The new Duke Nukem game has finally been released, and early reviews are that it is poison. Destructoid, the only gaming blog I read anymore, gave it a 2/10. That's...that makes me sad. I have such fond memories of playing the original Duke Nukem 3D, with it's ribald humor, and run-and-gun mentality. I knew Duke Nukem Forever wouldn't live up to the hype - how could it? The hype was over ten years in the building - but I was really hoping for something more than what seems to have been released.
I've talked about this before, but that is always the case with nostalgia. We always want the things that were special in our memories to be just as special today. They aren't, and they never will be. That is why it doesn't matter to me that this new Duke Nukem game sucks. It doesn't take away from my memories of the first game, and no amount of backlash against Gearbox will make me think less of them for trying, and failing, to polish the DNF turd.
I don't really have anything else to talk about tonight. I've got one poem I've been working on whose quality wavers from "Brilliant!" to "Ugh, really?" depending on what day I read it. However, I'm giving it just one more day to simmer before I post it. In the meantime have a cute puppy video, and stupid tee shirt.
Oh, so this is why it is a good idea to try and start posts before 11:40 pm; my brain has decided to shut down, and now my eyes hurt. I've also lost the thread of the post I was working, and my bed is calling my name.
Nostalgia is what I was going to post about. About how it makes us long for times that were never as good as we think they were; shows that were terrible but we were too young to know any better; and music that didn't sound like crap even though it did. What brought this on was seeing the below video on Destructoid a few days ago.
I heard the opening notes of the Voltron intro and the announcer saying "From uncharted regions of the universe comes a Legend!" and suddenly I was ten years old again getting up at 6:30 am to watch Voltron on a fuzzy UHF station. A big smile still lights my face when I play that clip, and hearing "And now back to Voltron, Defender of the Universe" when the game unpauses is almost enough to make me go out and drop $400 on a 64GB iPod Touch (because there is no way in hell I am going with AT&T as my cell provider).
Almost, but not quite. You see, I distrust nostalgia. I know for a fact that Voltron was not as awesome as my ten year-old self remembers as I tried to watch when I was in college. The jerky animation (due to censoring for the US audience), the horrible dubbing, the two dimensional characters, and the formulaic plots all conspired to remove any enjoyment I might have once found in the show. So why would I want to spend $404 for a simplistic isometric game that uses original audio clips from the show?
So no, no Voltron for me. No G.I. Joe, He-man, or Knight Rider. The A-Team movie they are making can stall and stagnate for all I care, and hope to hell a miracle happens and Michael Bay dies in a fire before... eh, actually, no. Michael Bay didn't rape my childhood by making the Transformers movies. The old show was another case of nostalgia blinding people to how terrible it was, so the fact the movies were hollow spectacles of light and metal means little to me. This isn't to say that a modern refresh of any of those concepts wouldn't be welcome. It's just that I do not believe any of the shows from my childhood were above reproach or improvement. And I certainly don't think that any modern refresh, reboot, or re-imaging is going to taint my fond memories of the originals.
In the end, nostalgia won't magically make things better. It can't fix any of my current problems, and only distracts me from them for a little while. And when I am done day-dreaming about my childhood I resent the here and now all the more for not being the idealized refuge that memories of my childhood have become. Besides, there was nothing in my past that was so awesome, so incredible, or so amazing, that it can top my life right now.
Okay, so it seems that the Transformers movie did far better than hoped for, and with $300+ million a very real possibility in terms of box office performance, it should come as no surprise that Hollywood is looking for more giant robots.
To make this movie something more than an unneeded trip down Nostalgia Way, the characters need a change up. Pidge needs to be an all-out badass; Hunk should be the really smart one. Lamer in the Red Lion...if he is written as an emo-wannabe Hot Topic little bitch, I will do my best to end Hollywood. As for the leader guy in the Black Lion, make him gay.
That just leaves Princess Allura. They better not fucking change her. She was a princess who put her life on the line to defend her people when the original pilot of the Blur Lion was severely injured.. Also, she was hot. She could, however, use a little more depth to her character. Oh, alright! All the characters could use more depth, but Allura has always been the most interesting. She's not simply a tomboy character who is out to have fun and adventure, but a monarch-in-training who is committed to her people.
They can lose the mice, though. They were just lame.
