Giving Comets keys to the keyboard

UTD has a chance to reverse the trend of reduced student access to artistic facilities and equipment with new policy

JACK SIERPUTOWSKI Mercury Staff

The single piano in the Student Union is not enough for an entire college campus.

UTD needs to prioritize creating an efficient and equitable system ensuring access to music spaces for all students.

Like many others here at UTD, I have a strong passion for music, even though I my- self am not enrolled in music courses. In my free time, I like to play the piano. However, finding pianos to practice on has become increasingly difficult, as musical resources are made unavailable to the general student body, for a variety of reasons—some satisfactory, and some not. I’ve spoken with several musically involved students about their difficulty finding usable pianos. Charles Averill, a senior Ccomputer sScience sophomorestudent, described his long-time passion for music and his increasing struggle to find available practice spaces. This started with trips to Jonsson Performance Hall.

“Once I couldn't use the performance hall anymore, I would go a floor down to the practice rooms to use the out-of-tune wall pianos,” Averill said. “Not nearly as nice, but it was still

Lights, Camera, Play: Overcooked!

With a bevy of silly video-game concepts going into film production, it's high time studios looked to titles that would be compelling on screen

ANDRE AVERION

Mercury Staff

“Overcooked” deserves a movie. Unlike the the odd projects currently aiming to make live adaptations of “Tetris,” “Just Dance” and even “Raving Rabbids,” “Overcooked” provides compelling potential to be a unique entry into the video game movie catalog, one that could challenge the formula and rekindle interest in the game.

The last three decades of video game movie history have been filled with mediocre adaptations. It’s only within the past few years that creative adaptations with more positive receptions have begun to erode that trope of poor adaptations– making this the perfect time for “Overcooked” to debut on screen. The dynamic chemistry of an invigorating world and the Herculean achievement of bringing plot to a cooking simulator would make enormous waves. People would flock to the sight of plump animal chefs developing as a team to overcome bizarre cooking challenges. One might argue that “Overcooked” couldn’t make it as a film because of its dearth of plot, the unrefined cooking genre in cinema and it lacking any appeal outside the game’s extant fanbase – however, it stands to have a lot more potential than the video game films that are currently in development.

In 2016, animation studio Threshold Entertainment was given an $80 million budget to make a live action “Tetris” movie, planned to be the first of an epic sci-fi adventure trilogy. Surprisingly, the ambitious project has yet to be cancelled. If a plotless game like “Tetris” is slated for a trilogy, what’s stopping “Overcooked” from getting a film of its own? The game’s unique plot establishes an interconnecting world with actual characters, while holding enough space open to interpretation for any storywriter to fill in the lore of the world. A film could flush out the struggles of being a team while having to handle the diverse kitchen puzzles that made the game so popular, constantly keeping an audience engaged and on their toes. The chaos of each puzzle could reflect a player’s frustration, creating plenty of comedic opportunities, too. Its plot alone would make it stand out from the current slate of videogame films, a premise that could revive the genre—instead of hurting it like our next entry.

In 2019, the Sony Pictures subdivision

Screen Gems, producer of the previous “Resident Evil” film series, was given the rights to create a live action “Just Dance” film after the franchise’s involvement in “The Emoji Movie.” They have since prepared a script and entered production. Unless they switch gears and make it a musical, it’s hard to imagine this being a successful film when its entire premise relies on the work of others. “Overcooked” has far more potential to be a successful film because of its original premise, backed up by the viewership of its genre. The box-office viewership of “Ratatouille,” for example, is unsurpassed by many dancefocused films such as “Singing’ in The Rain,” “West Side Story” and “Center Stage.” The cooking film genre is unrefined, as few filmmakers are bold enough to boil a story down simply to cooking, but the few examples that have done so have won attention from movie

SEE OVERCOOKED, PAGE 10