Blegh. I booted up Squad 51 versus the Flying Saucers. I might have bithced about it before. Case of being exactly what I thought it would be but being disappointed, like, play five minutes and think "fucking kill me."
It's a space shooter (by genre) with retro graphics, it does the sci-fi B movie thing the way Deadly Tower of Monsters did sci-fi B movies and Cuphead did early cartoons. I think one big problem with that as a premise is it shows how "like X genre" isn't enough, other things that were send ups of a specific aesthetic or fiction genre also have a hook to make them good games. Cuphead, for example, used its cartoonery, wild jazz music and bullet hell genre to reinforce each other, each piece is drawing out some of what makes the others good. But sci-fi B movies are kind of gray mush to begin with - I like the visual aesthetic of stupid bullshit, loved it in Deadly Tower of Monsters - but here you've got straight black-and-white, crackly audio, it's being very very authentic and that includes being authentic to the experience of sucking, which old B movies did. That's why even the stuff that riffs on it isn't THAT authentic. Mars Attacks is a modern B movie but it isn't shot like the 1950s. Deadly Tower of Monsters got its play out of the framing device of being directors commentary and the game itself would have sucked but the commentary was genuinely delightful. Cuphead and LA Noire had the good sense to have colorized be the default setting. (Similarly, Trek to Yomi hanged its hat on balck and white and ALSO sucked.)
Plus, "Director" Zardoz. Modern man cannot even imagine a Ming the Merciless or Confederate soldier John Carter banging a Martian, it's gotta all be about the same braindead corpo bad message. It's just a default, same thing for theming/narrative that the zombie is for a mook. Sci-fi B movies aren't about directors. They're about god-emperors who keep pleasure domes with captured princess in lingerie on chains and enslave monkey men to mine uranium and terrorize the peasants with psychic wizards.
I also booted up Forgotten City today and I have an eyebrow raised. Heard some dude suck its dick in a review ages ago, he mentioned it having an interesting depiction of Christians from the Roman perspective and being essentially a glorified Fallout game in its engine and design (what is Fallout at heart, it's not an action game as it's always sucked at that, it's a walk around and navigate dialogue trees game). So I boot this up having last played 3 or New Vegas a decade ago and am flashbanged by the limp lifeless sex-doll-like body of a hylic narrating at me, and about 10 minutes in maybe I'm hearing a Roman talk about how all colors and sexual preferences are welcome in his empire. I'm hoping it shapes up to be worthwhile but compared to the experience of say, reading Pompeii, you know... I mention Pompeii specifically for a reason too, it's a great example of fiction that writes about the ancient world vividly like these are modern people (thats its thing: its Chinatown in Pompeii) but it exists thoroughly in the ancient mindset, it'll have characters randomly be pedophiles or slaveowners and stuff and it's the most normal thing in the world to everyone around them.
