Transformers: The Last Supper

A dinner date with Michael Bay:

The main course is a tiny nibble of broccoli. After that comes dessert. Four hours of him stuffing his face with pastries and chocolate bars. Just a swath of culinary destruction, chunks flying in every direction. In little flashes between consuming entire worlds, he actually says some interesting things that make you wish he would calm down, chew and elaborate. Or at least savor the meal, instead of becoming a black hole from which no sugar can escape.


You look at your watch, and 3 hours have passed. You check your watch again, and you've aged 50 years. Time gives up in his presence. You check your watch a third time, and it's only been five minutes since he said something vaguely racist.


After ogling the waitresses' breasts for a terrifying amount of time, he washes it all down by chugging Mountain Dew and Bud Light until he barfs.


So umm... "Transformers: The Last Knight" is a movie.


END OF LINE

~A.H.

Michael Bay's Mega Man X

I am troubled by the trend in video games of simply "rebooting" classic franchises, in ways that are fundamentally wrong. The badly-designed, ugly re-imaginings that confuse missing the point of the source material with "going in bold, new directions"(or what Winston Rowntree called "Franchise-destroying change for the sake of change").

And they usually title these abortions in ways that just make it annoying to talk about them years later. Sonic the Hedgehog. Bionic Commando. Devil May Cry. Tomb Raider. The upcoming Thief installment isn't numbered or otherwise categorized from the original moniker, which looks like it might as well be an entirely different game. Now we have to clarify if we're talking about the original good game, or the stinking pustule that borrowed its' legacy.

At least Bomberman's terrible reboot had the decency to add the subtitle "Act Zero", which could be synonymous with "Bad Version".

They're usually overly serious, gritty, pandering only to cheap gimmicks of the time. Often they lack not only whatever creative spark made the originals so enduring, or any of the original people who worked on it, but also any polish or even a sign of remedial QA testing. If they are useful in any way, they are barometers for everything wrong with video games at the time of their creation. A historical record of how clueless the people in charge of making video games can be.

If there is one small silver lining to Capcom's total abandonment of the Mega Man franchise(and Keiji Inafune's ragequit from their offices), it's that we were spared the horrible reboot of Mega Man X.

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