To parents and kids, G-Force is merely a poorly reviewed 3-D movie where sassy guinea pigs toil as U.S.-trained soldiers, battling against waffle irons and ordinary appliances that have come to evil life.
To me, G-Force is a mildly fun video game based on that movie - and the game's technology is a step in a bold direction for the video game world at large.
That's because G-Force comes with 3-D glasses so you can play the game either in flat 2-D or broader 3-D. It's. About. Time.
Real 3-D is something games never offer, but should. Why can't I play Call of Duty in 3-D, seeing bullets whiz at my face from enemy soldiers. How cool would that be?
In fact, I hereby challenge third-party game companies around the world to take 3-D to the next level: To invent and sell a peripheral that translates any video game into a holographic chess board hovering over your living room floor. Sound crazy? It ain't.
It should be relatively easy to create a holographic device compatible with games, because games are already drawn and programmed so that characters and settings (battlefields, houses, etc.) are rendered internally as 360-degree models inside your Xbox 360 and PS3.
The big obstacle might be retail cost, since such a device would require expensive visual display points to work. But the way the business world spins, a holographic add-on would be expensive at first, then cheaper as supplies became produced in bulk.
Okay, so there's my soapbox. On with the game: It's better than expected, but I'm not sure there's much replay value in it.
In G-Force, you play as a guinea pig who has weapons strapped all over his little body. You use a laser gun to shoot things, a laser whip to whip things (it's like a rubbery light saber) and a jetpack to reach vents.
You need these weapons because the world has come alive with evil anthropomorphic appliances. A blender sprouts legs and tries to blend you to death. Alarm clocks hover in the air and fire electricity, as if they were in War of the Worlds. Paper shredders - stay away from them.
Sometimes, the anthropomorphic villains don't make sense. You'll find yourself as the guinea pig crawling through an air conditioning vent, where a waffle iron is waiting to bite at you. What's a waffle iron doing hanging out in a vent?
But G-Force creates a surprisingly creative array of weapons, villains and puzzles. I say "surprising" because movie games usually stink, and this movie in question is a product of, ohhh, Jerry Bruckheimer.
The only problems: Place settings are stale (you travel through metallic government offices); you can wrap this game up in a moderate number of hours; the 3-D images look blurry sometimes; and like I said, I'm not sure how much replay you're getting for your dollar.
However, it's a fine little game, which is itself a guinea pig to see how 3-D can fly us into a future where much more is possible.
