I am torn folks.  Activison’s new game Transformers: War For Cybertron looks amazing and has been receiving universally positive reviews. It seems incredible loyal to the kickass cartoon, not the Michael-Bay –CGI-Spider-Looking robots that are currently bumming around the popular consciousness. The fan service of this game is intense, just look at one of the promos:

asd

That’s You’ve Got The Touch, one of the most 80s pieces of audio in existence. It comes from the soundtrack to the original cartoon movie. You know, the one with Judd Nelson and Orsen Wells, the one where Optimous Prime straight up dies? Yeah dog, that is how real it got. But wait, the realness has yet to even kick off properly. Because you see that guy, playing it? That’s Soundwave. Soundwave is probably the most mackin-est character(...check that: concept) to arrive in fiction since Old Testament God:

See? There’s a brother with a furious mind if you ever encountered one. Dude’s tapes are so bad, they kill people. While other Transformers sometimes looked like toys Soundwave never wavered from looking like a combination of dead pan badassery and stone cold fury over not having enough things to kill.

Fan service did not stop there.  Koatku today reported the end of game is some sort of cell-shaded hug from your childhood, similar to the end credits of the cartoon and with a new song by Mr Transformer. Somewhere nerdy men are weeping crystal tears of awesome.

;;;pl

But should they? With the glut of nostalgic reboots and revamps (A-Team and Karate kid in the movies, Bionic Commando Rearmed 2, Mega Man 10 ect) is nostalgia really that good? Obviously producers have to appeal to people with money and it seems 18-30 year olds with a Jones for their childhood are a key demographic. Raised eyebrow versions of what everyone did on a Saturday morning does not seem like the most creative way to go. I think people between my age and thirty really need to let things go.

Imagine if in twenty years Ben 10 was getting a gritty reboot with Justin Beiber’s son as Ben. You’d think the entire population of planet earth had lost its mind. The thing is, this probably won’t happen.  Because kids now are face deep in the fourth and fifth reboot of stuff we used to watch. Soon there'll be so many levels of irony and weirdness remakes, reboots and original content will all come out simultaneously.

As awesome as the Transformers game, maybe we should really just grow up and move on? Apart from with Batman. Continue to make more Batman games ad infinitum.