Nicki Minaj to Nicolas Cage

There’s nothing particularly surprising about video game tie-ins for blockbusters, especially in the era of ongoing live-service games where new promotional events are churned out every few weeks. But it’s somewhat surprising to see one as lazy as the latest for Dune: Part Two in Call of Duty.

The first major “Operator” bundles for the recently released Modern Warfare III and the free-to-play service Warzone, the crossover offers players the chance to play as Paul Atreides and Feyd-Rautha, characters from the film modeled after stars Timothée Chalamet and Austin Butler. Given the star power behind the endeavor, you’d think more attention would’ve been paid to the details, but the execution mostly amounts to dead-eyed avatars dredged from the uncanny valley and assorted cosmetics for loadouts. Although both actors fulfilled their contractual obligation to play a few sessions for the launch video, it seems neither could be bothered to record fresh dialogue for their skins, which consists of out-of-context quotes snipped from the upcoming film. Given that this crossover is tied to the film’s original pre-Hollywood strike release date, months ahead of the real marketing push we’ll see in 2024, this already half-assed package feels even more out of place.

As the latest major artist to appear in Epic Games’ Fortnite, The Weeknd makes sense. With broad appeal and tons of globally recognizable hits, you can bet that pretty much anyone who boots up the game will instantly click with Abel Tesfaye’s cartoonish façade. But The Weeknd isn’t just another celebrity cameo skin in Fortnite, he’s the face of an entirely new game mode: Fortnite Festival.

Launching alongside LEGO Fortnite and Rocket Racing, Festival functions as its own fully playable music game woven into the fabric of the Fortnite ecosystem. It plays like Rock Band­-lite, which tracks given that it’s developed by that legacy game’s creators, Harmonix. Although with just a handful of repetitive songs to play at launch, including a few of The Weeknd’s most ubiquitous hits like “Blinding Lights” and “The Hills,” and one-note gameplay, the entire package feels anemic. The Weeknd himself adds little to the experience, mostly bopping along on stage like a Chuck E. Cheese animatronic, and as a skin for other game modes. A safe bet for a lackluster premiere, it feels like an uninspired choice for a game whose rounds often peak with John Wick executing a Ninja Turtle to the sound of “Tití Me Preguntó.”

It’s a universal truth that, once something remains popular for long enough, Snoop Dogg is bound to make an appearance. And having already appeared in Call of Duty’s 2022 lineup throughout Vanguard, Warzone, and Mobile, it feels slightly redundant to see the “D O Double G” revisited not just so soon, but with such mundane design.

Whereas his first appearance brought classical swagger to Vanguard’s period aesthetic, the latest version drops Snoop into Modern Warfare II alongside a newer generation of rappers with Nicki Minaj and 21 Savage making their debut as Operators. And while that duo brings a fresh (and absurdist) spin to Call of Duty lobbies, the (re)inclusion of the legendary West Coast rapper/cookbook author feels like a middling afterthought. With sleepy dialogue that feels like it’s been AI generated from generic -izzle isms, there’s not much novelty left to mine from smoking people as Snoop Dogg.

Like Hollywood, the games industry is known for digging up aging actors to reprise their most iconic roles. Unlike Hollywood, fans generally cut video games some slack for these resurrections because – let’s face it – the uncanny valley is more forgiving when everything on screen is fully digital. But sometimes, even the most faithful recreations can be a mixed bag. Case in point: Peter Weller’s return as Officer Alex Murphy, A.K.A. RoboCop, in this year’s RoboCop: Rogue City.

Developed by Polish studio Teyon, the game is set between RoboCop 2 and 3, and plays as a gruesomely violent first-person shooter with a tongue-in-cheek tone that evokes the spirit of Paul Verhoeven’s original film, down to the character’s sluggish movement and proclivity for shooting perps in the dick. Literally, crotch shots are insta-kills in this game. Innovation!

Through facial rendering and voice, Weller’s turn as RoboCop feels authentically reproduced in a world where stilted delivery mostly fits, but the same can’t be said for the rest of the characters, whose mindless NPC-ism is only worsened by the buggy window dressing. Rogue City feels like a schlocky budget title, but given the source material, perhaps that shoddiness is more a feature than a bug.

Netherrealm’s Mortal Kombat games have made their name as the most popular fighting games of today due in no small part to the slew of guest characters filling out the roster from the annals of pop culture. Usually that means the likes of Rambo or The Terminator portrayed by their real-life counterparts, but with Mortal Kombat 1, creator Ed Boon had a different vision: hoping to reimagine the game’s original cast with famous faces taking on the roles.

After some concessions, one of the only characters to get the full star treatment was Nitara, an antagonistic vampiress played by Megan Fox. Unfortunately, her inclusion was mostly panned. Through both voice and facial capture, Fox’s presence detracts from the character more than it provides, with a performance dragged down by her flat line delivery and monotonous energy. She’s an actual energy vampire.

At a point where beloved voice actors are routinely pushed aside for celebrity stunt casting, Fox’s role feels extra slight. Fans can only hope that future casting will push Boon to ask himself not just “Who can I cast,” but “Why should I cast them?”

As part of the transition to Fortnite’s next chapter, the folks at Epic Games decided that they needed to blow everything up and start anew – literally, with an event dubbed “The Big Bang.” At the center of the event was a musical performance event led by none other than Slim Shady himself, Eminem.

Pulling double duty as both a live performance spectacle and crash course introduction to the next phase of Fortnite, the Big Bang kicks off with a tear in the fabric of reality, throwing players into each of its new worlds before giving them a taste of Fortnite Festival in a demo focusing on Eminem’s undying hit, “Lose Yourself.” The demo ends as the song shifts to “Godzilla” with (what else?) a kaiju-sized Shady doing his damnedest to induce an epileptic fit.

As with the season’s actual headliner, The Weeknd, Eminem’s appearance feels like a milquetoast choice for an equally bland game mode, but Marshall Mathers gets bonus points for at least bringing some electricity to the one-time event. His playable avatars also deliver more personality, with three flavors available: Marshall Never More, Rap Boy, and Slim Shady (and, of course, a backpack filled with mom’s spaghetti).

2023 was a big year for Japanese developers changing up their approach on how to capture the attention of Western audiences. Square Enix would ultimately knock this out of the park with its Game of Thrones-flavored Final Fantasy XVI in June, but it initially kicked off the year less successfully with another AAA game: Forspoken.

A brand-new IP developed by Luminous Productions (the team behind Final Fantasy XV), Forspoken stars English actress Ella Balinska (Charlie’s Angels, Netflix’s Resident Evil) as Frey, a New Yorker who gets magically transported to a fantasy world in what ends up being a run-of-the-mill “Isekai” story. Lack of originality aside, Balinska does what she can with material to imbue some smidge of pathos to a character whose personality mainly amounts to a messy soup of clichés and quips. It’s a shame, too, because despite the lackluster story and dialogue, there’s potential in the world of Forspoken, and it’s increasingly rare to see publishers like Square Enix take risks with protagonists like Frey.

It’s pretty hard to screw up an appearance by J.K. Simmons; the mere presence of his voice manages to elevate pretty much anything he’s in. It’s part of what catapulted Prime Video’s Invincible into the pop culture stratosphere and memehood after just a single season in 2021. As Omni-Man, Simmons brings that same low effort lightning in a bottle to Mortal Kombat 1 as the game’s first major cameo character.

While previous Mortal Kombat games had pretty obvious themes to their guest character rosters, like horror icons or actions heroes of the Eighties, Mortal Kombat 1 has gone a very specific route with “Bad Superheroes” leading the charge, including the aforementioned Omni-Man, The Boys’ Homelander, and John Cena’s Peacemaker making the cut.

And while his inclusion mostly amounts to some additional dialogue recordings, there’s real novelty to having Simmon’s gravelly voice pop into pre-match verbal sparring exchanges to flippantly shit talk the entire Mortal Kombat cast with different variations of, “Think, Mark!” Fans of Invincible will also get a kick out of Omni-Man’s fatalities, which painstakingly recreate some of his most heinous kills from the series that manage to be among the most stomach-churning in MK history.

Since ending (for the second time) in 2022, The Expanse has left fans wondering what’s next. Initially airing on SyFy before moving to Prime Video, the beloved sci-fi series often billed as “Game of Thrones in space” built a cult following for its intelligent and provocative take on interstellar drama. Its future is currently unknown, but thankfully the developers at Telltale Games have picked up the reins for an episodic narrative game in the form of The Expanse: A Telltale Series.

Telling a prequel story centering around fan favorite Camina Drummer (Cara Gee), the mostly point-and-click-style story plays like a visual novel with choose-your-own-adventure notes. As the primary cast member returning to the fold, Gee does the heavy lifting of hooking players into a story that’s mostly inconsequential but serves well enough to fill the void the series left. And heavy lifting it is, as Gee’s voice performance as Drummer is by far the standout among an otherwise mediocre cast phoning in dry reads. It’s not perfect; Gee’s character in the show uses “Belter speak,” a fictional dialect that can be rough to listen to for prolonged periods of time. Hinging an entire series on her was certainly a choice, but Gee’s wry charisma manages to drive the effort home across snackable episodic bites.

Star Wars fans have been having a rough go of it lately. With much of the Disney era content arriving to mixed reception and a general sense of fatigue setting in due to oversaturation, it’s tough to say where, if anywhere, audiences are looking for stories from a galaxy far, far away. But one place Star Wars is thriving is in gaming, where a quiet renaissance has picked up steam over the last few years.

Leading the charge is Respawn’s Jedi series, starring Cameron Monaghan (Shameless, Gotham) as Order-66 survivor Cal Kestis, on his journey from Padawan to Jedi Knight in the interim years between the prequels and the OG trilogy. Fully voice and motion-captured by Monaghan, Cal is a wonderfully realized character that, over the course of two games, has managed to add humanity to the larger saga by coloring in the margins. As an original character in the player’s control for roughly 40 hours at a clip, Monaghan’s work has to transcend nerd bait and living trivia masquerading as narrative, and the actor shines in a role that could easily be as grating as Ahsoka Tano was in the early seasons of The Clone Wars.

One of the hardest-hitting celebrity losses of 2023 was the passing of character actor Lance Reddick in March. Star of The Wire and the John Wick films, Reddick’s baritone often brought heft to authority figures he played, yet also provided a soothing ASMR-like quality to softer roles. There are few voices that you’d like to hear on repeat over the hundreds of hours of gameplay, but the actor hit the mark with his work in series like Horizon and Destiny 2.

Released posthumously just a few short weeks after his death, Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores brought the veteran actor back to virtual form as Sylens, the sometimes antagonist, sometimes mentor, always catty frenemy of series lead Aloy (Laura Bailey). Fully motion-captured and featuring a 1:1 recreation of Reddick’s striking face, the appearance is brief given that Burning Shores is shorter than a full game, but it hits hard. As the second part of a likely trilogy, Forbidden West left Reddick’s character in a critical place, aligning with his rival Aloy against an unfathomable interplanetary force.

It’s hard to say how Sony and Guerilla Games will approach Reddick’s role moving forward, or whether they’ll utilize existing recordings from the actor. An irreplaceable presence, any future games would be sorely lacking without his charm and gravitas.

We’ve come to a place in gaming where titles like Call of Duty have reached a level of ubiquity that goes beyond an endless stream of annual releases and into the never-ending live service model, where the next mainline game is pretty much just a $70 update. To retain player interest, developers need a steady flow of splashy events. The more ridiculous, the better. The worst ones (Hi, Dune) are lazy cash grabs. The best ones, however, turn the vanilla PvP experience into something totally unhinged.

That’s why the introduction of Nicki Minaj and 21 Savage as playable characters is the best thing to happen to Call of Duty in a decade. Ensvision a tense round of Search and Destroy, coming down to the wire. Buddies getting picked off left and right. Suddenly, through the smoke a voice rings outs, “Bad bitch incoming! Brrrrrratt!” Barreling through comes Nicki Minaj, clad in pink down to her rifle, knuckle-dusting a ghost-faced operative with a fist wrapped in diamond rings.

What characters like Nicki and Savage bring to a game like COD is a break from the monotony of a franchise past its peak. With a strong sense of character and a totally gonzo POV, their inclusion makes every match feel like a fever dream in the best possible way.

Of all gaming’s near-miss stories, few are as painful to the developers as Jean-Claude Van Damme turning down the offer to appear in the original Mortal Kombat. Creator Ed Boon has been very open about the ordeal, having famously based the entire concept of the game off of the Muscles from Brussels, who not only refused to appear in the game using full motion video (FMV), but ended up starring in rival series Street Fighter’s live-action debut and that game’s FMV.

But here we are in 2023, and things have come full circle. With Mortal Kombat 1, Boon was able to finally fulfill his own personal prophecy and land JCVD himself to be the voice and face of the game’s own iconic martial arts schlock star, Johnny Cage. In a wise move, given the eventual reaction to the appearance of Megan Fox as Nitara, the JCVD skin serves as an alternative to the main Cage visage, but who in their right mind would choose otherwise? Chewing on Van Damme’s marble mouthed delivery makes Mortal Kombat 1’s cinematics into the true trash art experience it yearns to be.

Back in 2019, Keanu Reeves blew the doors off E3 when he revealed that he’d be starring in The Witcher studio CD Projekt Red’s newest RPG, Cyberpunk 2077. What was always going to be a hit with gamers suddenly became a phenomenon – selling far beyond anyone’s expectations despite launching in a buggy, disjointed state. Playing S-tier asshole and extremist revolutionary Johnny Silverhand, Reeves plays a vital role in the game as an ever-present consciousness implanted in the protagonist’s head. As a belligerent Jiminy Cricket, the part relished in a kind of douchey antagonism we rarely see from him.

Now, the game has found a second life with the Phantom Liberty expansion, which not only fixes most of the main game’s issues but brings back Reeves for a poignant epilogue alongside everyone’s hall pass, Idris Elba, stepping up as the new face of the franchise. Like Reeves, Elba lends his full image and voice to the role of Solomon Reed, a shadowy agent at the center of the mysteries of Phantom Liberty’s story. The part was specifically written for Elba, neatly fitting the actor into the Cyberpunk world with stunning fidelity in cut scenes and an integral presence throughout missions.

Appearances like these are the Platonic ideal of what celebrity casting can be in gaming – putting the player in a position to interact with actors and live the story at levels of immersion cinema simply cannot touch.

It’s Nicolas Cage. That’s it. In one of the most bizarre crossover announcements to hit this year, Hollywood’s most eccentric figure broke everyone’s bingo cards by appearing in a video game. And not just any video game, but in the hugely popular murder simulator Dead by Daylight, an asymmetrical multiplayer game where gamers can choose to band together as survivors, or hunt prey solo as the killer.

For surprisingly deep lore reasons, Cage joins the survivors in a special event and is playable as a character in pulse-pounding rounds of cat-and-mouse where everyone from Freddy Krueger to Pyramid Head are out to gut the thespian. Dead by Daylight isn’t the best-looking game, but the jank is part of the charm. In-game, Nicolas Cage the character is a nightmarish facsimile of Nicolas Cage the actor, like an off-brand action figure found in a Chinatown toy bin.

So, why Nicolas Cage? Well, why not? Like pretty much every decision made by the most versatile of the Coppola clan, the role doesn’t need to make sense. He just needs to commit – which he does, according to the actor himself, solely so he can join the ranks of horror legends like his personal favorite, The Ring’s ghoulish specter Sadako. In a year filled with stellar celebrity appearances in video games, trust me when I say that there’s no experience more transfixing than hiding in a meat locker as Nicolas Cage, breathlessly stalked by Chucky the killer doll. That’s the power of gaming.