Friday, November 28, 2014

DESTINY: Such Hubris.

So I'm sitting here, watching some youtube videos.  At the beginning of them, an advertisement for the video game 'Destiny.'  There's a band of heroes (I assume), three in total.  One of them is looking down these binoculars (it's the future, we're fighting aliens in space, and we don't have optical implants?) at a fortress in the side of a mountain.  So they deduce it looks pretty quiet.  Might as well blow something up, right?  I mean, it's not like there's just three of them, or that the three of them are standing in front of a huge fortress brimming with probably thousands of enemies.  Enemies possibly much more advanced than the simple 20th century firearms they apparently lugged through space (shipping things to space costs A LOT OF RESOURCES). 

Blast apart the door they do and out pour these myriad enemies.  You know they're enemies because the English-speaking fellows are shooting at them, and they don't speak any civilized language (and they look scary too!  Why do these antagonists never look like cute little bunnies or kittens or something?  Always so humanoid).

As the first enemies pour out, one says 'Looks like the party has started,' to which the other replies something about wanting his floating computer to play Classical music.  Que Led Zeppelin's 'Immigrant Song.'

There's something funny about playing a song about Vikings fighting their way to Valhalla that's probably lost on the average viewer.  I mean, yeah, the protagonists are definitely invading the natives, so that's probably a decent track to pick.  But what I don't get is why they apparently have a floating computer that has the entire history of music on it (mind you, Destiny has to be set sometime a LONG time from now - are you gonna put several-hundred year old music on your future MP3 player?  I doubt you can stream Pandora from servers on Earth to somewhere light-years away almost instantly...)

Also, it's pretty awesome how we Americans all pretty much still have the exact same dialect several hundred years from now, and intergalactic warriors are gonna be listening to English music (of all the possible worlds full of music, ours is still the most awesome, music no one of that time is going to have any real ties to).  I mean, seriously, who wants to listen to a Holophoner (thanks, Futurama!) when you have remastered vinyl from several centuries ago?

Maybe this is why I don't play video games so much anymore...