Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Wise fwom yor gwave!

So it's finally happened. We, as a culture, have finally run out of things to make movies out of. The bottom of the barrel has been thoroughly scraped and now we're turning to old Sega games. Yeah, Sega games.
"What do you want from us? There're only like 36 different stories and we've done them all.
Every last one of them. All that's left now are Sega games and reality shows about cake."
-Screenwriters
Yes! It's a game where you kill zombies
by typing quickly and accurately. Yes, really.
You know, it takes vision to look at the overcrowded film industry and say: You know what I want to do? I want to make a movie nobody wants to see. Nobody. But here we are. Sega and some production company called Stories International are Voltron-ing up to dip into Sega's oh-so rich well of intellectual properties like Golden Axe, Streets of Rage, Shinobi and because there can't possibly be enough TV shows about zombies, House of the Dead. But no Typing of the Dead, which I feel is a disappointing oversight.

Look, I'm not knocking Sega. As member of the generation that still bears the scars of the console wars of the 1990's, I can tell you that they fought bravely and that back then story wasn't nearly as important as gameplay and graphics. And by not as important, I mean story was usually confined to the cover art.
Golden Axe II for example tells the story of, uh, well there's an axe...
Oh and a valkyrie, and a barbarian, and a disturbingly sexy dwarven warrior who
battle their way through some knock-off Frank Frazetta art. So maybe a CW series?
No, you only remember it being awesome.
 Go back and play it again. Or better yet, don't.
Or Altered Beast. Holy shit, Altered Beast. It was the Genesis pack-in game before Sonic was a thing, and while the graphics were enough to blow our tiny sugar-addled minds the story was, shall we say, minimal? The protagonist is a corpse waised from his gwave (digitized voices weren't so great back then) by Zeus to walk slowly and shirtlessly to the right, punching monsters and occasionally turning into wereanimals like a werewolf, a werebear, a weredragon and then a another werewolf, but a with slightly different color.

The game was objective garbage, so what's the draw? Nostalgia that's what. And safety I suppose. Studios don't want to take risks on new things and neither do we really. Every time we hand over 11 bucks for another sequel, reboot or adaptation of some fondly remembered thing from our childhoods we make shit like Altered Beast: Origins: Shirtless Guy Wising (working title) possible. It's how Michael Bay has been allowed to make a fifth Transformers movie. Fifth.
Above: A blurry, indiscernible shot
from Transformers 5. Be it on our heads.

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