I wish this were a prank, I honestly do. It’s just so amazingly terrible. I still hope that news will break in a day or two that this is all a joke, but it’s been all over the ‘net since it was announced on Tuesday, March 30th.

Linkin Park (the band) (your younger brother probably loved their song “One Step Over” nearly a decade ago) have decided to make a massively multiplayer online iPhone video game. In the process, they are attempting to capitalize on the recent wave of retro-nostalgia (Mega Man 9 & 10, New Super Mario Bros Wii, the chiptune craze, MacGruber) by making the game… ahem… “8-bit.”

It’s so… I can’t… ugh, just watch the trailer:

There are so many things to be upset about here., I’ll allow my friend Joe Larson to do get us started:

1. Where’s the 8-bits? I don’t see anything even remotely 8-bit. Oh? Those chunky pixelated 32-bit era pixels? Fail. That map, no 8 bit. Those weapons, no 8-bit. YOUR CHARACTER, no 8-bit. Your room, no 8-bit. Besides…
2. If this is supposed to be nostalga vs modern then first of all my money is on modern. It’s just better.
3. Oh, they’ve taken a remixed Linkin Park into blippy tracks? Oh, well that might be 8-bit. But it’s still based on pretentious quasi-teen mock angst. Lard, my ears throb just listening to it.
4. I love how they show you the idiot taking a shot at a guy and having the laser pass harmlessly through them, pause, realize it’s a friendly before moving on. Yeah, way to showcase your bad game design there.

It MIGHT be less of a betrayal to its very name if you will eventually change everything into chunky pixels, and it looks like that MIGHT be the case looking at the trailer, though they’re still distinctly 32-bit (like the SNES) sprites and character avatars and weapons are never at any time in the game anything less than hi-def.

Near as I can tell they’re making this game for one person, the Linkin Park fan. That being the case I really hope they plant a subversive piece of code in the game where if you play it for more than 20 hours it detonates your iPhone killing the user and ridding the world of the pretentious middle-class white kids who were probably going to go on a killing spree at some point anyways.

Man, I hate this thing.

Joe, a game developer of his own right (the excellent and much-buzzed ASCIIp0rtal was his doing), makes some excellent points, but there’s just so much more to hate about this project. Just off the top of my head:

1. Do people still care about Linkin Park anymore? Does name recognition like that sell a game? My teenage sister and I refuse any setlist in Rock Band 2 that includes the Linkin Park track or the Paramore track.
2. Unlock an exclusive song? That HAS to have been done before. I can’t cite the example off the top of my liquified-upon-submission-to-nonsense-game-trailer mind, but I refuse to believe there’s never been an exclusive song unlocked in-game before (I know that 50 Cent game last year had a whole bunch of “unreleased” tracks in it… “unreleased” in that they were too shitty for the album… even a 50 Cent album). Besides, that song’s going to be on YouTube and any blogs that still give a crap about Linkin Park the day after somebody competent buys/steals the game.
3. The developer – Artificial Life, inc. – also did the iPhone ports of the Adult Swim games, which in my experience have been mostly shitty, so at least nobody’s besmirching their good name with this nonsense.
4. My favorite t-shirt and hoodie are now soaked with vomit. Thanks a fucking lot, Linkin Park. Why did I have that banana for breakfast? Yuck…

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 1st, 2010 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Music, Videogames, WTF. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Related reading:

None Found