My new Cracked article is up, and it's really great and everyone should read it. Again, a couple things got cut -- for very good reason -- but I thought I'd throw them up here because whatever.
Animorphs: Shattered Reality is Actually Completely Normal Teenagers: Shattered Reality
In case your unfamiliar with the books, The premise of Animorphs was that there's a group of teenagers with attitude that transform into animals and fight aliens. The "point" of the books is that this is awesome. Occasionally there was some "war is hell" stuff, but the books (wisely) never strayed too far from "hey, how cool would it be if Tiger v. gigantic-killer-centipede happened? What about huge-snake-headed-orc-with-blades-all-over-its-body v. grizzly bear? How about Eagle v. mind-controlled-telephathic-alien-horseman-with-scorpion-tail?"
The specific story in the game is that Visser Three (the leader of the alien invasion of Earth) gets a hold of a device that can "shatter reality," and the Animorphs have to stop him. Okay what's the Visser gonna gain by "shattering reality" again? Do you feel like maybe explaining this in the opening cinematic? No? Okay.
Barring the total insanity, this actually sounds pretty passable as an Animorphs plot. Those wacky kids were always stopping the villains’ plans by transforming into animals and fighting them. Hey, Video game developers, looks like you actually managed to pull this one off!
How the Game Ruined the Point
As you've probably already guessed by the title of this section and our sarcastic optimism, the video game developers didn't actually manage to pull this one off. The load times are pretty slow, and the character models get a few pretty important things wrong: for example, Jake's hair was supposed to be short in the books, but it's pretty clearly medium length here. Oh, and you can't fucking turn into animals.
Gosh, how will I solve this problem? Not by flying, which I can totally do.
Alright, in all fairness, it is possible during pre-scripted combat sequences and certain other moments to turn into a tiger and fight things (with a sixty second time limit), but the vast majority of the game is spent in human form. And since the game is a platformer, you spend most of your time jumping.
It's almost like the game is taunting you: you have the power to turn into a bird and fly, but only when the game says it's okay. It's physically painful to watch your player character hop across floating platforms for half a fucking hour, only to come to a cliff and have the game gently inform you that you've been able to fly this whole time.
Do you want us to keep giving you screen shots of Jake poking around as a person? Because we can.
Where the Wild Things Are: A Tragedy About Insanity And Death
NPR called this movie "the hipster version of Star Wars" and… yeah, we can't top that. Touche, NPR.
In the most common interpretation of the movie, most of the story takes place in Max's head: the "Wild Things" represent his conflicting emotions, needs, and desires, and his story with them is a metaphor for his coming of age in a difficult time. Disappearing into a world of hallucinations and insanity might seem a bit extreme for a nine year old, but we'd probably do something similar if we ever found out our mother was dating Mark Ruffalo.
http://musicforants.com/blog/?p=1985
To be fair, we can't blame the video game developers for balking at a theme like that. A video game about growing up? A metaphor for achieving maturity? We're all for acknowledging video games as art -- but that's pretty ambitious. Given the limitations that come with a big license like this, it's totally understandable that they'd just make a kid-friendly platformer built around running, jumping, and smacking black gunk monsters that try to eat Wild Things and drag them into the "Nothing."
They look like big, strong hands, don't they?
How the Game Ruins the Point
"Ruined" is a relative term here. If you’re the kind of person who prefers childrens stories that end up being about death and dementia, then you’ll probably love this game – but we’re going to go ahead and assume the developes didn’t really think the implications through on this game. First of all, if the Wild Things' island is in Max's brain, what is the invasive blank gunk supposed to be? Alzheimers? Because that's kinda fucked up.
Because your consciousness is being consumed by a degenerative mental illness!
You know what else is fucked up? Bull, the Wild Thing that represents fear, nature, and Max's Father, decides to stay in "the nothing." And unlike the movie, at the end of the game Max doesn't go home. He stays on the island as king, and there's no suggestion that he plans on leaving.
Wait… which one is laughing?
Now we're not saying that Max is crazy for imagining an island full of monsters that represent different facets of his personality. He's a kid established to have an active imagination, and the movie makes it clear that fantasy is voluntary. The last scene is him reuniting with his mother, and its pretty straight forward that Max has simply used story-telling to work through some shit.
Though even at 8 years old, at least one of the Wild Things should’ve had tits.
But the ability and desire to leave that fantasy isn't just a throw away detail, it's the difference between using imagination as a way to grow and using imagination to keep from ever growing at all. It's the line between a child who's coming of age and a child who's mentally ill and really needs help. So while the movie tells the story of Max struggling with and ultimately accepting the hardships that come with his burgeoning maturity, the video game tells the story of an 8 year-old boy who loses his grip on reality and spends the rest of his life suffering from severe alzheimer induced schizophrenia. Since he was lost and far from home when these delusions hit, the rest of his life is very likely to be, at most, three days.
Max, the little boy who was brave enough to be king, is going to starve to death. In the woods.
Alone.
Terminator: Future Shock
Since it's based on the entire franchise rather than a specific film, all Bethesda's "Future Shock" had to do to stay off this list was follow the very, very loose rules of the first two Terminator movies. Seriously, guys, it's not hard. Please, just…
How the Game Ruined the Point
God dammit! Well first of all, when you beat this game Kyle never goes back in time because the war never happens. So, yes, it literally writes the movies out of existence.
But it gets worse: according to the game, not only did the first two movies never happen, they couldn't have happened.
None of the Terminator movies have really "made sense" if you expect your time-travel logic to be bullet proof, which is why no one in the movies ever go into too much detail about how it works. In T1 and T2, it's taken as a given that the time-travel thing is a bit wonky. There seem to be specific moments when you're allowed to go back: Kyle and the original T-800 arrive at pretty much the same time, as do the next T-800 and the T-1000. When pressed on details as to why, Kyle says "I don't know tech stuff."
I do, however, know how to present myself as a sane and rational human being.
That's fine, whatever, just keep the movie going. It's a bad idea to bog a movie down with tech stuff, because if you try to explain how time travel works, you get stuff like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv_jPWWcAtg&feature=player_detailpage#t=47s
You... you did? You thought that? Wow.
Anyway, according to this game, not only is Skynet going back in time to create itself, it's also informing itself how to win battles against the resistance. Furthermore, it's warping in extra soldiers to fight those battles it already lost. Which means it can send as many T-800 as it wants to any point in history it wants.
(This creates problems, but not new problems, so let's keep moving...)
The human resistance notices this happening because history is changing in real time: the program Skynet is uploading to its past-self is almost done uploading, and as such everything is still in flux.
History changing in real-time in 1995
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsbcdiCmy_c&feature=player_detailpage#t=343s
When it finishes uploading, Skynet will have retroactively won all the previous battles it lost and the resistance will stop existing.
Okay, fine.
But if that's how time travel works, the window to stop the original T-800 from killing John Connor would have been while that T-800 was being sent back -- as soon as the process finished, Connor would have ceased to exist. However, in the movie, Kyle explicitly says that he got to the time machine after the first T-800 was sent back.
Unless it happened in much closer proximity to each other -- in which case, will the sequel to Terminator: Salvation have a long sequence where John Connor almost fades away while struggling to play Johnnie B. Goode?
If you can hear me… you are the resistance.
Because that's pretty much the only sure-fire way you're getting us back in that theater.