SPOILERIFIC! Transformers: Age of Extinction - Part Two

Welcome back to the second part of this SPOILERIFIC!.  Yesterday I went into detail about some of the key characters, and found them to be pretty lacking.  In the hopes of finding something redeeming for the movie, I've decided to retrace the steps of the movie in the hopes that it at least tells an interesting story (I'll be glossing-over anything that was covered in the character analysis; refer to Part One for those details).  My findings after the page break (since it was a 3-hour movie, this is a bit of a long one):

!!! WARNING!!!  Spoilers After The Break!!!

SPOILERIFIC! Transformers: Age of Extinction - Part One

Welcome to SPOILERIFIC!  Today's subject will be Transformers: Age of Extinction.  As a note, I will be going in-depth on several plot points, so only read if you have seen the movie or do not care about spoiling the plot of the movie.  Without further ado, let's start the first SPOILERIFIC!

I lamented the other day that I wasn't entirely happy with the newest Transformers movie, and I plan to outline, in detail, why I felt that the movie could have done better.  For the first subject, let's talk about the humans.  Yeah, I know, nobody cares about the humans, but the movie spends most of its time with them, so I should hope that their story is worth the time, right?  Otherwise they could have shaved most of the duration of the movie down to a respectable hour-and-a-half.  After that a brief discussion about the Dinobots, and then tomorrow I will discuss the plot as a whole.

!!!WARNING!!! Spoilers After The Break!!!

PAD #28: Age of Disappointment

Just got home from a pre-screening of the new Transformers movie.  My thoughts?  Eh... it's the usual action movie schlock.  It has good action set pieces, but as usual with a lot of these movies, they failed to capture the essence of what made the source material great.  I'll probably go into more detail on it on Friday when the movie is officially out, but in the meantime that's my thoughts on the movie.  I suppose for the sake of having something good to say, I do like the the Autobots (who aren't Optimus and Bumblebee) actually look fairly distinct now, so that when a shoot-out happens between the good guys and the bad guys it's a little easier to tell who's who.  All-in-all, it's at least closer to the third movie than to the second, which is probably about as much as we could ask for from Bay.

Had a nasty headache all day, so I wasn't really able to sit down and get anything done as far as typing goes.  So unfortunately I probably won't have a Game 4 Thought to post tomorrow.  I suppose that's what I get for procrastinating on it all week, though that's part of why I'd like to have one or two done in advance at any given time so that I have at least something to post even if I get held-up for some reason.  Anyway, what with the headache, I'm gonna call this one a bit early.

Thanks for joining me today, and I hope to see you tomorrow.  Until then, game well.

PAD #11: Stubbornness is a Great Scapegoat

I was at Half-Price today and spotted a few copies of Transformers Vault.  This is one of those gems I missed the first time around on account of me having not heard of it.  They were selling for only $15, marked down from the original $35, so I had to jump on that.  After checking Amazon and B&N, looks like I got a decent deal, too.  Even on eBay I was only able to find one listing at $15, but that guy wanted $15.80 for shipping!  Always gotta watch for that on eBay.  Meanwhile Half-Price wanted to charge me $1.06 in sales tax.  Lemme weigh my options, might have to sleep on that one.

Seems there's some controversy with Mario Kart 8, and I don't mean Luigi's death stare (I could YouTube videos of that all night if there wasn't Wildstar to be played).  I guess there's a bit of an exploit in the game where you can hop at the end of speed boosts so that you don't slow down to normal speed as quickly (basically, being on the ground makes you slow down faster than while airborne).  Needless to say there's an outcry of how this is going to ruin the online play, being countered by the opposing faction saying that it really doesn't give that much of an advantage.  At the end of the day though, if you're really that worried about winning, then learn to do it.  It's hardly "cheating" as most detractors say, and jumping is just a single button-press, so it's hardly a difficult thing to learn.  It's something easy that everyone can do, and anyone who cares enough about the game is likely going to be at least reading the forums, if not actively posting as well.  When you get right down to it, it's just something for people to stubbornly refuse to do so that they can blame it whenever they lose a match.  Maybe Nintendo will patch it out (since that's a thing consoles can do now), maybe they'll specifically leave it in even for future games.

Meanwhile, here's an awesome video of an awesome goat.  If you can watch this without feeling the need to comment about the amount of dust in the air, then I think it's safe to say that you have no soul.  It was included in Goat Simulator's patch notes, which were quite amusing.  You should give 'em a read if you're the kind of person who can have a sense of humor about that kinda thing.  Anyway, today's PAD is gonna be rather short.  C'ya tomorrow.

PAD #8: New Look!

I got sick of that ultra-skinny template I was using before.  After skimming through a few, I think I like this one a lot.  Now my paragraphs look like paragraphs instead looking like the sidebar on a newspaper.  I might play around with colors and fonts later, but for now I like it.  Now to fire-up some music, been in a chiptunes mood, lately.

Seems there's a fair bit of controversy around Watch Dogs, which I guess is to be expected given the amount of hype the game received during the couple of years before its launch.  Long-story-short, the game isn't what Ubisoft said it would be.  Yeah, big shocker.  It does beg an interesting question though.  At what point do we draw the line between "the usual media hype" and "flat-out lying to their customers"?  The first warning sign was when Ubisoft showed-off some gameplay footage that had severely toned-down graphics compared to how it looked the year before, almost as if Ubisoft realized that the "Next Gen" consoles weren't going to be able to handle the graphics they originally had in mind.  Now the game is out, and there are videos comparing the game to GTA and videos that just look at the game on its own, and it's hard to deny that the game looks nothing like the "true next gen experience" that it was hyped to be, especially given that the reason for the game's delayed release was so that they could "win the next generation".  Instead, it looks like we just got a run-of-the-mill GTA clone that replaces the randomness of GTA with a hokey hacking mechanic that many criticize as being just a long-range "Use" button.

Read a bit more of All Hail Megatron today, and I am definitely digging it.  The most interesting part of the story so far has been the Autobots as they deal with trying to survive on Cybertron (which in this continuity, is basically a desolate wasteland that can no longer support life).  Meanwhile they also have to deal with the fact that they were betrayed to the Decepticons by one of their own, but they don't know who.  The reveal of who did it and why was an interesting twist, though astute readers will likely see the bread crumbs.  Also, Kup is a bad-ass, because of course he is, but he's just plain awesome in this story.  Haven't quite finished it yet, but I'm gonna have to track down some other comics from this continuity.  It's my understanding that another mini-series is called Maximum Dinobots, and there are just no words for that.  No words.  Maximum.  Dinobots.  Speechless.

PAD #7: Something I Didn't Know I Needed

So I was nonchalantly browsing at Half-Price Books today when I stumbled upon something that might very-well have changed my entire life.  Well okay, so it's nothing that drastic, but it sparked a surprising amount of joy that I probably haven't felt since I was a kid; or perhaps when I first saw The Avengers, anyway.  I was in the comics and manga section when I noticed a book sitting on the shelf, it was a Transformers book called All Hail Megatron.  I picked it up, curious, as I had no idea what I was supposed to make of it.  Then I opened it up and I swear it was like a golden light had shown-out from the pages, and a rainbow sprang forth while an unseen angelic chorus "ah"ed at the splendor.  A recent-looking comic done in the style of the Generation 1 Transformers.  I knew right then that I needed this comic in my life.

So naturally when I got home, the first thing I did was hit-up Google to demand answers.  I discovered that this was a part of a comic series that had been running since a couple years before even the Michael Bay movies were a thing.  Just let that sink-in, before the first Transformers movie, keeping in mind that the fourth is right around the corner.  Anyway, All Hail Megatron is a series that starts a little ways (a wiki article refers to it as the "second act"), and that one objective of the series was to serve as a sort of in medias res jumping-on point for new readers.  Basically, it starts-out with the Decepticons taking over Earth while the Autobots, having been defeated during a previous story arc, have been left desolated on Cybertron, and from the looks of things when I was flipping through the pages, have a bit of drama to sort-out before they can get around to saving Earth.  Probably the best part about it is that since they aren't being forced to adjust the story to accommodate a toy line (since there isn't one), they're able to actually tell a story without needing to worry about forcing-in new characters or contriving reasons to get rid of characters who aren't selling well enough.

Sign me up for that.  Depending on how All Hail Megatron fares, I might have to check-out the rest of this comic series.  Amusingly, and coincidentally, I also stumbled on an amusing Transformers parody on YouTube today based on when Optimus gets revived during Season 3 (or maybe it was Season 4).  I laughed quite a bit, I don't know if I should be ashamed to admit to that or not, but I did.  I've never actually seen the series of episodes where Optimus gets revived, probably because Season 3 was so terrible that I just couldn't keep watching it, and that's after surviving through Season 2.  SEASON TWO FOR FUCK'S SAKE!  We're talking about the season where one of the Autobots falls in love with some human chick after being tasked with being her bodyguard; the season where some Transformers and Spike time travel back to medieval times; the season where some big game hunter captures some Autobots so that he can hunt them for sport ; the season where... you probably get the idea.  Season 2 has a lot of very asinine episodes, yet Season 3 was somehow worse!  So yeah, that's my dirty little Transformers secret.  As much as I loved Generation 1, I haven't finished watching the entire cartoon series.  Though I think that those who have would tell me that it's nothing to be ashamed of, and that they're a little bit envious.

On that, and having added a number of new words to Firefox's dictionary, I think I'll sign-off for tonight.