posted by Think Tank on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 7:00am
Look out behind you!
Disaster movies, like Roland Emmerich’s 2012 (debuting this week), always feature our protagonists speeding away from some onrushing threat. Whether a giant monster, a geological phenomenon, a torrent of lasers, or a terrifying combination of the above, the margin between life and death is measured in miles per hour.
Hurry up! Run!
The chase says so much about the genre and humanity’s relation to it. It’s man vs. nature writ large. Nature goes from indifferent to cruel, targeting our heroes with falling debris, obscuring smoke and other unfortunate people who just weren’t fast enough.
It’s gaining on us! Step on it!
The panel of Overthinkers sprinted to safety this week and, while catching their breath and staring at the wreckage of a major American metropolis, debated on what was the Greatest Escape in a Disaster Movie. Read our verdicts and weigh in by voting in our poll.
And make sure you read all the way to the end for our Mystery Guest Judge!
posted by fenzel on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 9:14am
I’ve been playing a lot of Super Smash Brothers: Brawl lately, and I played Super Smash Brothers Melee religiously for years (at least, wow six or seven years by now).
Religiously, hm?
It's-a me! Pentecost!
At the heart of Super Smash Brothers is solid gameplay, but on the surface is misplaced familiarity. Take something that doesn’t belong in a fighting game, put it in a fighting game, and suddenly there are all sorts of unintended joys. It took everybody a while to warm up to the Tekken guys (and I, frankly, still haven’t), but there’s a sincere pleasure to playing with these familiar characters as they fight. It’s the sort of fantasy that’s always part of the artistic imagination. It worked for tennis, it worked for golf, it worked for paper, it worked for karts — when you shoehorn in Nintendo characters, the game becomes more familiar, more interesting and more fun.
Shoehorning, hm?
More fun, hm?
What follows is an experiment . . . can the Smash Brothers principle make anything fun? How much of the original shines through, and how much is just nonsense? Can it spice up something that’s solid at its core, but could definitely gain something from being more familiar, more interesting and more fun . . .
