Ha, nice ending, Fall of Cybertron

Great final level that runs like a highlight reel of the entire game and has you switching between sides on the fly, great climactic sword duel between Megatron and Optimus (that lets you choose sides!), and an overall great finish to a grated game. Going out with a bang is key in a day and age where too many games could easily pull the plug at the five-hour mark before they decompress the remaining ten minutes into five hundred. And just to make sure you weren't taking things TOO seriously, the credit sequence splashes some cold water onto your face with a cheesy '80s power ballad dance montage pulled right out of the likes of Buckaroo Banzai.

And hey, maybe I'll even try out the online MP! Lord knows I've loved rolling around in a tank ever since Battletanx gave me the hunger.

Ever notice that a Transformer is basically a were-car?

Told you so - War for Cybertron IS Metal Arms

Many critics found themselves complaining that the Cybertron Transformers games were "basically Gears of War, but with a licensed property", and even argued that the Transformers license was all that made the game special. Later I'll have a full review of Fall of Cybertron to fully debate these points, but let's get in a quick slap to the face of critics now.

War for Cybertron immediately and throughout reminded me of an evolved version of a sixth-gen game I loved: Metal Arms: Glitch in the System. This was a generally comic robot war third-person shooter, focusing on run-and-gun and light platforming rather than sluggish cover-turtling. The game starred some creative and unique weaponry (like a dismembering buzzsaw gun long before Half-Life 2 or Dead Space would feature the same), multiple playable characters, stealth missions, and a puzzle here and there. For having gone so under the radar, it certainly played like your biggest budget games.

Of course, my initial thought was, "maybe my brain is linking these two games on the superficial level: third-person shooters about robots". Getting deeper into the levels and seeing Cybertron's preference for mobile, arena-style battles instead of trench warfare, as well as its integration of vehicles directly into the flow of a level (vs. Gears of War or Halo, where these have their own stages), I knew that the developers must have at the very least played Glitch, if not been consciously influenced by it.

Metal Arms never got a sequel, and sadly, Swingin' Ape Studios never saw their name on another game. They were acquired from Vivendi by Activision-Blizzard (perhaps just Blizzard at the time), and put to work on that tragic bit of vaporware, StarCraft: Ghost. Seems like somewhere at Activision the swingin' apes are still afoot, because check this: Moby Games confirms:
Matt Krystek, the lead level designer for War for Cybertron, also designed the levels in Metal Arms.

So you can see why I so rarely doubt my own opinion.

What surprises me most about Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, revisited

The writing is actually not awful. I've more than once caught myself chuckling at the zingers thrown back and forth between these clompingly lovable bots. The Sanford and Son dynamic of Jazz and Cliffjumper is likely to be a hit with fans of all ages.

I remember this episode.

These days every game wants to be Star Fox 64; if that doesn't necessitate a landslide of AI buddies clogging up the shooting field, it at least means a persistent chirp in your ear to tell you what you're doing. Everything from Vanquish to Lords of Shadow to Skyward Sword includes some form of companion navigator, team dynamic, or externalized internal monologue. If you're playing a game, you're gonna have voices in your head. Deal.

More often than not, you'll barely notice these voice bytes thrown into the theatrical clattering of clinking clanking battle sounds and jangling or soaring soundtracks. That said, when you DO notice them, you NOTICE them. Like, in a bad way. An immersion-breaking way. A technologically limited way. A "hey, get out of the way!"

There are some fairly obvious reasons to employ the chit-chat device, but the risk doesn't necessarily seem worth it. Often it characterizes the player-character, as in the enthralling 2003 Sands of Time. As a matter of fact, let's just talk about Sands of Time, because I think it's gonna work for all of my examples. The Prince likes to talk about what he's doing. He occasionally without instigation goes into an anecdote or tirade. It gives us a feel for the character and the backstory, even though the world is lifeless. A reason to keep moving.

Later in the game you'll hang out with Farah. She provides relational dialogue, to make you further identify with the player-character and develop your relationship with the game world. This approach is often taken with female characters: Ashley with Leon (RE4), Zelda with Link (Wind Waker), and whoever that woman in Vanquish is who keeps telling me to do things. Because you're assumed to be a guy, and the easiest way to write dialogue that male teenagers will fantasize about is by adorning them with a dedicated female. Whatever. Gender issues are another day. And these days people throw around terms like "Bromance" which I think is meant to cover male-male relations of this sort.

Even later in the game, I think, because I haven't played this game in like five to ten years, is a part where Farah is gone again, and there are puzzles. And during the puzzles, you're going to repeat the same mistakes a lot and probably straggle a bit. So the prince (or Farah) chimes in with a suggestion to help you along, but it's vague and ineffectual. And you screw around with the puzzle a bit more. Then the prince (or Farah) chimes in with the SAME suggestion to help you along, this time equally as useless and an annoyance too. By the time you've finally made your way past the obstacle, you'll either have heard the same quip repeated a fucking thousand times, or wisely have muted your TV.

All I'm trying to say is, WHY do they play that same clip over and over and over again. Dozens of games do it! Sometimes it's a randomized draw from a pool of ten, but you still end up hearing the same ones again and again. It's not guidance, it's not character development, it's not backstory, it's just fucking incessant nauseating yammering, as if the television HAS to be making noises at you. So fuck you, stupid fucking developers. Stop doing this.

Ever notice that the Transformers are homicidal maniacs? Revisited.

DISCLAIMER: All I know about Transformers is taken from one video game I played, ever. I guess I saw that first Michael Bay movie but at the time I remember my reaction being "this is the worst movie I've ever seen", "why do movies still not know what computers is", and "was that a Mountain Dewbot?" So if something I said here conflicts with TF canon, let's just say I don't even begin to understand how someone could care.

The blue one is Optimus Prime and the yellow one is Bumblebee

Comic books, cartoons, video games, and Jack Nicholson frequently employ a device so familiar to us that we don't notice it: robot bad guys. Or undead, or skeletons, or giant bugs or aliens. Monsters. The reason is fairly simple: it's hard to sympathize with a protagonist who mows down dozens, hundreds, or thousands of sentient individuals, even if he was chosen by some gussied up broadsword for the purpose of saving Delaware from a screen-door market collapse. War games tend to play in more reasonable numbers, not to mention provide a(n*) historical anchor. You can believe an Ammy soldier in WWII killed a handful of Japs because someone, somewhere, as a matter of fact did. And it was probably pretty horrifying for him and for them, and he sure as hell doesn't want you to call him a hero. But I don't play Historical Simulation of Duty, and I never served in a war (fat), so I'm not going to get into those heavy implications. It's hardly a video game specific issue anyway.

On the other hand you have games like Max Payne and god-forbid-I-even-mention-it GTA where some unlicensed vigilante kills enough people to start up a small Soylent Green product line. Laughable though it may be, the leads in these games usually to some extent lament the lengths they've been driven to to fight for their [I don't know]. I actually recently played Max Payne 3, and the existential Max's dedication to revenge paints him as perhaps the greatest villain in the medium. The number of people he kills and gets killed and the number of lives he ruins because they needed to drag the campaign into just one more level is staggering. At least Max pretends he cares though, at least he asks why.

You can see how much those lives mean to him. Look ye upon the face of true anguish

I put a bit of time this past weekend into Transformers: War for Cybertron, because I'm moderately excited for the pending release of the sequel. I just wanted to swing by to say that the dialogue is hysterically violent. The traditional circumstance of man-on-machine destruction is supplanted by machine on machine; if you care to recall, the Transformers are basically aliens of steel. I'm not gonna get into why is Megatron evil and Optimus good, because I already had to deal with stupid religion good/evil chromatics while watching Wizards yesterday. The point of robots is normally that it doesn't matter which side they're on - they aren't people, so you're really not killing them at all. Transformers, however, aren't really robots. And in a story without humans, they aren't aliens either. They're very much people.

Let's just say: Sideswipe and Jetfire and all the 'sympathetic' Autobots take a lot too much pleasure in not only killing Decepticons, but literally tearing them to pieces. Bumblebee says something along the lines of "there's nothing I like more than murder". You don't notice it at first, but swap in humans for the 'bots for a sec. What you get is the stuff of the worst ethnic conflicts the world has seen - not our everyday American war, not even the Holocaust. It's bad enough that they are born (are they?) as war machines, call home a planet comprised entirely of factories building more war machines, and have tires on the sides of their heads. Then the only thing they enjoy is murdering the guys that wear a different crest?

God I mean it's really grim. It's not mindless KILL KILL KILL, it's yayyyyy ripping peoples heads off is awesome. They may actually be a step ahead of Warhammer, the universe that has WAR and HAMMER in the name.

*if you so choose