Review of the Week Feb 14 - 20: OD vs DH

There's been a whole lot of Vacant recently. I will say, though, that its constant appearance at least makes for compelling head-to-head battles. This week we have a grueling match between Overdrive and DementedHut.

Side note: I still want to call you Pickhut. Change is hard.


OD - Rise of the Argonauts
I will never not rant and rave about the Italian Hercules movies starring Lou Ferrigno because they're absolutely batshit. Lou vs. a giant robot bee? Or how he and King Minos both turned into constellations and fought in space. And by "constellations," I mean, "the two most well-known images formed by stars in the sky, King Kong and a T-Rex." No, seriously, you see the fight between Kong and Rex from the '30s movie rendered in freakin' neon IN SPACE. What part of my head do I need to hit to invent this kind of material? I seriously want to know.

But I digress...

Parts of what you described remind me of The First Templar, a game that was drier than a grocery store in a Southern Baptist town. I like that this review exuded your enthusiasm for Greek mythology, which played partly into your disappointment with this game. You kind of repeat yourself a midway through your section about combat, but that's more of a minor nitpick. This is a terrific review that paints this particular search for the fleece as underwhelming.


Dem-Hut - Global Defense
That has to be one of the most boring titles I've ever heard. Imagine calling Gran Turismo "Fast Car" or GTA "Do Crimes" or something like that. They really couldn't come up with something snazzier than Global Defense? (Yeah, I saw the other name for this one. It's marginally better.)

Anyway, that's a banger of an intro. I have no interest in this game, and yet you've got my attention.

And damn, that second paragraph really drove the point grimly home. The rest of the review describes the game clearly and effectively outlines that this title seems simplistic, but it's quite difficult and somewhat awkward. You do a wonderful job of getting across just how frantic and pressuring this title can be, and that it like so to let you know just how high the stakes are. Geez...


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And now the hard decision of who walks away with the W with week: it's Dem-Hut!


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You claim to love the darkness. Go then and dwell there for all eternity!

Thanks for the RotW! I didn't really put much thought into how mundane the name Global Defense is, other than it's a word switch away from the term tower defense. I thought about implementing that somewhere in the review, but I figured it would be too much of a detour from the actual game discussion.

The game itself is a hard sell if you knew absolutely nothing about it. Imagine walking into a store, browsing the game section, seeing this game on a shelf or rack with its mundane (non-Japanese) box cover, flip it around, and you just see screenshots of a mushroom-shaped "robot" floating in front of planets. ?????

Glad you liked the review and to OD for a solid review.

At least it's not as bland as Triangle Strategy, I guess.

Thanks for the comments! You know, I've never seen any of the Lou Hercules movies. I have seen a few that were riffed by MST3K that featured other, inferior, actors taking on the job. And those films ranged from bad to hilariously bad (the difference being whether I needed the riffing to laugh or if the film provided plenty of chuckles on its own poorness.

Moral of the story: Italian cinema is the bomb because it tends to gravitate towards batshit insanity more often than not. Even if the movie sucks on every meaningful level, odds are that it will be entertaining. Like, Zombie 3 (started out directed by Fulci, but the combination of his failing health, the climate of the Phillipines not helping his health and his dislike of the hack screenwriter caused him to turn things over to said writer and Bruno Mattai) is a very bad movie, but it also was as entertaining of a 90-minute (give or take) period I've ever had with zombies.