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It's not that I hate stuff done for the rule of cool. There's a lot of stuff that I like simply because it's cool.
Hell, you know what one of my favorite movies is?
Iron Sky has a lot of historical in-jokes and nods towards hard sci-fi concepts, but that's not what won me over. This is a movie that promised, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, that Moon Nazis would invade with dieselpunk zeppelins and flying saucers. And it delivered.
Or hey, how about that RTS I've been playing for the past seven months? It's called Original War. The gameplay is fun as Hell, but the story is pure B-movie awesomeness.
You see, an American expedition to Russia during the Russian Civil War discovered an odd device and a bunch of weird green rocks in Siberia. They take both home, stick them in a locker for a few decades, and eventually someone discovers that the device is a time machine and the rocks are a material (Siberite) that allows for cold fusion to take place. Of course, the only rational thing to do is send a battalion of soldiers and geologists back in time to the Pleistocene to dig all the Siberite up and move it across the Bering Land Bridge to bury it in Alaska so we don't have to pay Russia for it. Because 'Murica!
Only, this doesn't change the future. This just creates an alternate timeline where America dominates the world as an unstoppable hegemony, and the USSR is still around because the only alternative to taking orders from Moscow is taking orders from Washington DC. While prospecting Siberia, Russian geologists find an alien device, cave paintings of a jeep, and traces of this weird green material (Now called Alaskite). Moscow decides that Something Must Be Done, and sends a whole regiment through the time machine to stop the Yanks in their tracks. Sadly, this is not called "Operation: Oi! Get Your Filthy Hands Off Our Alaskite!"
The biggest snag is that the time machine sends stuff back 2 million years, give or take a few years and a few hundred miles. No group is arriving all at once; individual soldiers arrive in the middle of a shooting war and get picked up by their own side if they're lucky. There's no way back to the present, and the fight only gets more complicated when the Arabs and their mercenaries (The game isn't quite clear on which timeline they're from) show up. Oh, and if the fight over the main deposit should somehow detonate the Siberite/Alaskite, the resulting explosion will make the Tunguska event look like a firecracker. Which kind of explains why there's only two or three timelines.
The visuals are dated and the dialog is awful, but I'm playing a race of retro-futuristic Soviets fighting Space Age Americans and Arabs with vehicles and buildings straight out of Mad Max. That's just cool.
Now, let's go through the list of webcomics I read. You've heard me talk about Schlock Mercenary, right? That's at least 81% Rule of Cool, enabled by SCIENCE! Just look at this:
Or Girl Genius, where Mad Scientists rule the world... poorly. Hell, can we throw Exterminatus Now! into the mix?
I like cool stuff. I really do.
Mechs aren't cool*. In fact, that goes for pretty much all of anime.
: Loose but not lax. There is a point where things are so loose that you think
: that they are not even trying.
: They probably aren't really trying because they want to do their own thing. I
: might be able to get on board with that if their own thing was amazingly
: good. But it is not.
Pretty much.
: Halo has always been cheesy and a collage of all the cool stuff from Alien
: and Aliens, with a bit of ring world thrown in for good measure. I
: remember a (Mac World?) Halo demo that had marine characters with faces of
: some of the guys who worked for Bungie. It was fun and you could see that
: the guys making it where having fun. So Halo shouldn't be too po faced.
The thing is, 343i's fun is completely different from Bungie's fun. In fact, Bungie's fun isn't what Bungie's fun used to be. Used to be, the impossibly cool shotgun reload animation was lampshaded in the manual with a "You wouldn't understand the mechanism if I explained it to you." Almost twenty years later, Joseph Statten laments not being able to come up with a canonical justification for why the souls of Vex pour out of their heads when they die.
: There is the problem. We don't relate to sentinels as enemies because things
: without limbs are just machines and we don't get worked up about fighting
: machines - unless they are terminators with limbs and skulls - just like
: prometheans.
I know that Legion wasn't an enemy, but the principle holds. The way to make machines fun to fight (Besides good mechanics. Sentinels are a one-trick pony) is by giving them a way to emote. This is a post unto itself, but the way to do it is blinkenlights and biomimicry.
: But, whereas terminators are cool: prometheans are not; their
: holographic fright-faces are just a joke. When that first, scripted,
: promethean did his fright-face at me I laughed. I think I said, "you
: can not be serious".
When you translate that scream, the Promethean is saying "Verily, sir, is it not quite plain that I am an evil, tortured abomination? Is my skull sufficient proof of my villainy, or should I strive for emotional depth?"
: People will still buy a game even if it doesn't have fan service. How many
: people bought Halo for Cortana?
: Guys, that's not a rhetorical question - did any of you buy Halo because of
: her little blue bod? Don't worry, we are all friends here - fess up.
: Anybody?
I got into Halo because a friend loved Halo PC multiplayer, and he especially loved how much I sucked at it. He was the kind of guy who loved fighting an easy target in a 1v1 match. So, when I was at my cousin's I asked to play the Xbox version for practice.
Not going to lie, when I booted up campaign and played the first mission, I saw Cortana and thought "Hey, she's pretty hot."
You know what sold me on the game, though? Halo. Walking out of the crashed escape pod and seeing that ring stretch from one horizon to the other.
: Halo once had standards - it WAS cheesy but it had some standards. Cool is
: difficult. If you try too hard, if you don't have good judgement and some
: restraint then fan service and rule of cool can just become farce.
"Hey, man, the animation is almost complete, but we don't have the dialog nailed down."
"Dialog? For heaven's sake, it's twenty solid minutes of Spartans kicking ass! I don't see pornos headhunting for scriptwriters, do you?"
"But what if it's not enough? This is anime, we've got a fanservice quota to meet."
"Tell you what, let's just have Halsey and the Master Chief regurgitate lines from the games. We can pretend that it gives the later lines more meaning or something."
"Works for me."
: No, I don't like disappointment and, to a degree, I have walked away from
: Halo. But when I see something like that new promethean it wrings a cry of
: outrage from me - a WTF? and a, "you can't be serious!!?" :-)
Pretty much this as well. =P
*StarCraft and Avatar are the only two stories that got it right.