Believe it or not, the Disney company was not always seen as the truly evil empire it currently is, and they actually put out good stuff every now and again. One of those great gems they put out was the 2009 movie Up. Spawning many memes and being a generally great movie overall has given it great longevity and fondness in the eyes of most.
Enter now the address of 13222 Herriman Rose Blvd in Herriman, Utah is a a near perfect exterior and interior replica of the protagonists house from that movie. Created by the Bangerter Homes company specifically as a way to promote themselves and create a tourist destination, the company received permission from Disney to create it and painstakingly researched every known detail with Disney in order to create it.
It is now privately owned and the owners do have a website detailing it's history and some FAQs about visiting here: http://www.therealuphouse.com/ Also, Disney itself loves the promotion given by the house and made a short film about the family living there that you can see on youtube:
The only shame about the place is that it's stuck in the general area of Provo which is basically the leaky butthole of Utah, with the highest concentration of jerks in the state.
Located in an old Christian Scientist church in San Francisco’s Richmond district, lies one of the most indispensable and yet often overlooked and underappreciated projects/resources of the modern age: The non-profit Internet Archive. Strangely enough, the location itself was chosen for the project as the building resembles the logo for the organization.
A picture of the building taken from their site.
Perhaps most famously, they are the ones who operate and curate the famous Wayback Machine that seeks to catalog and archive all websites on the internet, including defunct ones. Starting in 1996, it is offered as a free service to all for finding old sites that no longer exist, seeing how changes were made to sites over time, or (my favorite use) to see how blowhards and politicians have walked back or reversed their claims or statements over time. This in itself is a monumental project, but it isn't the only thing that they do there.
They consider themselves an open library to all and also offer a project in which they are digitizing books, have an archive of TV news broadcasts, audio recordings of live concerts, as well as archiving free software, and projects to digitize a variety of other physical media among many other projects. It's near impossible to detail it all here, but you can go directly to their site to find out more: https://archive.org/about/
As an added bit of interesting trivia about the location is that the church's chapel is still intact and has more than 120 ceramic sculptures of the Internet Archive’s current and former employees situated among the pews that were created by a local artist. Another interesting tidbit is the fact that the massive amount of data servers needed for the project are so vast, that they serve as the building's heat source! Pretty neat eh?
I realize this is old news at this point, but I'm shocked that I didn't mention it here before. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a massive success with gamers and is a huger success in terms of sales for Rockstar Games, but a while back they said that they will no longer be supporting the online component for the game within a few months.
This does nothing but prove two points, one: Rockstar Games are again proving that they are incompetent morons; and two: is that the reasons for them doing this just help to illustrate that the gaming industry is blatantly wrong for not giving players the ability to host their own online servers.
Yes, I know that the reason why is that Rockstar wants to push micro-transaction with their dumbass shark cards and gold in the case of RDR2, but they are shutting it down as players freaking hate the paid services and are cheating as an alternative to paying to win. As a result, there is a rash of cheaters on Rockstar's servers that they are unable to control in any meaningful way, who are doing nothing but griefing other players, making the whole experience awful.
If they had just given players the ability to host and regulate their own servers, this would not be a problem that Rockstar would even have to manage or spend money on at all. Yes, it would increase your development costs and time, as well as cut into your micro-profits, but would see a far larger return on investments, as that would allow for people to more freely mod the game, increasing long term sales and popularity, as the community would self police their own servers.
But hey what do I know? Heaven forbid you actually let people play a game online that they paid for, instead of freaking pulling one of the highest grossing games from being able to be played at all. I honestly hope this ends up in multiple lawsuits against them and it proves very costly to them.
Valley View Memorial Park in West Valley City, Utah has something pretty unique as far as gravestones go that caused a bit of a trend among the nerdy peoples of the world who pass on to the next. In the Southwest corner of the cemetery there lies a Steven Allan Ford who passed away on September 7, 2010. But what is unique about his grave is that it reads under his name and dates ”MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU ALWAYS.”
Pic taken from the Atlas Obscura article.
What is really odd about it is that it's not just a Star Wars superfan's last statement, but he was listed as the first officially licensed minister of the Temple of the Jedi Order and ordained Jedi Priest after it being declared an official religion in the US. He was even the officiator of his own brother's wedding as such. Unfortunately for Steven and the rest of us, he was (as is obvious) a bit mentally damaged as his cause of death was that he took his own life. Still, his legacy goes on as his gravestone will always be an oddity that is world renowned in nerd circles.
The concept art comes really close to what the game is like.
Generation Zero is a game developed in Sweden and takes place in the same country during the 80s. The premise being that you are among a group of teenagers coming back from a trip to an outer island only to discover that the local population is gone due to extermination by rouge military robots. The game has a unique setting that allows for a little more fun when exploring, and it has a fun premise that provides for some interesting combat.
The game is not without it's faults, though. The game feels far too empty, with the looting being pretty bland for the most part, there's also not enough survivors to interact with, nor enough remnants of people to explore. It makes for a very uneven feeling while exploring the world, with there being all sorts of interesting places and architecture to see from afar, but then it feels like a bit of a let down once you get there to find it's mostly generic when you are actually exploring inside it.
See? The screenshot is pretty close.
This isn't the only issue, as the landmass you inhabit is massive, but can be a bit frustrating as there are no powered vehicles to use, and the game kind of devolves into a walking simulator at times. There are bicycles you can use, but they feel pretty unpolished and buggy, and seem like more trouble than they are worth. There is an in-game explanation for this, but still it feels flimsy. Some of the player gear seems to be pretty unbalanced and a bit underwhelming, such as the gas mask not actually giving you full protection from gas at all.
To be frank, it seems the game may have either been rushed so that it doesn't include features initially planned, or that there were technical hurdles in which they couldn't implement more into the game. To me, it would have been good to have the world be populated with more human NPCs both friendly and enemies to interact with as well as the numerous death robots.
Despite this though, there are some great aspect to the gameplay. It's meant to be a drop-in cooperative PvE experience more than anything. As I mentioned before, the combat and guns are enjoyable, with a good customization and quality system, all sorts of player customization and armor, a decent story, and I do find the setting and scenery to be utterly enjoyable. Since launch, they have also added a good number of DLCs, that add a larger variety of weapons as well as expanding the crafting system, as well as the feature of base-building. So far, I say it's certainly far from being a perfect game, but that's also what gives it some of it's charm. Overall, it if you can get all the DLC with the game while it's on sale, it might be worth it to you, as you can certainly do worse.
I mentioned the Boeing Condor in my article about Hiller Aviation Museum where one of the prototypes currently resides, but I figured a more in-depth write up on it was required, as it is a very unique aircraft.
Created in the late 1980s as an unmanned, remote controlled reconnaissance test bed, it has a wing span of over 200 feet, which is longer than the first flight of the Wright brothers. Overall, the Condor's wingspan is even larger than both the Boeing 747 or the Boeing B-52 bomber as well as having an unprecedented level of flight duration of nearly 80 hours without being refueled. Constructed out of all-bonded carbon fiber composite materials, this gave the Condor a very light weight as well as a fairly low radar cross section despite it's immense size, it's propulsion method of piston prop engines also helped give it a very low heat signature as well.
A nice size comparison from theadvancingblade site.
The ground control stations and crews who operated it were able to pre-program the flight pattern of the aircraft on the ground, or remote control it via a system of satellite communications suites in the aircraft spine much like other UAVs today. Alternatively, they could launch the Condor with a pre-programmed flight, and cancel the programming mid-flight for it to be remote controlled on the ground at any time.
With two examples built by Boeing for testing, the Condor flew out of a facility at Moses Lake, Washington, and in that testing, it immediately began breaking aviation records of the time. It set an altitude record for a piston powered aircraft of 67,000 feet (compare that to the jet record of 123,523 feet) as well as setting another record in that it was the first to fly a fully automated flight from takeoff to landing, another record it set unofficially was an endurance record in 1988 by flying continuously for more than 50 hours. The test program flew 188 hours of test missions overall between the two airframes before it's end.
A closeup of the fuselage and antennae from Wikipedia.
According to the Boeing engineers, the program never was able to mature or achieve its full potential during the testing. They claimed either of the demonstrators could have flown more than 23,000 miles in a single mission, or remained airborne for longer than a week at a time, as well as potentially reach an altitude of 73,000 feet, if needed.
Ultimately, the project was cancelled in 1989, as there were no military customers, as they claimed it would be far too vulnerable to modern Anti-Aircraft weapons and detection systems, since it was not a fully stealth platform, and so cut the funding. The Boeing website for it maintains the Condor would have also had tremendous potential in the civilian market for weather monitoring and atmospheric research, but it did have an expensive and complicated system of logistics as well as launch and recovery compared to other aircraft. They still maintain that it was essential in laying the ground work for more advanced UAV designs that came later on.
I don't think I mentioned it here before, but I was big fan of Thief Simulator. It was a very low budget game, with some technical glitches, but was a great amount of fun. Frankly, whenever I'm playing any kind of open world RPG, I always start off by playing a sneak-thief of some kind and am not satisfied enough to try any other kind of build until I've literally stolen everything in the world. So it's nice to see a game just straight up cater to that and have everything built around it.
I would certainly highly recommend the game despite any flaws as it was great amounts of fun, but I had no idea that the creators had also come up with a prequel of sorts, called American Theft 80s. The premise is pretty self explanatory, with it being set in the USA during the 80s, and has all the retro aesthetics and sounds, but otherwise plays very similarly to the original game, but with a few more RPG elements, which is a welcome addition. So, I'm planning on snagging that one up and trying it out as soon as possible.
I LOVE me some good eldritch/Lovcraftian/cosmic horror, and was very pleased when the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park stuff became an internet sensation a little while back. Unfortunately, I never really posted that stuff here for some reason, and I figure it's about time I do so.
If you aren't familiar with it, a writer posted to reddit and tumbler a bunch of adverts, and brochures he made to look like official National Park Service and corporate promo material delving into a fictional and now-defunct National Park that allowed visitors to explore the inside of a subterranean unidentified super-organism that was inducted into the national park system in the 70s under Jimmy Carter (history's greatest monster) and is located in rural west Texas.
It has it's own website that you can peruse that has all sorts of snippets, articles, and illustrations about the origin, notable people, organizations, technology, biology, safety measures for exploring the park, and the story of it's ultimate demise. https://www.mysteryfleshpitnationalpark.com/
Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages (and if you go by some other pronoun, I don't really give a crap), we are gathered here today to mourn the passing of the GTA games into irrelevancy and worthlessness.
In case you aren't into gaming, or live under a rock, the entire GTA franchise is meant to be a hugely over the top parody of American culture, people, and locations that is supposed to be hugely sarcastic, nihilistic, and insulting to just about everyone. So when I see shit like this:
Where the makers of the game go out of their way to say that the new GTA entry is going to be far more "culturally sensitive", all I can think of is this:
And this:
So, Rockstar Games, you've already really tried hard at killing the culture and game with GTA V, the only crappy one in the series so far, with wallet raping micro-transactions and the most limited gameplay and features, all while insulting the fanbase.
Now you have sealed the deal with making your new game suck even more while giving the middle finger to not only the fans, but to the very point of the game, making it the complete opposite of what it's supposed to be, so I won't be buying it at all and go screw yourselves.
Now, the game isn't out yet, so I could be completely wrong, but with the trend set by GTA V, and the wokeness of other industries lately, I hold no hope for it at all.
Finally got around to watching the Netflix series Love, Death and Robots, which was meant from the get go to be a spiritual successor to the film Heavy Metal (that I have talked about before). Other than a reliance on computer animation, which I don't entirely blame them for, it's certainly a worthy successor.
The stories are all shot in various animation styles, and are anywhere from 7 to 17 minutes, and unlike the Heavy Metal movie, they don't have any story themes connected between them. It has a lot of dark humor, excellent horror with some great lovcraftian influences, a whole host of good sci-fi, and some even have a good moral story to them.
If you have a chance, go check it out, but if you can't or even if aren't interested in the series as a whole, I would still highly recommend the following episodes: "Pop Squad" is heavily inspired by blade runner and equilibrium, "All Through the House" is a standard Santa story, but a little more demented, "Night of the Mini Dead" is just one of the funnies things I have ever seen, "Kill Team Kill" is about spec ops soldiers confronted with an augmented grizzly bear made by the CIA gone wrong and is just as funny, and "In Vaulted Halls Entombed" is an excellent eldritch tale in the modern world, and "Lucky 13" is about a nugget pilot being given a cursed dropship. There are others that are great as well, but those are by far my favorite. In fact here's a low-res clip of the night of the Mini Dead:
I make no secret that I love the lore of the Warhammer 40K universe. However, Games Workshop is nothing less than a despicable company for a multitude of reasons, one of which being that they seem to love pushing out completely garbage low budget video games for the franchise as a whole. There have only been a few that I thought were good, those being: Dawn of War II, Battlefleet Gothic Armada, Space Hulk: Deathwing, and Space Marine. Even among those one, though, they still have the feel of being shoe-stringed nearly to death on their budget. Despite that, I am still looking forward to the release of Darktide and Space Marine 2.
Anyways, this post is really about Space Marine. The game is a third person shooter in which you play as an Ultramarine in a campaign against the Orks and the forces of Chaos. The game really nails the setting and gives you that over the top action-movie feeling right from the get go. My only complaint about the story is that I feel like the Ultramarines are really one of the more boring aspects of the lore compared to other chapters of Space Marines, and you can tell that they were a little self indulgent with some of the cut-scenes and they drag on far too long.
Sheer awesome.
Overall though, the game is absolutely great and has some excellent moments the especially funny ones being with the Ork boss. It's full of all the coolest weapons and has plenty of blood and guts to satisfy all. The game is usually on sale or even when not, is usually just straight up super cheap, and I would highly recommend it.
So there has been a rash of remastered/remade games lately, some blatantly not good like Rockstar's bullcrap classic GTA games remaster which actually made the games worse. But thankfully there are also some really good ones out there like the Destroy All Humans remaster, which I happened to like a lot.
First off, I haven't actually played the original games when they came out, so take everything with a grain of salt when comparing the two here, but from what I hear they didn't do anything to ruin or change the story, characters, setting, or overall story in any way from the original, so massive win there. Why is this so important, you ask? Well in this day and age when even video game developers aren't immune to the tides of woke bullcrap and try to include "the message" in everything, it's nice to a developer sick to it's guns and insist on retaining all it's political incorrectness that made the original characters and dialogue so good to begin with.
The game is really prized for it's excellent humor, and straight up leans into an insanely exaggerated late-50s little green men from mars setting and story that works so dang well. With all your favorite tropes to play an wreak havoc with like mind control, ESP, telekinesis, ray guns, jetpacks, gelatinous goop, and of course, flying saucers with tractor beams. My favorite aspect to the gameplay is that it feels like a more demented version of what an Invader Zim game would be like and it even features Billy West straight up doing the same voice as Zim for the character of your boss in the game!
Needless to say, I'm eager to get the remastered version of the sequel as well.
This one will be a bit longer than most of my posts on films, especially for a film that is known for being so short. It's also not really that forgotten, but rather, I don't think it is given the recognition for it's huge significance today and at the time.
Basically, during the great drought of Trek shows before the garbage that is Disco, but after the nu-Trek Jar-Jar films released, there was a small number of fan studios putting out some high-quality Trek content. In particular, a new one was just starting and released a preview for what was to be a full length feature in a faux-documentary style. Thankfully the full preview is still available on Youtube:
Why was this such a big deal, you ask? Well, first off, instead of trying to re-imagine the original series era of Trek, this one faithfully recreates it. The Jar-Jar Trek was required to be different and was way too heavy on the gloss and lens flares, making everything seem fake on screen. On the other hand, Axanar tried to feel more grounded in it's sets and effects, giving it a more gritty feel. Unlike Enterprise and the nu-trek shows, it also wasn't trying to re-tread old ground, but was trying to flesh out something that had never been told first-hand in the trek universe before. As well as being faithful to established trek, it was also respectful to it's audience.
Naturally, because of these things, it was getting much higher viewing numbers than the new show that released at the same time, Disco. It was also getting a lot more fan hype and enthusiasm surrounding it, and the entire internet was praising it while using to compare to Disco and how trash that show is.
So, naturally, because the boneheads in charge of CBS hate both Trek and it's fans, and have no business sense whatsoever, the lawyers started seeping out of the woodwork to swarm on Axanar like flies to a carcass. Because Axanar wasn't doing anything conceptually different than has been done with Trek fan-films in the past, CBS came up with new draconian restrictions on fan-films with the threat of legal action if it was breached, and handed cease and desist orders to the studio. That action had the affect of not only killing Axanar, but nearly all other trek fan projects going on at the time.
I look back at this now and realize my worst fears at the time were completely right in that this was the first big blow to the Trek fandom and was the beginning of the end for Trek in general. Now Star Trek is permanently dead, never to be born again.
The only place that Trek lives on is in a small community of the PC gaming sphere, despite the garbage that is Star Trek: Online. With the revival of many Trek PC games on GoG.com, and with the release of one of the greatest trek mods of all time, Armada III for Sins of a Solar Empire, there is a bit of a resurgence of classic trek fandom that lives on. Not only that, but little known to most people, there was to be a major mod project tie-in for Axanar at the time it released.
The same team behind the Armada III mod were asked to help make this tie in, and they started work on it even before the final version of Armada III was finished, calling it Axanar: Strategic Operations. However, because of the CBS actions, this project was quickly cancelled. But the same team still couldn't be kept down and now have a similar project to carry on the original spirit and setting now called: Ages of the Federation: The Four Years War. It is well into an early build release and it is still undergoing development with additional releases expected soon.
At the same time, the same team also announced a sequel to the mod that takes place purely between the Motion Picture and the TNG era, which is what I am most excited about, as it's my favorite era of visual style for Trek, but with not much exploring that time frame. So, all you real Star Trek fans who like stuff that isn't trash, go give 'em a look-see.
Let's be real, here. Trek is dead, Jim, and it's never coming back. There is no longer a katra to revive it and there is no real fandom left. Why? Because of the lack of gatekeeping of it's supposed fandom.
It's obvious that reddit is a cesspool of left wing leaning parasites spouting their dribble and it's host to all the worst people that are enabling the mutilation of all our favorite franchises in media and pop culture. In particular, all the subreddits about star trek seem to love to defend the this trashy nu-trek garbage like it the best thing since sliced bread and say that you are toxic if you are gatekeeping it to any degree.
I have no longer have anything nice to say about anyone who is a "fan" of the alleged trek shows like Disco, Picard, and now Strange New Worlds on reddit for this reason. I genuinely don't hold a hatred for many people at all (communists don't count as people), but I do loathe those bastards writing that garbage over at bad robot and the (I bet paid) shills for it over on reddit.
They constantly use the argument that people didn't like TNG when it came out, too, but that's now considered some of the best of trek. They fail to realize TNG had to get better, because it's first season's writing was so shoddy and that stuff still doesn't hold up for that reason. Discovery, Picard, and SNW, not only have lazy, shoddy writing, but is actively insulting, degrading, and mocking it's legacy characters, continuity, and people who actually enjoy legacy trek. It not only stays that way, but gets worse over time as they implement more nods and cameos from previous trek just so they can crap all over it. They have effectively killed Trek in pop culture, and I doubt it will ever be able to be revived at this point.
Though even the writer of this meme is kinda dumb because Trek has always pushed the boundaries of diversity on screen, so even that isn't a plus to the new series.
Say what you will about Voyager and Enterprise being not as consistently good as the rest of Trek, at least they try not to insult it's audience and what was established before (though Enterprise did try some really dumb retconns).
Sorry, but if someone says they are a fan of something, but then says it's problematic, that it needs to have woke garbage to become better, or says that it needs to be like a different genre, they are not a fan at all. They are a saboteur who is doing nothing but seeking to destroy your community and turn that something into a boring propaganda piece. So, if you think the legacy fans are "toxic", yes, we are toxic to those who are actively trying to destroy its legacy and our fandom, so go screw yourself. We hate you because you facilitated the destruction of Trek and it's community and it's purpose overall. Go perform the Hegh'bat, you cowards.
Fans of nu-trek have no honor.
Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who are all permanently dead, now. But there is a small glimmer of hope. I have stated I never cared for the works of Tolkien, but he is nothing less than prolific for good reason. It seems now that The Lord of the Rings is the last frontier of the war to preserve nerd culture. The woke are coming for it, and are trying to destroy it like they did the others, but the fans are fighting at the gates for it. Despite never being a fan of Lord of the Rings, to the true fans fighting for it not to be vandalized, I say, "Kill 'em all!"
But, I digress, as rants on the internet are like tears in the rain...
So, I love all the actually good Trek shows (ie. TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY) and movies (NOT the JJ movies), so being a huge trekkie, I love delving into the tech and lore of the universe to a ridiculous degree. Enter another fun youtuber I found called Venom Geek Media 98. He's got a lot of commentary and analysis on the various starship designs in trek and their use in the show. Another interesting thing he's doing is a series of videos detailing the evens of the Dominion War in chronological order kind of like the channel the Great War did with WWI. This is just the kind of nerdy crap I am totally into and will find very interesting, and if it's up your alley, give it a look see.
In other Trek news, I recommend going over to Scott's place at The Unwanted Blog for some serious bashing of the woke by pointing out stuff in Trek that would seriously ruffle their feathers. So go check it out. I actually wrote something similar myself about gatekeeping that I had scheduled for a couple weeks from now, but I may have to move it up a bit.
Big hat tip to Scott at the Unwanted Blog for posting about this one a while back, and I figure I'll forward the news along.
So the big news in nerd circles a couple weeks ago was the announcement of the Roddenberry Archive and the projects it announced. First, they stated they will be making full digital recreations of all of the Enterprise starships, including ones not seen on screen, all of which will include every room and prop in excruciating detail.
Next they announced a project to recreate the pilot episode of "The Cage" as a a full scale holodeck simulation, whatever that means. I assume that they mean a VR-style, fully 3d experience, but that's just a guess. But, they do include the famous Michael Okuda in the project as well as the original director of the episode as well. Below is a little video of the projects they are working on at the archive so far:
Now, as Scott pointed out, how the projects will be digested or distributed is a complete mystery to me at this point, and I don't know if they will be products to consume by the public at large, or just an internal thing, so we'll see how that pans out, I guess. Hopefully is is something that the average person can enjoy, as true Trek fans have been getting nothing but runny excrement with nutty chunks as official content for more than decade or so.
Minecraft is truly the game of the century, not for what it set out to achieve, but what it inadvertently has.
One of the greatest accomplishments achieved in the game is The Uncensored Library. It seeks to use the game as a medium for all banned media/news in countries with oppressive and restricted rights to an individual's speech and freedom of the press. In even the most restrictive countries, the game is still often available and can connect to servers hosted abroad to be accessed by anyone playing the game. It very well may be one of the greatest achievements a video game has made in the name of freedom for the oppressed.
Ah, Disney, you stupid morons. No, I'm not talking about their latest efforts aimed at making kids gay and grooming them for abuse ('ol Walt would want to kill these people if he were alive). No, I'm talking about when they actually just tried to make entertainment that wasn't trying to kill the souls of children.
Back in 70s, Disney wanted to make their own high-budget sci-fi movie and began making the movie The Back Hole. Unfortunately for us and for the movie, a little flick called Star Wars came out to unprecedented success for a sci-fi film, and subsequently shoved dollar signs into the studio heads and their meddling nearly (or according to some, actually) ruined the movie.
Some of the set design was just gorgeous
When you watch it, the movie immediately sets up an atmosphere of foreboding, creepy mystery with it's excellent theme song (I can't gush enough about it), then with the massive and empty, almost gothic looking starship which you later learn is run by an egomaniac. The movie has some fabulously beautiful scenes and really is at it's best when setting up and showing off the creepy tone and atmosphere and unsettling aspects of the story. It also features some really good actors of the time, and has perhaps the most controversial ending to any Disney film ever.
Sadly, Disney will be Disney, and as soon as the success of Star Wars was seen while in the middle of production, they immediately insisted the movie be more of a adventure film to emulate the success of Lucas' film. This translated to a wildly shifting tone in the film, going from ghost ship vibes to cutesy robots, then to zombified crewmembers, to more cutesy robot segments, to high adventure chase scenes, to literal hell. To say the tone is uneven would be an understatement.
One of the coolest effects shots in the movie.
Nobody I know really recognizes it as a great or even good film, but darn if it isn't memorable. Personally, I always loved this movie, despite all the imperfections and missteps. Not just for what it did do, but for what it wanted to do. To me, the movie seemed like it was really trying to be more of a horror movie in space before suddenly shifting in tone to a more adventure flick by the end. I honestly think that the movie Event Horizon (despite being far more extreme) had at least a little inspiration from this film, as they have a lot of similarities. I feel the movie just missed the mark by Disney trying to be like Star Wars while also fearing they would ruin their family-friendly reputation.
This is another movie I would actually love to see remade to fully embrace the horror sci-fi experience, and it seemed Disney was on track to do exactly that in 2009 when they announced the movie would be remade. However, the dumbassess at Disney announced in 2016 the remake script was "too dark for a Disney film" and then put it on hold. I guess I should have expected that from the douchebags who brought you the bull crap Star Wars sequel trilogy, screwed over the character of Boba Fett, and then blatantly try to groom kids by selling such gems like this to them:
Kill Disney. The company needs to go down already.
So, so many years ago I heard of a very small group of developers wanting to make a true spiritual successor to the Rainbow Six franchise. Some have since attempted this, and in my opinion failed miserably. Not to mention the actual Rainbow Six franchise, which not only become a non-tactical mainstream game, but also cowtows to the commie Chinese government censors.
So, what does that leave us? I already talked about Ready or Not, which aims to be more of a SWAT series spiritual successor, but has a few of the same vibes. But as for an actual, improved one for one experience, I think there is only one out there and it is called Ground Branch.
This being made by a very small team of devs, and they have been developing this game for nearly 15 years. They have had a number of things to delay them, including completely switching game engines, getting bought out by a publisher, and outsourcing and hiring other teams to make modules/components to the game.
A 747 map just like in Rogue Spear!
However, all the time seems to have paid off, as the game is available now as an early access title and despite being in a pre-alpha state, is coming together very nicely. No other game has given me quite the same feeling as the old R6 games, but this one delivers in spades. Heck, even some of the maps are near identical to some that were in Rogue Spear, along with some more inventive ones like the Bin Laden compound in Pakistan.
Very in depth customization for gear and weapons.
Personally, I don't recommend buying games in an early access state, so I would tell most people to wait until an official release to ensure you not only get a product, but that the one you get is both good and what is promised. However, if the current state of the game is is any indication of the future, things are looking really good. That, and if you are like me and just are comping at the bit for an experience like the old Rainbow games, even if in an unfinished state, then go sign up!
