Watching video games as movies

A couple of weeks ago Metroid: Other M was released over here in Ireland. I heard somewhere that if you complete the game you unlock a theatre mode where you can watch all the game's cut scenes together like a movie.

From what I've played of the game so far I'm definitely more interested in the cut scenes rather than the game itself so what I'm going to do is download a save that has theatre mode unlocked and watch the whole thing from start to finish. I'll blog about it in a future entry.

This isn't the first time a game has done this. The European version of Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence has a third disc where you can watch the whole game as a three and a half hour movie(Metroid: Other M's movie is said to be about two hours). In the instruction manual Hideo Kojima had a special message talking about watching the game as a movie:

Metal Gear Solid has become something you can experience more than just one way. I'm not sure how selling games as something you can "watch" instead of play would work but quite a lot of video game fans do it already with the likes of watching "Let's Play" video walkthroughs on Youtube.

So why are we watching games being played instead of actually playing them? Well, one thing for sure is that watching gameplay footage helps give us an impression of what a game is mainly like before buying it, installing it, loading it and sitting through its lengthy prologue. Modern game releases take a lot of effort to get into.

I suppose the best way I can sum this up for now is that although the final impressions always come from playing the game itself, watching the game being played can really help you to assess if a game is worth going to all that trouble.