I guess there's that debate over the movie-accurate and "arcade"-accurate versions. Can't it be argued, just for argument's sake, that the movie version is the definitive version? Since the arcade version is based off of the movie ver. I'm sure it's been discussed before, but are there huge differences between the movie and arcade versions?
Personally, since I'm a collector of prop replicas and other such nerdy collectibles first, and new to the arcade collectible world, (been wanting to join in forever, finally jumped in with the destroyed popeye cab I got a hold of), I'd prefer a movie-accurate version.
Benjamoose proposed the same thing on the first two pages of this topic. I can see the appeal: Who wouldn't want to have the same experience as a kid at Litwak's Arcade? People aren't asking for cheap corporate-designed games "inspired" by the movie; they want the game exactly as depicted
in the movie!
My mind's divided over the issue, though. I think in creating the game for real, the developers were able to make it conform to early eighties game standards better, making it a more realistic representation. The soundtrack's been discussed, but basically in terms of sound effects, the movie's FIFJ is full of high-quality voice samples overlapping with lots of almost "16-bit" sounding noises, while the real game makes all its new sound effects out of square waves. Now the recent iPhone version of the game did borrow several sound effects from the movie, but the way it added the "I'm gonna wreck it!" is wrong in every way.
And the music matches pretty well now, but it's interesting how the teaser trailer used all different music for the playing-the-game scene at the beginning; most of it was reused for the games on the original official homepage, but that in-game-play music was never used for anything else. Could have been a fun "Hurry up" tune to switch to.
So what would you have to do to make the game all movie-accurate? Well, let me think... (Warning, you asked for it, walls of text incoming)
In terms of game-play, the movie makes Felix out to be a true Mario-style jumping-based platformer character, who runs and jumps at varying speeds and heights with timed presses of the Jump button and requires the Jump button to reach higher floors. He has a "skid to a halt" graphic unused by the real game for when he slows down. He can run along the ground, even out beyond the edge of the building, whereas the real game's Felix only jumps down to the doorstep when he passes the door and sticks to the floor's windowsills otherwise. The movie's Felix is shown to be able to hammer while running (in the 3D scene where Ralph's missing), and if he hammers while jumping, he stops his descent until he finishes hammering. The player makes it look as if Felix needs to jump-attack like this just to reach the windows on the ground floor, but then Felix is able to jump directly from the ground to the second story; can he stand on the ground floor's windows at all?
I bet the developers of the in-real-life ports of the game took one look at all that and said, "Okay, there's no reason for Felix to have to control like this on such a basic level layout. It's a grid-based, 'step on every panel' game. Felix should simply move from edge to edge with a single input." Steve Wiebe compared it to Q*Bert and Pac-Man, while I like to call it Word Munchers with no wrong answers.
(And no time limit in the arcade versions that would make this difficult! No way would this thing munch enough quarters to turn a profit.) Like, in judging the Jump button to be mostly superfluous, they went and made the Jump button mostly superfluous. So, it's up to you to decide if the developers wimped out on crafting the more sophisticated platforming experience intended by the creators of the movie, or if they correctly determined how such a game really ought to play.
Then you have minor little changes in the graphics to consider, some of which Benjamoose already mentioned. On the title screen, the real arcade game changes "CO." to "COMPANY" with perhaps a little more space before the "ALL RIGHTS RESERVED", replaces "INSERT COIN" with a flashing "PRESS 1P OR 2P START", and already has the scores displayed above the title; then it superimposes "CREDITS 02" in the lower-left corner during the whole attract mode. I think comparing the start of the intro story scene, the screen's not as wide, and it doesn't show the current score or number of lives yet. Pressing a player start button makes the game start from when Ralph walks on to say "I'm gonna wreck it!", while in the movie, it starts from when the building is being constructed. Although, since it was the first game of the day and Ralph wasn't there yet, maybe they only did that then to buy him more time.
Though it may not be in the real game, it could be nice to add a feature where you can push a button to skip ahead to later points in the opening scene after quarter-drop to get to the game-play sooner.
It looks like a thicker cluster of dust clouds over the construction in the movie, the overlap in bulldozer treads may be different, and the Nicelanders seem to enter the building more slowly in the real arcade game. There's a lot of possible little inaccuracies in timing like that, or missing frames of animation that might have been left out on purpose to imitate a more limited video memory (or to "protect assets", whatever that means), or one-pixel errors in graphics like Benjamoose said to have found with things like window shadows or the light part of Super Felix's hat, which can be difficult to determine when we only have camcorder footage to work from for Disney's cabinets. (Oh yeah, and didn't I mention that the movie gives little drop shadows to all the objects against the background for some reason?) So maybe it's better if I just take write down peculiar details I remember noticing when I stepped frame-by-frame through the game-play scene on the Blu-Ray, then someone else can figure out what was or wasn't kept in the real deals and whether they're worth including.
Only in the movie does Ralph make a big gray dust cloud at the top, which leaves a large chunk of the building missing behind him during play. Okay, so Felix enters... Does Ralph always start off going to the left in the game? He starts off going to the right in the movie. Oh, you should know that the real arcade version is the only one where Felix always fixes two windowpanes at a time, even without a power-up pie. Honestly, I think they made that change just to speed the game up a little, to make up for the slowness of running around. I mentioned Felix's missing skid frame... Ralph also has a couple of preparatory frames before he starts pounding which I'm not sure are in the real game. First he winces with his arms pulled in a little tighter, then he stretches his arms up as high as he can with his mouth wide open. Stepping frame-by-frame also let me see that transitional frame from Ralph's hyper-punching where both his hands and feet are off the ground. After a while in the movie, pounding makes the ledge stretch down a pixel, and hyper-punching makes bricks come up from over top of it. (?)
Did anyone catch that the 100 that floats out of windows has two different graphics? It starts out a little smaller, just a straight line for the 1, then it expands a few frames later. Curiously, the real arcade version has a major delay in tallying the points, only adding the hundred once the graphic
disappears, while the movie's game adds it when it
appears.
Ah, and now that I look again, the arcade version also does make the bricks bounce off the ground and flicker before they disappear, though I feel the movie makes it a little easier to see. And I see that bricks that break windows on the arcade game get used up in the process of breaking the single pane, so there's no danger of one brick taking out a whole column of windows as in the first Flash version. The movie shows window-breaking happening a little differently, though: The window flickers a few times to blink out of existence, just as it blinks in when Felix fixes it, while the real game makes the piece of glass fall out with a crash, just as when Ralph tears up the level to begin with. I feel the way the real game did it works better, since without the falling glass and sound effect I often found myself going "Huh? But I thought that window was already fixed!" while watching the movie. But you can add a little blinking for fun if you want.
Now, when the Nicelander shows up with the pie, a few unusual things happen. Arcade Ralph can only pound at three specific spots on the ledge, and this seems true of Ralph in the movie, but then he stops at a point between left and center to just pump his arms like in the pre-level animation before moving on. The earliest iPhone version made Ralph do this after every pounding session. (Another fact I just noticed about the arcade version is that getting killed makes all the falling bricks vanish, and getting killed by a brick also makes Ralph shuffle all the way back to the left before doing any more pounding.) On the Blu-Ray, I was able to make out that the Nicelander was Deanna, who takes three frames to get all the way up inside the window, and on the next-to-last frame you can see the window frame pushed halfway up. Then she has a frame where she calls out to the left, with a word balloon above her and accompanying soundbite: "YOOHOO", and purple music notes float out from behind the word balloon. I saw that BadBoyBill added the "YOOHOO".
I couldn't guess, however, if the "YOOHOO" is there on every level, or just for the first level, or just for Deanna, or even if it's supposed to be only Deanna who dispenses the pies ever. Maybe Mary does too.
Then you have Super Felix, with a questionable control scheme and sparkling golden ring animation that only the latest smartphone version has done an imitation of so far, but more on that later.
The 500 that floats out of the last window isn't red as in the real game (and on the door in the Bonus Level), but cycles through several colors. This was with Super Felix, though, whose hat and hammer cycle colors, so maybe the palettes were getting passed around there or something. The 100s from the windows Super Felix fixed come out from
behind the windows for some reason. I don't know if it's some object limit from the Super Felix effect, but in that same shot the bricks were no longer bouncing or blinking when they landed, so maybe it was just a layering error on the animators' part. Though, in the Activision game, the bricks simply land flat on the ground when they show Fix-It Felix at the very end, so they were never too careful with the consistency of this.
The cutscenes are amusing in that the movie isn't even consistent with itself. Take the scene where Felix enters and grabs his hammer. In the real game, he runs across a whole blank screen to do it. The first time he does it in the movie, he starts to enter from the side of the screen with the apartment building still on there, but then in a close-up he's running across a blank screen like in the real game, then suddenly he's running onto the grassy plane
again to finish his entrance. The second time this happens, he does the whole thing on the screen with the building, like the hammer was right there. I think the movie is trying to make it look as if there's no horizontal scrolling in the game, but then is Ralph saying "I'm gonna wreck it" when only a little of the building is visible, or is he supposed to have done it right up against the complete building where the word balloon would probably be cut off the edge?
At the beginning of the finale, Ralph is saying "I'm gonna wreck it!" and flailing and growling when he's already at the top of the screen--and well, at least that first part is true for the iPhone version now. In that scene there are 7 Nicelanders just sitting at their windows the whole time Felix is doing his thing: the six regulars, plus... is that Rich Moore in the lower-left?!
Maybe they're just trying to get Mr. Litwak's attention that "the gang's all here".
So then, the rooftop scenes: Right off the bat, the realized arcade version adds Felix lifting up his hammer which then shines underneath the "You fixed it!" message first. That makes it less movie-accurate than the Flash version there, but I guess the screen was kind of boring the way it was. The exact line-up of Nicelanders keeps changing in all four scenes it's shown in the movie, and differs in the Flash and arcade ports as well, not even agreeing on whether there should be five or six of them. The first time you see the roof in the movie, it's the regular six you see in the game, with Deanna handing Felix the pie and Nell kissing him. Then it cuts to a close-up, the one seen way back in the teaser trailer--but right here there's some weirdness, as before, Ralph was right up against the end of the roof, but suddenly the roof is much wider, giving room for Ralph to be carried before being thrown. The other staging goof is with the clouds, which are smaller and far apart before the close-up, but then are suddenly the larger kind and together in the middle in order to conceal and reveal the medal. Did those big clouds just poof out of nowhere, or did the little clouds zoom together and change shape? Also for some reason the top of Deanna's head inflates a little after she hands Felix the pie. (?) Oh, maybe it's just another layering error, with Deanna bouncing up behind herself. Anyway, the smartphone version uses this same line-up of Nicelanders, only with everything scaled all wrong and the ladders going up to the roof, and no presentation of awards. The Flash version has the same six, except the order has been shuffled so that the two on the right have become the two on the left, meaning it's Mary who kisses Felix, and that guy in blue who would hand him the pie if they had the animation frames for it. There it's the medal that scales smoothly and the Nicelanders that walk in huge chunks.
Looks like the real arcade game may have added a cloud on the far right when Ralph is thrown.
The real arcade version has only 5 Nicelanders on the roof, leaving out... No, not Gene, but that guy in blue I don't know the name of. The arcade, movie, and Flash versions each pick a different set of four Nicelanders out of the regular six to say "Fix it Felix!", but it would make sense to leave Gene out of these four if he's the one getting thrown out the window. Actually, I think the reason for leaving one out from the rooftop is to fix that spacing error I mentioned, along with moving the door a little more to the left, so that there's room for the Nicelanders to walk before picking up Ralph, and so that he can be centered across them so it looks as if they're all doing some lifting. When you see it happen in 2D in the movie, Ralph's really only on top of three of them, and so the other three just bring up the rear to watch him fall, with Nell getting out of synch by a pixel a few times. As a matter of fact, in the third rooftop scene toward the end of the movie, Nell isn't doing any lifting, only the other five, yet it's all six doing the lifting the final time. And in the second scene, where we push through the screen to see the aftermath of it, Nell isn't there at all. Skipping out on work early? She doesn't enter the building with the other five at the beginning, either. I wonder if Disney was waffling on how much Nell should be a part of the game. (The transition to 3D also cheats the characters' sizes a little so Felix can fit through the door. And it doesn't really make sense there that we can see the whole building then when it normally doesn't all fit there at the standard resolution, but maybe we've been given "magic eyes" to see past the black around the title screen even before passing through it.)
All in all, the point I'm trying to make is that the movie may be implying that different Nicelanders can be part of the line-up in differing orders on the roof, as the later rooftop scenes feature Nicelanders I don't recognize from the game. The scene where Ralph's missing also acts as if there can be just three Nicelanders calling "Fix it Felix!" from over the ledge where Ralph would play. So the movie-accurate way may be to randomize them more, as if they're trading shifts, the way Sugar Rush Speedway has the random new racers added to the roster, or how Hero's Duty was able to get by without Ralph pretending to be Private Markowski for the rest of the day, as if he had an understudy... Actually that one makes the most sense, since I've actually played first-person shooters where the faces are randomized. Maybe you can take the scene where everyone is running around Niceland looking for Ralph and try to come up with "neutral" versions of them to create a larger cast. Oh, also, the way the rooftop scene is shown in 3D at the end, the Nicelanders appear to be bouncing up a little higher than in the arcade, where they only bounce up by one pixel. That might make the Flash version a better translation of the 3D form, but then I can't understand how in 3D the medal changes from having Felix's name to having a hammer symbol and gaining a white stripe on the ribbon. And it's not just that they changed it in the ending; look at Felix's room in HD, and all his medals have white stripes and hammers.
I also don't quite get how being set further into the building in 3D makes only the middle column of windows have the thinner "capstone" sticking up from them on the arcade screen.
Oh, and if we're talking prop replicas, the facade's a little different too. I think the real one left off the little "1982 Tobikomi of America Inc" copyright notice around the bottom of the screen. For some reason the movie left the cabinet art with Felix in a bright green shirt, a callback to an earlier design for him, which is also on the little train inside the game world. On all the real FIFJ cabinets, Felix is in his current light blue shirt. The movie's cabinet also features more instructions than necessary: You can see on the bottom there are three power-up pies in different colors instead of just one (Were there going to be different pies with different effects? Imagine!), and on the left half of the panel between the control board and the screen border are some more diagrams about what Felix can and can't jump on, which don't make a lot of sense as they seem to have been copied from Donkey Kong without much thought as to how much applies to Felix. You can read some of them on
this papercraft. And even the real-world cabinet uses the old
sprite for Felix that looks like a bad knock-off of Super Mario. Also, did any of the real cabinets even install a coin detector, or are they all on permanent "Free Play"? I didn't really take a good look at the coin slots or speaker in the movie to see what was different.
Now, as for Super Felix...
Also, the movie version is not very playable. Basically, you just have to wait for a pie and finish the level in 2 seconds.
When Felix eats the pie and he goes into Tornado mode and fixes all the windows in 3 seconds?
People have described this as an "instant win", but I've rationalized it as a combination of the rapid movement from the Flash version with the rapid fixing from the smartphone version, which the player took advantage of with very quick hands. The "super-shine" effect on the windows is interesting, though; is it just for show, or could it mean that, say, those windows can't be re-broken for another second or two? Not only does each window get the shine as it's fixed by Super Felix, but upon fixing the last window, all the windows that were fixed as Felix shine one more time. Another shine effect goes up all the windows in the "Ralph is missing" scene just to show Felix that none of them are broken.
I'm more perplexed by all the extraneous animation Felix goes through upon receiving the power-up pie. You only even see him lift up the pie and wince in the Flash version, but in the movie, it flickers as Felix looks at you, he proceeds to shove it in his mouth, then he just kinda stares upward with his hands on his hips while bricks bounce off his hat, which makes him nod in reaction and give off sparks I didn't see in the real game (at least these could be added). Then Felix holds up his hammer and smiles, stretches and squashes, turns the hammer into fire which turns his arms into a sparkling golden ring, and twirls around before the player begins controlling him as Super Felix. (?) Yeah, so, does the player have to wait through all that? Is Felix forced to stop and do that when he gets hit with a brick? Is it an idle animation which you could skip? Honestly I think it's just a way to show the audience that it's easy for Ralph to resent Felix when Felix looks
so smug, but it's fun to wonder about.
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Topic: Fix-It Felix, Jr. Replica (Finished) (Read 265770 times)
