1/15/2014

Gamer Cinema: Reboot :The Series


This is a bit later than I expected due to me being varying levels of sick the last week or so, but I should be back to regular update for awhile at least now.

Anyways, Reboot seemed like good material given not only was it one of the first CG series, was very centrally themed around not only games, but the internet as well, and it's been recently announced that their would be a new Reboot series. The concept is pretty simple-The "Net" is  living place with cities and people representing various files and commands and even viruses. The "Users" (that's people like us) are harsh gods who seemingly randomly send games to various sectors, if we when, a sector gets decimated (that's right, when you win you are a murderer!). Luckily there are "Guardians" like the main hero Bob, whose mission it is to protect sectors, not only from incoming games but other various threats like the villainous viruses.

Now granted, someone coming into this show having never watched it will probably not get a good experience out of it. Though cutting edge for TV back in the mid-90s, Reboot's look is more akin to today's extremely low-budget cg kiddy fare. And all the internet-based lingo comes off as kind of lame. On top of that, the initial mission statement is that Bob intends to find out the motives of the user and that is NEVER addressed. The "games" are easily recognizable but somewhat clever riffs on either genres or specific series and some even spoof movies such as Evil Dead. The first two seasons are most filler (oh no, Megabyte is causing trouble again!) But then surprisingly in the last two seasons it goes into sort of a dark serial, with the younger characters suddenly aging and taking on more mature themes while trying to find Bob who was trapped in "The Web". It gets interesting enough to follow, but also leaves you with a cliffhanger that was apparently resolved in comic book form.

Ultimately Reboot is probably best looked back as a time capsule show. It's very 90s and will probably be at least somewhat fondly remembered by those who either watched the show back then or grew up in that decade. I think anyone else will just wonder what the big deal is.

That's all for today, I hopefully will have another post up sometime tomorrow or Friday as there has been plenty of news in the past couple of weeks that I haven't really touched on.

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