Video game reviews: Transformers (xbox 360)

I really wanted to like this game.

How in the world can you take the premise of giant robots trashing a city in their battle against each other bad i though to myself, and voice acting legends Peter Cullen and Frank Welker were reprising their roles of Optimus Prime and Megatron respectively. This fan candy alone prompted me to buy this game, and all seemed well as I heard Optimus narrate the gorgeous opening CGI movie, I felt 5 all over again.

Having seen the movie, I knew Megatron does not make an appearance till the twilight moments of the film, so I began by playing as the autobots in the hopes to hear Optimus off the bat. I began as bumblebee, and ignoring Optimus’s orders the first thing I did was transform and run over a bus stop, proceeding to transform back and start blasting up a residential area. I then scaled a building and kicked off a billboard into a neighbouring building and watched it explode and crumble. And it felt good, I thought “What is more fun than destroying a town and seeing humans flee and scream in terror?”

After a little more wanton carnage, I proceeded to the giant green beacon indicating my first mission, and after a nice little mini CGI snippet entered my first battle with some decaptacons. These basic enemies were no match for bumblebees guns and fists, however to my dismay I lacked the capacity to ram them whilst in my car form, I instead simply stopped entirely and watched them fling their arms wildly overhead missing me in my shrunken car form. With a sigh I simply transformed, and threw him into a building instead, which he hit like a dry sponge hits a bus, and in my rage I gunned down the city, which was fun.

The sense of scale is well portrayed in this game, you stomp around as your beautifully rendered transformer making the screen shake and making crevices in the ground while humans flee and cars drive around like nothing is happening.

Yes, you may think I am describing this game positively, but if you look hard enough, I don’t sound too impressed half the time.

Through my exploits so far I had apparently unlocked some extras, which I decided to check out. A few images here and there from the film, and ooo a picture of the G1 bumblebee, nice. Browsing through the nicely animated menu (which resembles the allspark and does a good job reminding you what you are playing) I decided to give the deceptacons a whirl. As blackout, the giant Helicopter transformer of peril, my first mission from lord starscream was to

Movie reviews: The Transformers (2007) – Part 51

Alternate Title; Michael Bay forgets to take his Ritalin.

Disclaimer; At the time of this writing, I have another article pending approval by Helium.com that I spend more than enough time complaining about Michael Bay. So don’t mistake this article for a Michael Bay rant. This is a movie review. It just so happens that he directed the film.

And I’ll try to avoid any spoilers.

When I was between the ages of 5-8 years old, I recall coming home from school and plunking down in front of the television to watch episodes of G.I.Joe, Transformers, and Thundercats back to back. The glory days of not caring about deep involving plots, acting, budget, special effects, or the fact that my homework still wasn’t done. If I was lucky it would be done in time for Macgyver anyway. No way was I going to miss those shows.

Gone are those days, and now, twenty years later, I’m of an age where those things matter to me….or they’re supposed to anyway. My homework still isn’t done.

And now that Transformers has hit the big screen, I of course, had to go see it in the theaters. I suppose that was my first mistake.

Now normally I’m the type who goes to see a film if it looks like the theater experience will make a difference in the presentation of the film. Typically special effects, explosions, mass mayhem and carnage are the type of things that draw me into the theater. I had no idea until this film that all of those things could be overdone. I had a lot of trouble tracking the fight scenes as the Autobot on Decepticon combat, for some reason, involved a lot of close ups, dust, debris, explosions, and not enough “letting me see what the heck is happening.”

And that brings me to my next point; the robot choreography. It starts of reasonable enough, but as the Autobots are introduced I couldn’t help but notice that they were all prancing and posing! There are several scenes in the film, particularly during the combat, when the Autobots strike poses and execute rolls and flips as though they were practicing for an audition on Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. To top that off, it seems that all of the Autobots took some Kung Fu lessons during their 20 year hiatus. Much of the robot-on-robot combat involves a lot of jumping around, adding to the confusion that already is the many battles. Funny, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles never looked so tall or metallic before. The human versus robot fight scenes are much easier to follow, with the exception of the climax,