actual story is incoherent and goes nowhere, and by the third and fourth novels, he's basically pitched the entire concept of Doom out the window and is writing a boring rip-off of Forever War with space ships and aliens that the author actually describes as looking like Magilla Gorilla.
>>3184385
They're portrayed as the only organization on the planet that both foresaw the aliens' attack and engaged in resistance. The lessons the protagonists learn from them culminate in the super-preachy virtual reality simulation in the fourth book where the only way to win was to pray or some dumb shit like that.
>they're not even in half the books
There's no reason for them to be in ANY of the books, that's part of the problem right there. It's not enough to just mention that they're the resistance, no, they're specifically the Mormon Resistance and they're the only ones.
>>3184385
>This meme is dumb, mormons are portrayed neutrally at most, they're there and not depicted in any particularly astounding or horrific light.. Hell, they're not even in half the books
I think the point is that the author spends an inordinate amount of time talking about the Mormons instead of talking about something cool like, say, fighting Mancubi and lost souls in outer space like this guy said >>3183674 , something which never actually happened in the story because the author spent more time masturbating over stupid shit.
