What's mostly annoying me now is people complaining about the new Zelda game. All the complaints seem to fall under one of three categories:
- They Changed It Now It Sucks
- This Proves They're Never Going To Make A Wii Zelda
- They're trying to reclaim the joy they got when playing their first Zelda game (usually Ocarina), not realizing that for most of them, it came more from youthful imagination than the game itself.
You're telling me people never said any of that stuff when Phantom Hourglass came out?
Now, you may think I'm going to go off on Spirit Tracks, but no. I have several, non-videogame-related things that have been annoying me far more than that for some time, and I'm going to express myself with...
Non-Videogame Things That Are Annoying ShadowBrain to No EndPart One: 3-DThree attributes can make a product or service unappealing: Unoriginality, poor quality, and undue hype. I can take, at the most, two of these and still enjoy something, but the recent 3-D craze has completely lost my interest by managing to encapsulate all of the above.
First of all, 3-D is obviously not new. In fact,
Bwana Devil, widely considered the first 3-D movie, was released in 1952. Despite the film's terrible reception, a 3-D "boom" in the industry continued until 1954. On and off throughout the last half-century, there's been tons 3-D movies, books, and special issues of magazines, all in varying degrees of quality. Six years ago, Spy Kids 3-D came out and the most news coverage I saw was your standard review in the local paper. I know (hope, rather) no one really thinks 3-D is new, so why, all of a sudden, is changing the red lense on those oh-so-famous glasses to yellow somehow worth Super Bowl halftime ads coming out of my screen, Time, Inc.
et al putting 3-D sections in a bunch of their publications like it's the Holiday edition of Nick Magazine, and a dozen CG movies?
Secondly, I'd care about this 3-D thing if it could match the quality of, say, those shows they do at the Disney parks. Now
that's three-dimensional entertainment. But what I've been seeing is the textbook definition of meh. When those aforementioned halftime ads were all set to premiere, I initially refused to get sucked into another nation-grabbing gimmick and passed on the paper specs my grandma brought to the party. However, when Monsters Vs. Aliens and Sobe finally showed up, I figured "why not?" and put 'em on. It was just as blurry and unconvincing as I expected, only instead of being shades of red and blue it was shades of yellow and blue, the "3-D" moments looking more like layers of 2-D. In print it's no different. Coraline, when I saw it, impressed me with the higher-quality glasses, but the 3-D was still Paper Mario-esque in its depth.
As for the final point, overhype, that's already been addressed.
In the end, even if all that stuff was "fixed", I'm still not that interested in 3D. Like so many videogame gimmicks I've griped about before, it's often used as a crutch to shirk on plot and all-around substance in movies, and even if the movie's decent, there's still the obligatory things-flying-into-your-face moments that are terribly distracting (that one Fairly Oddparents episode, to reference a somewhat infantile source, hit the nail right on the head). Besides, movies--and Burger King ads--are not an interactive medium. Videogames are, so I have little problem if they're 3-D (though I'd prefer they also be first-person, in that case), but in movies you are not supposed to be anybody. You're an outsider! The audience! Until technology gets to the point where the protagonist of a movie looks like whoever is watching it, leave the screen flat.
