Insert Coin Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out Insert Coin opens in virtual cinemas and on Alamo On Demand on November 25. [poilib element="accentDivider"] If you walked into an arcade in the '90s, you've played a Midway game. At that time, Midway was the "Sex Pistols of the gaming industry," rebellious pioneers delivering arcade games that were loud, weird, and unapologetically violent. This video game studio gave us the flaming basketballs of NBA Jam, the promise of a Pleasure Dome in Smash TV, and the spine-ripping finishing moves of Mortal Kombat. Now all this and much, much more are dutifully recounted in the behind-the-scenes documentary Insert Coin. Insert Coin begins in the '80s, when the arcade market had been flooded with "rip-offs" and "garbage." Gamers were hungry for something new and bold, and designer Eugene Jarvis was roaring to deliver. Onto a landscape littered with fantasy games, he unleashed NARC, an ultra-violent crime game with graphics that were much more realistic than the symbolic pixels of Pac-Man. When you blew a band of baddies to bits, you were rewarded with an explosion of flaming limbs. Players went crazy for it, and so began the rise of Midway. Over the course of the coming decades, a scrappy team of visionaries, misfits, and rebels made a fortune one quarter at a time by putting their wildest fantasies into arcades. Along the way, they pissed off parents, politicians, and the NBA, turning video games into the latest cultural battleground. Yet despite all this conflict, this doc is shockingly drained of drama. [ignvideo width=610 height=374 url=https://ift.tt/3fxTQmY] The story of Midway is told oral history-style, offering an array of talking-head interviews. Jarvis and former colleagues like programmer George Petro, art director Jack Haeger, and game designer Mark Turmell, step audiences through the highs and lows of Midway, including its beginnings as Williams Electronics and a messy merger that changed its name. Video game historians, journalists, and famous gamers -- like Ready Player One author Ernest Cline -- give cultural context to how these games hit or missed, sharing personal anecdotes and concise explainers on controversies the company faced. Altogether, they offer a steady stream of information about this game-changing era, including tasty trivia about T2's motion-capture models, the bowler-hatted hero in NBA Jam's lineup, and the cheeky origins of Sonya's finishing move. Unfortunately, the film's contents are let down by a crushing lack of showmanship. Director Joshua Tsui knows video games. He worked in the field for 20 years, directing franchises like Mortal Kombat, Fight Night, and Tony Hawk. His respect for Midway Games is clear in every frame of the film as he gives their makers plenty of space to tell their stories in their own words, even when those words come out in an awkward ramble. It might be this same reverence that keeps Tsui from pushing into the story's clear points of conflict. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=every-ign-mortal-kombat-game-review&captions=true"] The movie mentions how Terminator 2 drew national attention for its alleged glorifying of cop killing, how Mortal Kombat sparked a national debate about video game violence that went all the way to Congress, and how the bosses at Midway encouraged in-fighting and hostility among their employees, believing it made them more competitive in making their games the best. Yet, Tsui never digs into these issues to uncover how they impacted the workers or the work. Each is presented more like a bump in the road as opposed to a dynamic obstacle, which makes this journey a slog. Further hurting the movie's momentum, Tsui tells his tale in clunky chapters rather than a dramatic arc. Title cars like "Building A Smash," "Cinematic Ambitions," or "From Filler To Killer" proclaims a new topic is about to be presented, and the last issue is officially closed. It gives the film all the flow of a poorly curated YouTube playlist, as Tsui uses the devices as an easy out for a touchy topic. Thus, a clumsy version of "all publicity is good publicity" becomes the last word on the T2 dust-up, a conclusion that is neither informative nor entertaining. It's just frustrating and becomes increasingly so as each chapter lumbers into another with a similarly anti-climactic end. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=worst-reviewed-movies-of-2020&captions=true"]

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