Friday, April 10, 2015

YOU DEAD

I've mentioned Earthsiege a few times on the blog, as a mecha-based game that I played a fair bit (as mentioned here, mostly in a cheat mode).



The premise of the game and the mecha designs* are things I largely enjoyed, but the thing that sticks out in my mind the most is the little movie that played whenever you died.



Now, it could be my mind playing tricks on me, but I'm nearly entirely certain that this video left out a shot of a surgical armature moving into position for the brain extraction. (Unfortunately, whenever you saw this animation during the campaign, it was actually a permadeath, which is part of why the campaign was all but unplayable.)

Of course, hilariously gross as your character ending up on a dissection table can be, this death movie's got nothing on the one from Star Crusader.



Explosive decompression for the grossout factor win.

Do they do "death movies" like this anymore? They weren't really that common back in the day that I recall, usually just some grim music and a game over card.

*The mecha designs are cleaner, more logical counterparts to the ones from the better-known Battletech/Mechwarrior franchise. The premise involved the player being part of the resistance against the inevitable robot uprising. I kinda like series featuring multiple forms of fictional robot alongside each other and/or integrated with each other**, and putting a robot brain in any sort of giant robot just makes sense.

**Taking this to its logical conclusion was the Bots Master cartoon, which featured sapient robots, mook robots, animal robots, talking head robots, transforming vehicle robots, combining robots, giant robots of several sizes, and probably more things I'm not thinking of. Too bad that show ended up in the lethal 6:00 AM weekday suicide time slot. ...Why did every show to end up in that slot end on a cliffhanger?

-Signing off.

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