G.I. Joe the movie is coming out and you know what that means...
I'll admit it: I was something of a G.I. Joe freak in the eighties and I have a box filled with figures and dossier card cutouts to prove it. Sorry collector-type people, no more unbroken blister packs. And now that a movie is on its way, it was only inevitable that a game would follow suit but looking at the trailer, I might prefer the NES versions instead.
All of the jingoistic analysis that modern-day intelligentsia use to scrap childhood memories with simply pale against the endless fun I and my brother had in breaking Cobra Commander out of G.I. Joe's base with a H.I.S.S. tank assault. Sure it was merchandising, sure it was as American as Apple Pie, but as kids, we didn't care. It got our imaginations fired up and thinking of new adventures, especially with all of the crazy characters that Hasbro kept coming up with not to mention the Machiavellian flavor underlying the motivations of some them...like Destro. If you doubt that last statement, just watch the first mini-series starring the Joes, "The MASS Device" and come back to me.
Who could forget Destro? The Dreadnoks? The Pyramid of Darkness? The Mass Device? Tomax and Xamot? Cobra's corporate front, Extensive Enterprises, made Bernie Madoff look like a rank amateur. Still, some of us might prefer to forget Cobra-La had ever happened (along with Serpentor), although we'd be willing to keep the incredible opening sequence where the Joes save the Statue of Liberty.
So now that the movie is arriving and looking none too bad for a live-action reboot, the inevitable game tie-in finally makes its debut at GDC 09 and...I'm kind of worried. It's got the Hollywood voice over, the cuts, the dramatic shots of the logo, but the actual gameplay... It appears that the devs went for a "Battlefield" type of approach to the game and while that sounds like fun, it looks a bit...underwhelming. I'm hoping it might break the tie-in curse games usually fall under, but I'm not so sure here.
Anyway, here's the first trailer for the game, courtesy of Gametrailers. Odds are, I'll probably pick it up anyway. Just because.
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