Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Blessed Are The Mecha

There's a new video game that's hotly anticipated called Titanfall. I don't really follow console gaming closely, but as far as I can tell this must be a really amazing game, since it's hotly anticipated, but it's an all new game, not part of any other series.

It looks great to me, because it fixes another of my annoyances with modern video games: boring wars. Shoot-em-ups have been a big part of gaming since Spacewar!. But recent games have looked like straightforward military simulations, intended for people who would join the army if only it weren't for all that discipline stuff. Even in games where you're fighting aliens, there doesn't seem to be much that's novel about it. Don't these game developers notice that when past generations envisioned fighting aliens, they always added something cool, like lightsabers or aliens jumping out of people's chests?

Well, finally they've figured it out and added their own cool sci-if battle thingy: big friggin' robots. Admittedly, big friggin' robots is not a new science fiction element, but I appreciate the breakthrough.

But that brings me to my one complaint, which I have touched on before. Can we finally decide what these robots are called? So far they've been called Mecha, Labors, Mobile Suits, Jaegers, and now Titans. I know, this is probably a result of modern trademarking, no one would be allowed to call their robots the same name the last movie used.  It's a good thing storytelling didn't always have that problem, and created some creatures that are now in the public domain.  Imagine how many names we would have made up for Vampires if everyone was trying to avoid a lawsuit from the estate of Bram Stoker.

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