Two Games, One (Grand Prix) Cup
This week, two kart racing games enter, but only one can leave. It’s time for a cartridge cage match… A sixty-four bit showdown… A Nintendo… knife fight? That’s enough alliteration for 9:00 on a Saturday morning.
In this corner: Our reigning champion, having sold over nine million copies worldwide, its titular character appearing in over 200 video game titles since 1981… the Red Menace… the King of Kart Racing….
MARIO KART 64
And in this corner: Our challenger, a spin-off of a spin-off, never having achieved quite the popularity of our champion despite selling almost a million copies in two weeks before Christmas 1997…
DIDDY KONG RACING 64
Both games featured cutting edge graphics, both were for the Nintendo 64, and both came out in 1997. Because Mario Kart hit shelves first, however, and because the N64 Mario Kart was a remake of an SNES game with the same name, people had more time to get used to it, and grow accustomed to the cutesy go-kart racing style. When Diddy Kong Racing arrived in November, nearly nine months after Mario Kart 64 dropped in North America, nearly everyone saw it as a cheap knock-off. However… I will attempt to make the case that Diddy Kong Racing is the superior game. If Mario Kart is Cheers, Diddy Kong Racing is a show about Norm’s long lost son Billy who happens to own a bar. And that bar is better than Cheers. I know I won’t convert the die-hard Mario Kart fans, but let’s look at the facts.
1. Diddy Kong Racing has an Adventure mode.
Sure, it’s a racing game, but in addition to all of the race tracks available in multiplayer mode, Diddy Kong racing also features a single-player Story mode. All the tracks available on multiplayer are also unlockable or discoverable in the Single Player adventure, and the adventure mode also features several extras, such as difficult races against several “Bosses,” quests to find and collect items on the various race tracks, and somewhat non-linear world design which encourages exploration. Granted, the story is geared towards eight year-olds, and the world is fairly limited, due to the fact that most of the game’s memory went into the racing gameplay, but I don’t see Mario Kart having an Adventure option.
2. Diddy Kong’s Power-ups Aren’t Based on Race Position
In both games, there are items strewn about the various race tracks which your racer can pick up and use. Generally speaking, the different types of power-ups in one game serve a very similar purpose to their counterparts in the other, with some being unique to each. There are items you can pick up and shoot at other racers to slow them down, items you can activate to give yourself a speed boost, items you can drop behind you on the track to try and trip up your opponents, etc.
In Mario Kart, all the various power-ups come from little question-mark boxes placed in strategic locations around the courses. You never know quite what kind of item you’re going to get, and the quality of the power-ups you’ll receive depend on your place in the race. If you’re in first place when you drive over a power-up box, be prepared to groan as you consistently get shitty items. If you’re in dead last, get ready for lots of golden mushrooms (extremely powerful speed boosts), stars (speed boost + temporary invulnerability), blue shells (missiles that specifically target the guy in first place) and the like. Why does Mario Kart use this asinine Socialist reward system? My guess is that there are two reasons – (1) To make people who suck at the game feel better about themselves, and (2) Mario is a goddamn commie.
Don’t tell me you’ve never noticed the similarities before. Why do you think Mario wears red? For more proof, just do a Google image search for Stalin Mario, like I did. Goddamn I love the internet.
In Diddy Kong racing, you know what power-ups you’re getting. Red balloons will always give you missiles. Blue balloons will always give you speed boosts. In total, there are 5 categories of useful items, and if you hold on to an item received from one balloon type and drive over that same color of balloon again, it will “power-up” your item. Each type of item can be powered up twice, meaning each category has 3 levels of strength, for a total of 15 items you can use to get ahead of the other racers. Because they’re not randomized like in Mario Kart, you can strategize appropriately, and because the quality of the item doesn’t increase the worse you’re doing, it forces you to actually actively improve your gameplay rather than count on charity-based handouts.
3. Diddy Kong Racing has More Tracks
It’s time for some math. Mario Kart 64 has four “Cups” you can race for, and each “Cup” features a set of race tracks on which to play. In addition, the game has an unlockable “Battle Mode” with its own set of tracks where you and other racers can go head-to-head in a competition to be the last kart standing. Each “Cup” has 4 tracks, for a total of 16 normal race courses, and in addition there are 4 courses specifically for the Battle Mode game type. It is also possible to unlock “mirrored” or “flipped” versions of the original 16 race tracks, giving us a grand total of 16 + 16 + 4 = 36 tracks
Diddy Kong Racing features 25 normal race tracks, available in both Single Player Adventure and Multiplayer modes. As in Mario Kart, you can also unlock mirror-image versions of each of these tracks. There are also 4 “Battle Mode” style tracks. This gives us a total of 25 +25 + 4 = 54 tracks available for Single or Multiplayer. In addition, because Diddy Kong has an Adventure mode which Mario Kart lacks, the game also features 6 Boss tracks + 6 mirrored versions of these Boss tracks, or 66 total Single Player courses. Both of these numbers, you’ll notice, are higher than 36.
4. Diddy Kong Racing has More Vehicles
Although both Mario Kart 64 and Diddy Kong Racing are essentially similar go-kart racing games, we’ve already seen that the latter has several features not found in the former. Not only is there an entire extra game mode, there are more tracks on which you and your friends can play. One of the biggest disparities between the two games, however, is the fact that Diddy Kong Racing far exceeds our kart-racing expectations by giving us an additional two vehicle types we can race in: A hovercraft and an airplane! Not every track supports all three vehicles, but most tracks allow you to choose between at least two of these, and probably 50% or more give you the option of using any one of the three.
Total vehicle types in Mario Kart = 1 (kart)
Total vehicle types in Diddy Kong = 3 (kart, hovercraft, plane)
If you count each track + vehicle combination as a separate race course experience, that brings the total number of playable courses in Diddy Kong to well over 100. I don’t even want to do the math.
5. Diddy Kong Racing has More of… Well, Everything Else
Diddy Kong Racing features more playable characters than Mario Kart. Both start out letting you choose between 8 playable racers, but Diddy Kong has two extra characters which can be unlocked during the course of play. Ten is more than eight.
Diddy Kong Racing has more multiplayer-friendly cheat codes than Mario Kart 64.
Diddy Kong (in my opinion) has better music, better graphics, and smoother gameplay than Mario Kart 64.
What is Mario Kart left with, in the end? Nostalgia? More familiar characters? The fact of the matter is, when all is said and done, it can’t stand up. And I’m not a Mario Kart hater! I love Mario Kart 64 – it’s a great game! However, if you haven’t given Diddy Kong Racing a chance – pick it up. It’s even better.
Mario Kart is down for the count! The title of Champion, and our Grand Prix cup, go to the spin-off of a spin-off.
Categories: Random, Reviews Tags: video game
Heavy Rain
I got to watch Heavy Rain earlier, and it looks like an interesting game. The name does not allude to nuclear fallout (like heavy water), but rather to the fact that it rains, a LOT in this world. I got a quick overview of the plot line, then got sucked into the rest of the story. Basically one of your kids has been killed, and the other has been kidnapped by the Origami Killer, a murderer who leaves pieces of origami after he has killed. The game is mostly played in third person, you interact with objects and people via action buttons. Mostly specific tasks only have one option, but for others, such as talking to people, you get several. Different actions require multiple button presses (opening a heavy door), others just a tap (picking something up), and others require moving the controller (such as cutting off your own finger… yes, it’s rather graphic and bloody). Unlike many video games your actions have a consequence in the game, main character can die, and the plot line can change.
What surprised me about the game is that it isn’t play so much as a video game, but rather as an interactive movie. Rather than calling it just a video game the developer, Quantic Dream, bills the game as “an interactive drama video game”. You only have so long to find your son, as the Origami Killer enjoys drowning his victims by leaving them in a vat and letting it fill with rainwater. Instead of following one specific character throughout the movie you shift between them, going from the main character, to police officers, to friends, and back. This gives you a very interesting view of the plot line, in a way similar to the movie Momento, if only because it’s a novel way of telling a story. The graphics and storytelling also reminded me a lot of Final Fantasy : The Spirits Within.
Overall I’d say check this game out (at least if you own a PS3), it’s a novel way to look at games and the graphics are beautiful. The plot seems to be in depth and engaging (if not a bit brutal), so sit down, get your gamer snacks, turn off the lights and enjoy the ride!
Categories: Reviews Tags: video games
Game Review : Darksiders
Darksiders is a recent game (January of 2010) for the XBox360, that fills many voids in my current gaming world. It offers a mix of several other games that I love and somehow manages to do it all while not sucking. In addition to drawing from other games, Darksiders offers several other great features that make this a game worth playing.
First I’ll share what games I’ve found that make various appearances in Darksiders:
Zelda - The overall gameplay is very similar to Ocarina of Time. Mainly you run around with a sword killing bad guys, solving puzzles and jumping. The bosses hide out in different areas (ala Temples.. yes, there is a water temple), which makes for a varied game play experience as no area is the same. The plot also loosely follows Zelda, first you need to rediscover yourself, then defeat some minor bosses, then beat down some big boss. There’s also a Navi type character called the Watcher voiced by Luke Skywalker.. erm, Mark Hamill (yes, he’s still around!). There’s even a horse… thank god you don’t have to race to win it!
The Diablo Series – I wish this had online content like Diablo, but alas, it is not so. Instead we get inventory from Diablo. Different weapon power ups that increase the weapon damage, or how fast the weapon gains experience (gems anyone?), potions (although Darksiders calls them something else) that give you health or Wrath (basically mana for special abilities). Many, if not all, of the bad guys are of some demonic origin. Several of them are recognizable as demons or creatures (giant worms? More like Dune I guess…) and several others are just plain weird (giant fat guy on fire for instance).
The Dynasty Warriors Series – General combat and movement is quite similar, enemies sometimes come charging from way off screen, others just pop into existence next to you. At times this is quite predictable, other times it leads to some quite surprising encounters as enemies land on top of you and star wailing away. Giant whirling attacks are also similar, which leads into the next game Darksiders share aspects with.
God of War series – When I first started playing Darksiders it felt like a ripoff of God of War. First, the main character IS War, literally. I guess this is a leg up on God of War where you’re not actually War, but some poor bastard who is bent on killing the god of war. Combat sequences are very similar to GoW, with attacks stringing together in beautiful combination’s. You can also level up your weapons, but through a different mechanic.
The plot to Darksiders is great. You are War (as in the Four Horsemen). The thing that surprised me is that it starts in modern day. People are milling around Times Square (or some equivalent), and then meteors start crashing down and demons are crawling out. Ok, not exactly modern times, but pretty close. By this point you learn that Heaven and Hell were in constant conflict until the Charred Council forces a truce between them. The first part of the game is basically you running around beating the snot out of demons and angels. The angels show up to fight the demons, and you too for some reason. Soon you learn that you were framed for the destruction of Humanity. The rest of the game is you proving your innocence to the Charred Council.
Overall this is a great game, combining many of the things I enjoy from the above games and adding some of it’s own. The various attack combination’s are great to watch (and execute), and the variety of weapons make those combination’s different with a simple button push. Each of the main weapons has it’s own series of moves, which makes it all the more fun. As the various weapons power up you are able to purchase new moves for them (no money in this world, instead you get souls from enemies you kill and chests you find lying around. Blue souls are money, yellow are Wrath and green are health. Different enemies give you different kinds and amounts of souls). Many of the larger enemies have a special execution move (“b” button) that turns on when they’re close to death. These are just plain fun (and horrifically bloody!) to watch. These moves fit into your combination’s flawlessly so your combat isn’t broken up (you do get to watch the execution in bullet time).
There are several weapons that War uses, from his trusty sword, Chaosblade, to the Scythe (Grim Reaper style) to the Power Gauntlet. Each weapon has it’s own series of attacks it uses when mashing various buttons (X for Chaosblade and Y for the other two). These attacks get strung together into combo attacks that cut enemies to ribbons. In addition to these three main weapons, War also finds various other “artifacts” throughout the game, from the Crossblade (aka boomerang) to the pistol (basically a revolver with unlimited ammo). These weapons add functionality (some puzzles are impossible to solve without them) and fun to the game (running around on horseback shooting demons with a pistol is great). You can also use what the game calls environmental weapons, which basically translates as anything lying around. Chairs, cars, tables, rocks, whatever you see can generally be picked up and tossed at enemies.
The only downside I’ve found to this game so far is I get lost every so often. There is a map function you can access (press select) which shows you the general area (you need to find the map in dungeons to get this), but it’s easy to ge turned around at times. On the up-side Darksiders encourages exploration, and various power-ups and bonuses are scattered in random corners of the world. It always pays to explore!
Darksiders is definitely a game you should check out if you enjoy tricky puzzles, engaging plot, challenging enemies, viscious weapons and crazy attack combination’s. Or, if you just like a good time!
Categories: Reviews Tags: video games
2012 – Disaster Porn
Last November’s 2012, the movie inspired by the supposed Mayan prophecy about the end of the world, came out on DVD this week. Rob and I had a chance to see this film in the theater back when it first came out, and as soon as we arrived home we turned on a tape recorder and started chatting about the movie. I had all but forgotten about that conversation, but with the release of the DVD just two days ago, I figured I should finally get the transcript of our musings online. Here is the full 25-minute conversation between Rob and myself regarding 2012, when it was still fresh in our minds:
Rob: November 22, 2009 – We just saw 2012 in the theater. This is Rob and Andy. So where do we start?
Andy: Well, this is basically disaster porn, as you said, right?
Rob: Yeah, that’s what I heard it described as… and it really is. The plot… there’s a plot somehow. The world gets destroyed essentially is what happens.
Andy: Well, there’s a plot like any disaster movie, you know – there’s some bunk science, and it causes the oceans to rise, or the ice caps to melt, or, you know, earthquakes or whatever – it’s typical disaster stuff, except of course this is more global and more large scale, since it is the end of the world. But it’s the same basic formula – there’s some crappy science that kind of makes you giggle at first, followed by the introduction of all the characters, and they all have family conflicts and things, and…
Rob: Why don’t we start at the beginning, as far as main characters… what the fuck was that guy’s name? Adolpho or something?
Andy: I don’t know – John Cusack?
Rob: John Cusack. No no, the black guy – the scientist, who had a change of conscience or some bullshit.
Andy: Adrian.
Rob: Adrian, there we go. So Adrian goes to… India? Someplace…
Andy: Yeah, India. Really though, the details aren’t even relevant, that’s the thing.
Rob: Well no, here’s what happens – he goes deep underground, and like, the Earth is getting microwaved by neutrinos or… Q-particles, or… Q from Star Trek is doing it… we don’t really know what the fuck is happening. And yeah, it’s bizarre.
Andy: Well yeah, but I mean at least you know what to expect. I don’t think anyone is walking into this movie expecting it to be a great plot, or the tear-jerker of the century, or the, uh…
Rob: I cried.
Andy: Yeah, uh-huh. So it’s a typical disaster movie. It’s a “feast for the eyes” as far as special effects and everything – wasn’t this the highest budget movie to date or something like that?
Rob: Oh God, it wouldn’t surprise me.
Andy: I think I heard something like that; I may have been thinking about another movie. Maybe I was thinking about Avatar, actually – that wouldn’t surprise me either.
Rob: oh, Avatar is the one, yeah. Avatar was in the previews.
Andy: Okay, okay. Well, I’m sure that this was similarly very high budget, not only because they had a few good actors in there, who they probably had to pay a lot, but also… Well, all the actors really haven’t had good jobs in a while, but…
Rob: John Cusack? C’mon.
Andy: Well, I think maybe he was a higher-paid actor ten years ago. But anyway, you know what you’re getting. You know you’re going to get a lot of CGI, a lot of big scenes of people falling off cliffs, and things blowing up, and volcanoes, and tidal waves and everything… buildings falling down, that sort of thing. Like I said, you know what to expect. There aren’t going to be any surprises, really. You can predict right off the bat which characters are going to die, basically – I mean, we had walking in there and sitting down a debate as to…
Rob: …which tertiary character was going to get his ass handed to him.
Andy: Yeah, like… of the so-called main characters, the central cast of the movie… who’s going to be dying, who’s going to be living.
Rob: Well, you had your normal stereotypical American family – 2.3 kids… oh yeah, his son’s name is Noah, like the Bible…
Andy: Of course. There were all sorts of fun things like that, that were very obvious, but were clever in some sense… in a gross sense they were clever. You know… they had “arks;” the big ships to save everybody were “arks,” and then “Noah” was the guy’s kid… stuff like that. But we had a discussion as to which characters would die, and we pretty much called it. We knew right off the bat… as the movie started and as the characters were being introduced we could basically point up at the screen and say “That guy – that guy’s gonna live, or that guy’s gonna die.
Rob: The step dad, the bimbo, and the Russian guy. Both Russian guys.
Andy: Exactly. It followed a very tight formula for the most part, which is good and bad. I mean, it wasn’t a great movie, in any sense of the word, but it was kind of fun. I don’t know if I’d want to see it again…
Rob: It’s like a porno, you see it once and you know what happens.
Andy: Yeah, it was entertaining, it was a feast for the eyes, and it was very funny, too – there was a lot of comedy, which I think actually worked. There were a lot of scenes… whether they were intentional or not, I feel like a lot of it was fun and funny. And, you know, when you’re following a track like that, you don’t have to think as much, and the people making the movie don’t really have to put as much effort into it, which is good in the sense that they focus more on the aspects of the movie that you’re supposed to enjoy – the action scenes, and the…
Rob: The shit exploding…
Andy: Yeah, the explosions, and that kind of stuff, and all the funny ways they kill off characters – you can focus on that kind of stuff, and you don’t have to worry about the plot, or worry about the character development or anything because it’s not important, and they know it’s not important, because it follows a formula. So that’s good and bad – it’s not a great movie, but it was a solid, one-shot, um… pornographic, excessive disaster entertainment. So… what about specifics? You were taking notes during the movie, Rob…
Rob: Um… wow.
Andy: If you can make any sense of your notes.
Rob: Oh, I was keeping track of blatant product placement.
Andy: Oh yeah, that’s another thing – yes. I was thinking about that too; there is so much. Not only all the stuff in the store, because they go through a grocery store and there’s close-ups of…
Rob: Vault Cola…
Andy: Yeah, Vault, and all sorts of things… There was, um…
Rob: Caesar’s Palace…
Andy: Caesar’s Palace, Bentley… what was the other one towards the end…? There was another very obvious one… anyway, very very blatant stuff. And you see that a lot in these big budget, CGI disaster movies nowadays… Transformers, too, a kind of similar sort of thing, a similar movie in some sense – a big budget blockbuster with a lot of CGI – and there’s product placement all over the place. Very similarly, this was… every other shot was like a close-up of a Coke bottle or something. What else? What else do you have in your notes?
Rob: Never live in California.
Andy: Oh yeah! That’s right, it pretty much reinforces all of the things you hear about how California is going to fall off into the ocean if there’s another big earthquake, that kind of stuff. Which is, again, a strength of the movie – they play off a lot of stuff like that which people already know… most people don’t know about neutrinos and all that “science crap,” so they can get away with talking about all this bullshit physics that doesn’t make any sense…
Rob: Remember, the Earth is getting microwaved.
Andy: Right, I mean, they can get away with stuff like that, and that’s fine, because most people aren’t going to be bothered by it. But at the same time, they do run with these things that people do know, fears like “if California has all these earthquakes, there’s this fault line, and it’s going to fall into the ocean,” and they play off of things like that, and make it actually happen…
Rob: It didn’t fall into the ocean, it got swallowed wholesale.
Andy: Well, whatever. People feel… people can follow it a little easier. And so that’s smart, it’s smart movie making – it makes it much easier to write, because you can just focus on the other things if you’re following your track.
Rob: I also got… “crazy old man… Woody Harrelson”
Andy: Oh, Woody Harrelson, oh yeah. There was just a glimpse of him, through the woods in this one scene, and I turned to Rob and said “is that Woody Harrelson?” And it totally was, because he’s so recognizable, even when he’s in a wig and he has a full beard and this crazy get-up. He’s so instantly recognizable as “the crazy guy” that it really worked out well. He was just in Zombieland recently, too. Kind of a similar character.
Rob: Oh yeah. He was good in Zombieland.
Andy: Yeah. He wasn’t bad in this either – he was in this movie doing what he does very well, being the crazy guy.
Rob: Hiding in the bushes eating pickles and watching people take off their clothes.
Andy: Being the badass wild man, so it was interesting. Again, it was a character that fit a formula, it wasn’t really anything new, but he did it pretty well.
Rob: Oh, uh, maps. So they have to find this map to find out where the arks are to save their family or some bullshit, and he runs into the RV, or the minivan or whatever, as it’s on fire… it’s on fire, and there’s a stack of maps, and he goes through them one by one, looking for the right map. Is there a reason he doesn’t just grab the whole stack and run out, since he’s about to die?
Andy: There were lots of things like that…
Rob: The plane is about to take off and they’re about to say “fuck you, we’re going to leave you…”
Andy: As any typical “bad movie” or any typical disaster movie (of course all… well, not all, but most disaster movies are bad), there were a lot of things like that. Besides the science, there were a lot of moments where you just thought “what the hell?” Things like when the President says he’ll stay behind and the others are like “we respect his decision…” no, what the hell. You club him over the head and drag him onboard, like fucking B.A. Baracus trying to get on an airplane – you’ve got to drug him and put him in the cargo hold – you’re not going to leave the president behind. ”Oh, it’s okay, I’ll stay here and go down with the ship.” What? That doesn’t work. The White House is not a ship, you can’t go down with it. He’s unfit to command in that moment, and someone else should take over and drag him onboard. There were all sorts of ridiculous things like that which broke the suspension of disbelief or whatever, but again, who cares, really? You don’t have to really get into the movie and feel for the characters or believe what’s going on… you just want to see shit blow up. And along those lines, I think that the movie was fun, but it wasn’t very good… I think that I would much more enjoy 2012: The Video Game, or even more so, 2012: The Ride…
Rob: Yeah!
Andy: I want to go to Six Flags and I want to see 2012: The Rollercoaster, or even like the virtual thing where you sit in the thing that moves around with the screen, you know? One of those 3D theater rides where the seats move. That would be cool. And you know, I felt like I was in one of those theaters where the seats move around to the action on screen, only my seat wasn’t moving – that’s what it felt like. It was one of those kinds of movies. There were a lot of shots where you’re basically following behind the car or the plane…
Rob: And they’re flying under this stuff or over it…
Andy: Yeah, and the camera’s right behind the plane and you’re following it around as it’s barely missing things, flying under collapsing buildings and bridges, and it felt like my seat should be moving to the action. And I think it would be enjoyable, I think it would be a lot of fun to experience 2012: The Ride, or whatever… the motion simulator event. That seems like it would be more enjoyable than the movie. Same thing with a video game… I’m sure there’s going to be a video game tie-in, there almost always is with this kind of thing… but I don’t think it’s going to have a lot of replay value, probably, but it might be fun the first time, with a lot of near misses trying to escape from exploding shit, which is always fun. I think I would enjoy those more than the movie, is basically what I’m saying.
Rob: I’ve also got “cheesy love story between the main scientist and the president’s daughter.”
Andy: Yeah, of course, they had all sorts of ancillary love stories, and tried to have character development and have all these stories play out, but…
Rob: Why the fuck do we care?
Andy: Exactly. You don’t end up caring about any of the characters, really, you don’t feel for any of the characters… they could have just killed off one of the main characters randomly and no one would care. You’re not going to shed a tear, because you don’t really get into these characters enough to really care for them. And so I don’t know why they even felt it was necessary to have all these plot development moments. Except that, again, they’re following a track, and they’ve got to have the characters doing something, and interactions and conflicts and things – that’s just what they’re supposed to be doing.
Rob: Okay. So in Signs, the little girl has this thing where she puts glasses of water everywhere, in this one the main girl has a thing for hats. Again, why the fuck do we give a shit?
Andy: Yeah, there are little character quirks to try and flesh out the characters… by giving them quirks and personality traits and things, but no one really cares in the end. It seems like that’s wasted time. The time that’s spent explaining why this little girl likes to wear hats could have been spent showing more things blowing up.
Rob: Or not making it a three fucking hour long movie.
Andy: Yeah, that’s another thing… the movie was, what, two hours and 45 minutes or something ridiculous? It could have been two hours if they had removed almost an hour of footage of all this bullshit character development that didn’t work anyway, and the movie would have been tighter. Although, really, it didn’t feel that long. Some movies I just don’t like sitting through if they’re really long, but this one was long but actually didn’t feel that long, because at least I was enjoying myself – at least I was laughing at the bad things and enjoying the visual effects enough that I could kind of get into it. And I was also legitimately interested to see where they would take it. I actually was interested in the plot enough to kind of wonder about how it was going to end. I’m thinking to myself while I’m watching this if I was going to make this kind of movie – and you already know what the end is… it’s about the “end of the world” – but does that mean that the Earth is going to explode, does it mean there’s going to be a flood, whatever… you’re not really sure as it’s going along, you don’t really know ultimately what the end’s going to be, and so I found myself guessing “how are they going to end this? Are all the characters going to die? Are they going to get into a spaceship and fly off somewhere? What are they going to do? How are they going to wrap this up?” There’s got to be some kind of conclusion, an ending where they can have a final shot, pan out, and something happens. So I found myself want to know. Even if I had hated it and wanted to leave the theater – which I didn’t, I enjoyed it enough to stick around – but even if I had wanted to leave, I still would have been compelled to stay just to see how they resolve this. So it was compelling enough or interesting enough in that sense, where you think about it on a meta level, and go “okay, it’s a big disaster movie, how’s it going to be resolved?” And so that was interesting.
Rob: So what else we got? Oh, it sounded like Star Trek half the time, aside from the techno-babble – they have a situation room, emergency teams, a lot of that. Let’s see… Oh, we’ve got… I was hoping the last president would get crushed to death by the Washington Monument, which gets knocked down by a giant tsunami or whatever…
Andy: Yeah, me too.
Rob: Unfortunately, the last president was not killed by the Washington Monument, he was crushed to death by the John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier as it was flipped on top of him…
Andy: Although that’s also sort of ironic… although yeah, the last president getting killed by the monument to the first president would have been a little bit better.
Rob: I was hoping that would happen.
Andy: But the John F. Kennedy thing is also somewhat appropriate.
Rob: Let’s see, hmmm. ”The crust has shifted.” What is this, a pizza?
Andy: Yeah, more bullshit science… what were they saying about the crust getting unstable – “Oh no, we have to evacuate the Earth’s crust!” I mean, where are you going to go? Oh no, we’re being bombarded by neutrinos! Watch out for the accelerated particles! Try to dodge them!
Rob: The stupid tsunamis… so at one point a cruise ship gets completely flipped by a giant wave in the middle of the ocean, which is complete bullshit since tsunamis are like eight inches high in the middle of nowhere… I suppose if it’s a “super tsunami” or something it might be… ten inches tall? But not big enough to flip a cruise liner. What else… oh, animal air lift. They apparently flew elephants, giraffes and rhinoceroses over the Himalayas and they somehow didn’t get killed.
Andy: That was pretty awesome. Again, there was a lot of comedy… I mean, there was some intentional comedy, and there was also some unintentional comedy – I assume it was unintentional, anyway, and maybe a mix of both – like when the characters are in the middle of the Himalayas and have just landed their Bentley basically out of the back of a cargo plane in the snow, and there are these other cars falling all around them… and they’re standing there, and see these helicopters with long ropes and harnesses carrying a giraffe… yeah, you see a giraffe first… this military helicopter with a giraffe dangling in this harness beneath it, flying through the Himalayas – it just comes out of nowhere, and it’s just such a surreal moment. It’s so ridiculous you can’t help but burst out laughing, which I’m sure was partly intentional, but there were a lot of scenes like that. But that’s part of what made it fun… had they taken themselves so seriously that they couldn’t put stuff like that in there, then it would have been a lot more painful to sit through for two and half hours or however long the movie was. But because they could laugh at themselves, and because they just threw ridiculous things like that in there, you know that they were having fun with it, and were just saying “Look, it’s a bullshit disaster movie, have fun with it.” And so that made me feel good, just seeing ridiculous moments like that, that just added to the enjoyment of it. Again, it’s not going to win any awards, except for maybe best special effects or whatever, but it was fun. There were a lot of surreal moments…
Rob: Watching St. Peter’s Basilica crush thousands of worshipers was pretty cool…
Andy: Yeah, there were a lot of ridiculously over-the-top or also just strangely surreal things in it that were enough to break the monotony. You know, seeing things blow up for hours on end can get kind of boring unless you make it interesting… unless you make interesting things blow up in interesting ways, unless you punctuate it with these…
Rob: It’s like a porno… you can only watch some guy having sex with some chick for so long… you have to add midgets, or a fat guy, or…
Andy: Well, a good porno is not just an hour of some guy thrusting into the same hole over and over… that’s not interesting…
Rob: Haha, what’s that quote from Idiocracy… “not just someone’s ass, but who’s ass? And why does it matter to us that we’re watching his ass?”
Andy: Exactly, that’s the thing… a good porno at least tries to have a plot, you need some kind of setup, right, and then also they change things up, you know? It’s not just the same thing, monotonous, over and over. Thirty seconds of that is enough, you have to change it up a bit. And so this movie was punctuated with enough surreal moments, enough humor, and enough little things… like if you look really closely in this one scene with all the CGI things happening, you can see a SUV as it’s being thrown by the upheaval of the street… it hits a pedestrian walking across a bridge or something. Little things like that which you kind of notice in the background… especially seeing it on the big screen… you can tell that the animators working on all the effects had a lot of fun coming up with little things like that, animating every single little thing that’s going on. And so there’s a lot of fun stuff to look out for that actually makes it interesting enough or fun enough to seem like it’s not really as long as it is. I didn’t get bored. It was not a bad experience. I wouldn’t want to see it again, necessarily, unless I was drunk and seeing it on DVD or something, if I could pause it and get up to go to the bathroom whenever I wanted… I wouldn’t want to sit for three hours and watch it in the theater again…
Rob: Oh, another thing that bothered me – the giant ships they all got saved on, the arks… had internal combustion engines… did you see the smokestacks? I’m just wondering why you would build a ship reliant on fossil fuels if there’s no landmass left. Just a question. You can’t really pull up to an Esso station in the middle of the fucking ocean and fuel up your ship…
Andy: You know what I was thinking, before the movie had ended, maybe halfway through, when the main plot had been established – namely, the characters are trying to get to these ships, right? And so the characters are trying to save themselves by getting to these ships and somehow escaping the disaster… once that plotline had been established, I found myself thinking maybe this movie will potentially set up a sequel that could be, potentially, more interesting than this one, you know what I mean? And I still feel that way, even after I was kind of let down by the ending a little bit, even after seeing the whole thing. I can’t help but think that, if done well (which may be hard), this movie could actually set up a sequel that could be better.
Rob: 2016: The Revenge of Man!
Andy: Well, the sequel could be interesting. At the same thing, it’s kind of unnecessary – you don’t really need a sequel.
Rob: Well, look to fanfic for that.
Andy: Well, that’s true. I just feel like you have some questions about “okay, now what?” What’s going to happen now?
Rob: It’s like that fucking one where the world freezes over and now we have to go to these third world countries we shit on all these years… we were bad, but we need to be better, because they took us in…
Andy: Well, see, that ends up setting up all sorts of more interesting scenarios – a sequel like that is not going to happen, I think, for obvious reasons, but a sequel like that I think could be focused less on big explosions and all the CGI and more on what are the consequences, what are the effects of this happening, you know. What happens next? And that could produce some interesting plot points. I mean, some movies – like Planet of the Apes, right, did the same sort of thing. I mean, Planet of the Apes happened, and Charlton Heston is there on the beach, and it’s like “Oh, it’s the Earth! It was the Earth all along! It’s in the future.” And you wonder what next, right? Now what happens? He’s sitting there on the beach… where does he go? What happens? And there were, like, 50 million Planet of the Apes sequels, and it worked for a little while. Some of the later movies, even though they weren’t very good, had some interesting points. And this is the same sort of thing. It could start, potentially… I don’t want to say a franchise… and you know, Hollywood loves to play it safe these days… if this does really well in theaters (which these sorts of things tend to do, at least in the opening couple of weekends), they might actually make a sequel or two… just because Hollywood loves trilogies, they love to make sequels to movies that did well, rather than have new ideas, and so you could see the sequel to 2012, and it could be horrible, maybe way worse than this one, or it actually might be interesting. They could answer interesting questions.
Rob: 2013.
Andy: So yeah, the movie actually made me think, on a sort of meta-level. On a cinematic level. I didn’t really care enough about the characters or the plot to care in that way, but I was thinking “what is Hollywood going to do next? Are they going to make a sequel? How are they going to do that?” And it was interesting. It was pornographic, and excessive, and…
Rob: Disaster porn.
Andy: Yeah, and a lot of CGI, but I still enjoyed it, and I still found it stimulating on some levels.
Rob: See it in the theater just to see it, and then watch it on HBO or whatever.
Andy: Yeah, it’s worth the money. It’s worth the $8.50 or the $10.00 or whatever for a ticket…
Rob: Second-run…
Andy: …if you go with somebody. Yeah, I’d say see it in a dollar theater a few months after it comes out, see it with some friends, you know, have a couple drinks beforehand, and don’t take it too seriously. It doesn’t take itself very seriously. You’ll enjoy it, I’d say. Maybe rent it on DVD and watch it on a big screen with friends, and have some drinks, and you’ll get a kick out of it.