The best thing about Die Hard (1988) is that it’s the best action film ever made. On the other hand, the worst thing about it is that because a better action film hasn’t been made ever since, we’re still stuck talking about it almost thirty years later.
So take it with a pinch of reality: any hot co-ed you ever manage to date will not have been alive when it came out.
With Die Hard being so old and yet so entrenched in our hearts, the nostalgia we feel for it is undeniable. That’s exactly why you should take a break from viewing this Christmas classic one more time in order to indulge your nostalgia with its licensed video game counterpart, Die Hard Trilogy.
The first noticeable thing between these two is that any similarities are superficial at best. The Die Hard films feature a post-modern action hero pitted against an antagonist that views him the same way the audience does, whereas the video game uses the same ten minutes of film as the basis for hours of gameplay.
And let’s not mince words: since it’s Die Hard, its an impressive ten minutes of film, and being that Die Hard Trilogy is a mash-up of three movies with three different genres (third-person shooter, on-rails shooter, and arcade racer), it’s more badassery than the 90s should have allowed. (See, it was X-treme was had no limits back then.)
(In video game terms, this is like what would happen if someone made a double-barreled shotgun with three barrels.)
The video game spin-off is a mere shadow of the films. Die Hard Trilogy goes so far as to embrace the “cowboy mentality” that gets ridiculed from within the first film by sending in endless waves of virtual cannon fodder as reputable video game content. Maybe it’s a little on the nose, but the terrorists even call you “cowboy”.
It’s ridiculous. And, since our nostalgia is as strong as our familiarity with the Die Hard films, this skewed perspective a great way to enjoy the films again.
This nostalgia trip is great because it challenges you to remember how the original version went. For instance, John McClean lacks the tail end of his trademark phrase that starts with “Yipee-ki-yay”, but he makes up for it by apologizing whenever he shoots an innocent bystander by mistake.
Die Hard Trilogy is mostly an ugly mess to look at, but represents the way licensed video games made from feature films should be made: by being as unfaithful to the source material in order to make a game as fun as it can be using the resources available to us of sheer ludicrousness.
Maybe you can’t blame Bruce Willis for phoning in performances at this point, but I hope there’s another installment of the franchise just so they can make another Die Hard Trilogy *.
* This doesn’t include the video game sequel, Die Hard Trilogy 2: Viva Las Vegas
How far I got in an hour: the beginning of all three genres/films, lots of deaths
Would I play this again once this year is up: Yipee-ki-yay, sir
Numbers of days so far in the Year of the Play-a-DayStation: 3
Play-a-Daystation 