The 1990 miniseries adaptation if It was my gateway into the horror genre. I was too young at the time to see it as a coming-of-age story that unfairly gave physical form to the terrors each individual faced growing up. Indeed, if my mother had realised that the blood exploding from Beverly’s bathroom sink was a metaphor for the dread of menstruation and the implications of impending womanhood in the face of a possessively protective single father, I don’t think that twelve-year-old David and his three siblings (youngest age five) would have been allowed to go anywhere near it.
I haven’t watched Tim Curry’s outstanding performance as Pennywise since the 90s, but It has always been a standard that I hold all other horror up to, and while I’m not a fan of Hollywood’s obsession with reboots, remakes, and sequels, I was excited and curious to see how it would turn out. Overall, I had a good time. Well, I can’t really say that. My relationship with horror is such that I tend to look away at the most tense or violent moments. I stay and watch despite myself. Overall, my objectives in watching the film were fulfilled.
I’m still alive, honest, and still playing games. Yes, it’s still mostly LOTRO, but I’ve also added Minecraft to the mix. I’ll eventually do something worthwhile with that and post a YouTube video like everyone else or something.
In the meantime, though, I would like to talk about BulletStorm. One thing I do between gaming and work is try to stay up to date with what the next distraction will be (at least once they come close to release date). I saw an ad for BulletStorm (shall I call it BS?) on TV and thought it was right up my alley. You see, I’m from the Unreal Tournament school of FPS. I like fast-paced, bouncing off the walls games with ridiculous guns. And colour! Glorious colour! Like many commentators, I am bewildered by the trend of the last decade towards a palette of desaturated browns. Gears of War might have been a good game if not for their drab choice of games.
Back in the 1990s, there was plenty of choice: Doom, Marathon, Unreal, Halflife. And then CounterStrike came along, was stupidly popular (to be fair, it was a good game), and all of a sudden there was only Unreal Tournament… which got worse and worse with every release.
Where was I? Oh yeah, the TV ad:
Much more up my alley. Today, I caught this quick review on Facebook:
Dear epic games, Bulletstorm sucks. Way to fail.
My friend goes on to complain that it’s too repetitive, but I think that he may not have examined FPSs lately. Over at Giant Bomb, they’re saying something different:
In some weird alternate universe, John Romero is still a part of id Software and every first-person shooter out there is filled with new iterations on the old “riding the rocket” or “sucking it down” death messages found in the original Quake. Games went in a different direction in that universe, eschewing the petty grasps at realism found here in our dimension in favor of seeking out new–but stilltotally juvenile–ways to tell someone that they suck. On top of that, they’re all finding bigger ways to blow things up and new ways to have guns rip polygonal bodies apart, often while making as many “edgy” references to Satan as they possibly can. In that universe, Bulletstorm gets two stars for being too colorful, wholly repetitive, and a shameless bite of the ideas found in the Grudgehumper series, namely Grudgehumper VI: The Devil’s Warehouse. Back here in the real world, however, Bulletstorm is a refreshing shooter that challenges you to do more than just hide behind a burning car and shoot soldiers in the face.
That’s a game I want to play. I think I’ll get it tomorrow. I’m not expecting much because it’s been way too long since an FPS was fun for more than a couple hours, but I think it’s a worthwhile gamble. Besides, it’s made by the team who brought us the gun that shoots lightning and shuriken!
I had an epiphany about gaming yesterday. I was stuck at work, being paid a lot to do very little (the holiday period is good like that), and after we had exhausted showing off our meagre guitar talents (yes, that bored), somebody suggested a little Quake 3 action over the LAN.
After a little scrambling to figure out the best way to do this with three Linux boxen and two Windows machines, we stumbled upon OpenArena, which is a great cross-platform implementation of Q3. We were soon partying like it was 2000 again.
Anyway, the realisation I came to as I railed somebody from one of my favourite camping spots for the 10th time was that I hadn’t had as much FPS fun in ages. Sure, graphics and story and other things might have improved, but I seriously have had less fun combined with all three Halos, Gears of War and Doom 3 than I have across Quake 1, Quake 3, and Half-Life (and mods), Unreal (and its earlier sequels).
By no means am I near the top of the bunch. I mean, sure I can run rings around a newbie, but I was never dedicated enough to garner some of those advanced skills that come so natural to some players so as to appear somewhat godlike. But it’s still a lot more fun. The gameplay is free-flowing, over-the-top and a lot more funny than the depressing realism, grittiness, and grey palettes that seem to be infesting the genre at the moment.
I might be accused of indulging in a little nostalgia, but I don’t think so. I played for a good 3 hours before being forced to take a call, and would have kept going. It’s not that I’m an old fogey refusing to play the latest and greatest. I’ve tried a few, and they’re just not as fun.
What about you guys – do you stay on the bleeding edge, or prefer to hang on to the old classics?
