The rest are window-dressing, but strewn about everywhere (and not even cunningly hidden) in such a small game that you feel obliged to suck them up in order to find some value. Technically, you're only on the look-out for one or two special task-specific shining nuts that inexplicably permit you to squeeze into tight crevasses (I believe our man Freud would have a thing or two to say about that) and access the next zone. Here's the kicker, though: you don't actually have to collect any of them. Dreary, but addictive each nut collected makes a satisfying popping sound, like bubble wrap to a gamer's ear. Seriously, it's a lesson in the obsessive-compulsive collection of food the likes of which we haven't seen since the dark days of Donkey Kong 64's banana-hoarding. And so that one-joke idea is applied to the mechanics of a bog-standard action-adventure in which you have to collect hundreds of nuts spread across ground and platform in every single level in order to successfully complete the game. Not when they can have the opportunity to fill the furry shoes of Scrat, the primitive put-upon squirrel with the (admittedly pretty funny) nut-obsession sub-plot. Nuts, nuts, nuts and more freakin' nuts.Įvidently, somebody in charge believed that players don't want to waste their time identifying with the movie's prominent lead characters. The first is about a group of prehistoric animals involved in a race against time to save their valley from a melting glacier, the second is about collecting nuts.
#Ice age 2 the meltdown platforms movie#
Now, you may have noticed that those last two sentences don't really scan, do they? And that's because the movie and the game operate on two completely different levels. Ice Age 2, the game, is about collecting nuts. Where the two Ice Age movies, with their make up of wise-cracking anthropomorphic animals on a snow-filled adventure, broke out of the ever-restricting CGI cartoon framework was in their dazzling use of beautifully stark, minimalist backgrounds to frame the leisurely-scripted foreground action. Incidentally, here's a movie-licensed 3D platform game. The more things change the more they stay the same. All tied up in some high-concept plot that tediously echoes the previous one on the production line. Today: a formulaic rehashing of the same wacky group of anthropomorphic characters wise-cracking the same tawdry jokes with a moderately serviceable wink to the grown-ups, and transparent parodies of modern-day culture. Back when Toy Story was released, it was a fresh, innovative and exciting genre of infinite possibilities. Oh, it's a shame to see what Hollywood's doing to CG-animated movies these days.
0 kommentar(er)
