A Look Back at Pacific Rim

Time for a thought exercise.

I want you to imagine a child. A kind of small, impressionable young boy. He's playing in the bathtub with toy boats and rubber ducks and basically having a real fun time. And then he's like, oh man, what if the boat was a boat and the duck was a Godzilla. And he smashes the duck into the boat, making fake Godzilla roars with his mouth and just reliving the same moments he just saw on TV in black and white, but, like, it's him doing it. And he's pretty happy about it.

Now I want you to imagine that the kid has grown up and their name is Guillermo Del Toro and they're given millions of dollars to do the duck and boat thing but instead of a rubber duck and a toy boat in a bathtub, it's a real boat and a giant CGI duck in the Industrial Light and Magic office. And instead of making fake Godzilla roars with his mouth, it's Tom Morello making weird cool noises on his 'lectric geetar on the soundtrack. You've pretty much just imagined how Pacific Rim was made. Probably.

Review: "Transformers: War for Cybertron"

Thank Primus You're Here!

Review for Transformers: War for Cybertron (PC)

Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC - 1 to 3 player third-person shooter, Out Now

Transformers joins Sonic the Hedgehog as part of the super-star tag-team of entertainment properties everybody is really nostalgic about and fond of that I totally missed the boat for. With Transformers I have an excuse - I was a generation too late, being born in 1992 (thus landing me in the cusp of Generation Y). But that's not a great excuse. I had internet access by the time I was ten years old, and YouTube was a thing by the time I was twelve years old. I could have been "into" Transformers before now if I wanted to.

What's baffling is I can't fathom why I wouldn't want to. As a kid, I was massively into Hot Wheels, Thunderbirds, jets, spaceships, boats, trains... and Transformers is basically that, but the vehicles turn into and are giant robots. Giant goddamn robots! Y'know how a lot of people criticize Transformers as an entertainment property because it was designed to sell toys to kids? Well if I hadn't missed the boat on Transformers, it would have worked on ten-year-old me. There is nothing about "giant robots that can turn into cars and planes" that does not appeal to me. Yet somehow I missed it. It's peculiar.

At any rate, it doesn't really matter, because, little known fact: I never actually grew up in my head, so I have the mental age of a ten year-old. So since I'm acquainting myself with the nostalgic remnants of other people's much more interesting childhoods - from Ghostbusters to Sonic - it might as well be Transformers' turn, starting with the well-received prequel-videogame War for Cybertron. How do I find it? As a non-Transformers fan, will it sell me on the property? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. ...okay, spoiler alert, it totally does.