See? Told you I was back. I'm putting myself on a self-imposed and rather tight schedule, so my intro is going to be brief... Whelp, see ya later!
Maybe we are just a bunch of suckers, and maybe big game publishers know it. After all, they track our purchase history, make us like a Facebook page to access their latest trailer, know how many people are willing to shell out an extra fifty or a hundred bucks for a special edition game filled with 10 bucks worth of cheap, molded plastic “collectors items." If it earned us extra DLC we’d probably lick an active nuclear reactor, or run naked through the streets of Harlem hurling racist epitaphs for a exclusive purple costume or a +2000 Sword of Murder.
What I’m getting at is that we’re suckers, they know it, and they’ll never stop cashing in- Oooh! Look! A shiny!
This game is presently wadding up my nerd panties something awful. I was a unique child, in that I absolutely loved the Ninja Turtles... Wait, that’s not right. I was exactly like every child on the face of the planet that had evolved beyond drooling on to a nappy (and some that hadn’t), and watched gleefully as the Ninja Turtles marketing machine took my parents and their savings account behind a 7-11 and viciously attacked them. As such, I will be buying TMNT: Out of the Shadows on day one, and will happily punch and nunchaku (Mikey4Life, bitches) my way through as many Foot Clan as the game can throw at me. Even if the game (which is looking fantastic) somehow manages to suck, I won’t particularly care. Or more to the point: I won’t notice. It’s Ninja Turtles, and dammit, that’s enough.
I’m not in some way suggesting that this Ninja Turtles game is some sort of cheap marketing tool in the form of shovelware designed to skim the pockets of an aging Ninja Turtles fan base. It looks like a lot of love has gone into this game, and the combat seems to have a Batmanian refinement to it (if it benefits from the expected improvements from alpha to final launch.) But would it be as exciting if it weren’t another Ninja Turtles game? Or even a Final Fight reboot? What if it were just some guys in tank tops? Or chicks with big tits (whole different set of PR problems, there.) Or a tie-in to the Michael Bay movie that’s still inexplicably being made? What if it didn’t benefit from nostalgia? Would I still be as excited? Probably not.
As gamers, we’re willing to put up with a lot for new content from franchises we love, and there isn’t a lot we can do about it. Fans will complain all day about things like the Durango’s inability to play games directly from the optical drive, but at the end of the day, they’ll only have one question: Ok, but I can still play Halo 5, right?
We are an extremely devoted group, us gamers, but we often put on fan-blinders for the sake of denying harsh realities. We’re the idiot in a horror movie that goes outside despite the killer’s having just been out there 45 seconds ago. We’re the abused partner in a relationship that keeps taking back the other, even after fifteen acts of infidelity and a flaming case of gonorrhea.
And like a character in a movie, we are trapped. We have no where else to go. They can as easily walk off of the screen and out of the theatre as we can leave games behind because of corporate greed that still refuses to use lube before it fucks us.
But seriously, this new Ninja Turtles game looks fucking awesome.
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