Game Trailer of the Day: *This* is Sparta?

300 for PSPI’ll never understand why game developers are so unwilling to stay true to the spirit of their non-game IP. Easily the most anticipated movie of the season, Frank Miller’s 300 is a highly stylized retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae, in which several hundred elite Spartans held off an invading army of a million Persian warriors. (Or according to some revisionists, a mere hundred twenty thousand.) In case you somehow missed the gloriously stunning trailer, it’s here. The film hits theaters next month, and I’m going to be first in line. A PSP version of the movie is also coming out in March, and well, I think I’m taking a pass. Have a look at the game trailer, and explain how it could possibly please hardcore Miller fans.

Does the gameplay look like the Battle of Thermopylae, in which a highly coordinated phalanx of Spartans were able to hold off the Persians for days, because they fought them in a narrow mountain pass? Looks more like a God of War knockoff to me, traditional console-style melee action forced onto an event which had little to do with man-to-man head bashing. Miller’s story seems more conducive to a real-time strategy game in which the player controls the phalanx as a whole. Maybe all that’s part of the actual gameplay, but to judge by the trailer (which is the main thing fans of the movie will compare it to), it just seems like one more generic, hastily-produced retread hoping to piggyback off the success of the original IP— however unworthy that association may be.

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