Screw You, Marvel

This is exactly what Marvel is doing to their properties.

All of Marvel’s upcoming movies are going to be trash.

A decade ago, movie adaptations of comic books were a joke. With the exception of the 1989 Batman and 1978 Superman films, they were laughable at best, and huge steaming piles of shit at worst. The problem was that nobody took it seriously, not even the creators. They made them campy and hokey, and self-referentially stupid. They were the lowest common denominator of movies. They became a self-fulfilling prophecy of crappy movie-making. After all, if the filmmakers themselves treated the properties like shit, then the movies would inevitably turn out to be shit. The industry chugged along, and churned out turd after turd with the occasional, anomalous decent movie like Blade in 1998.

Fast forward to 2002, and the release of Spider-Man. Suddenly, we had a GOOD live action version of a comic book movie. How did it turn out good, you ask? Well, let me answer that for you. The simple reason was that the director, Sam Raimi, had been a longtime fan of the comic book series. He wanted to stay as true to the character as possible while adapting him for the more difficult live action film environment. Naturally, certain things needed to be changed, but they were done with as much care as possible. The characters and situations were taken seriously, and given the right amount of gravity with occasional moments of levity thrown in to keep things fun. The script was solid, the actors were well cast and talented, and everything flowed together seamlessly. It just worked. Worldwide, that movie grossed over $800 million. People were screaming about how awesome the movie was, and all of a sudden it wasn’t nerdy to like comics any more.

If There Was a Video Game Version of Sucking Balls, it Would Be Called Halo.

About a million years ago I played Halo on the PC. It was one of the hugest pieces of shit of all time. It was repetitive, boring, had lame guns, had an idiotic story, and was about as generic as FPS games can get. I hated it so much that I refused to play Halo 2 or 3, despite the fact that fanboys around the world heralded them as the best things since sliced bread. Which is really saying a lot, since sliced bread is the best thing since sliced bread.

A few months back, three other friends and I got together and it was decided that we should play Halo 3 online. My friend has an Xbox 360 and a huge HD TV, and I was drunk, so I figured, “Sure, why the fuck not?” We played, and it was incredible. It was one of the most fun multiplayer experiences of my videogaming life. Don’t get me wrong, it was no Goldeneye 64, but it was a pretty solid experience nonetheless.

So, after months of playing Halo 3 online with my friends, I decided I would go back in time and play through the single player campaign of Halo 2, with the intent of then moving on to part three. After all, online play was so much fun that the developers must have fixed their mistakes from the previous games, right?

That was a huge mistake.