Inkmonkey-Woodis

Downloading Smash Bros. now... taking so long. I think I'm gonna lose it.

I have a tumblr now! inkmonkeywoodis.tumblr.com/

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That is all.

So I just tried to play last year's critical darling, "The Last of Us", and I think I was horribly spoiled by the amazing opening. The openeing of the game does a great job of establishing tension, story, and direction with very little interference from the developers. The best I can think of to explain that  idea is that there are a number of moments where you have to figure out where to go without having something like a glowing waypoint shinging overhead for no reason.... so instead the game uses a combination of lighting and design to get your character naturally pointed towards your goal. It moves sequentially in a way that makes sense and which gives you snippets of the world around  you that makes it feel more real and immersive. Then... ominouse white wording appears over a flat black background that simply states that 20 years have passed... and then all sense of direction disappears. Suddenly you're just in a large, directionless world. Characters appear with no backstory and no significant interaction to imply that they're any more than canon fodder to, hopefully, fuel your sense of injustice when they're inevitably killed off later in the game. You encounter human enemies where the only option is to sneak by through a convoluted, ridiculous route, or sneak up on them and murder them en masse simply because the game tells you so. Where are the zombies? Where is the option to talk to people? I know its twenty years after the end of the world, but maybe everyone would be willing to not blindly murder anyone who happens to not spec as a potential aggro the minute they come into sight. I would think the survival of humanity has some level of greater importance.

So I just heard Joe Kubert died. For those who don't keep track of that kind of thing, I was a graduate of the Joe Kubert School in New Jersey, and I was lucky enough to study under Joe for a whole year. What really impressed me about Joe was just how fast he could work. I know that, perhaps on a technical level, he wasn't the best artist in the world, but when it came to getting things done on time and looking good he was the man. But there's one thing I learned in school... comic artists never retire. They just die. And at the time we thought it was a form of macabre, dark humor, but now, well... it's kind of an honor. A warrior's death, if you will.

So I decided to see how bad Transformers: Dark of the Moon actually was. I was curious, because although I agree that they're not particularly good, I also didn't feel that the previous Transformers were all that bad. So I decided to watch this one and just... my God. They really don't get what people want in a Transformers movie, do they? I'm not sure, but it seems to me that the movie actually spends more time showing humans fighting Decepticons than Autobots fighting Decepticons. That would be like if most of the fights in The Avengers were just Shield Agents fighting Loki. Hell, that'd be like making, say... a James Bond video game where you played as Q. Hm... actually that sounds kind of cool, but in a totally different way.

I get that animating any of the Transformers for any period of time is insanely expensive, but it seems like they spend half of the movie just as giant trampolines for the humans to fall into. By which I mean there are way too many scenes where a human is fighting a decepticon, and the Autobots only show up at the last minute to catch the human as they fall out of a building, and if the scene doesn't immediately cut away then also to shoot that Decepticon in the head.

This is exactly the kind of movie I didn't want to see. Honstly, excusing Optimus Prime and Megatron, I don't think I could name six Transformers that appeared in this movie. That's including both sides.