Three Post Combo!

Three posts in one day! I may become a blogger yet.

Mostly, I wanted to comment on the previous post. Those movies are an excellent example of how important good voice talent is in making an entertaining product. Most of the voices are good approximations of either the movie or cartoon voices of those characters. They are cleanly delivered, and recorded at a good level so you never miss a word. They're acted well, with no deadness or monotones, no mouth noises or stutters. They're so good, in fact, that it makes you forget that the action figure's mouths aren't moving whatsoever, or that there aren't really any body movements that are reflecting the content of the dialog. In a game, where facial animations and body language are just now getting good enough to use without people cringing too much, having that level of quality voice work is essential to bring your dialog from noticeably crappy to seamlessly transparent.

...and one more thing

These short movies are pretty darn funny...

Sinestro Corps: a giant video game?

I've been reading the current Sinestro Corps story line in the various Green Lantern line of comics. To sum it up, Sinestro, an old foe of Green Lanterns everywhere, has teamed up with some heavy-duty villains to create his own version of the Green Lantern Corps.




Besides all the interesting, cool recruits that make up the regular corps, he also has Superman Prime, the Anti-Monitor, a new Parallax, and the Cyborg Superman (who brings his own army of manhunters) along for the ride.

Pretty scary. The big question that's been flying around has been "How are the Green Lanterns going to take care of those guys all at once?"

The answer, it seems, is that they are taking a gimmick from the game industry and making each of the heavy hitters a boss monster.

In Green Lantern #21, Hal Jordan, the classic Green Lantern, is targetted by the Sinestro Corps as being the most dangerous enemy they have. So, what do they do? They teleport him to Qward (in the antimatter universe..try to keep up here) and have him face off against the new Parallax, Kyle Raynor (formerly the replacement for Hal, then given godlike power, and then recently possessed by the Parallax spirit... I'm sure you can follow that...)

There are some flunky Sinestro Corps flunkies behind Parallax, but no sign of the dual supermen, the Anti-Monitor, or Sinestro himself. What does this remind me of? A boss monster fight.

When we worked on Justice League Heroes, the plot was similar: Brainiac gathered a bunch of supervillains together, and the player had to first defeat low level minions, then defeat the big villain at the end of the mini-arc. This is a good way to stretch out a video game, but in a movie or comic or book, it always comes off kinda false, like those Bruce Lee fights where all the goons stand in a circle, and waiting for their turn to rush in individually and get a nunchuku facial served fresh from the master himself.

Of course, this is only one comic: maybe the series won't have each member of the uberteam split up so they can be dealt with singly. We'll see. I wish we would have been able to see more of the group dynamics of the uberteam. I'm thinking that, by far, the villains in this arc are much more interesting than the heroes.