TRON: The games

[Felicia]

TRON and its sequel are strange, beautiful and flawed movies with wonderful music and breathtaking special effects. And since they're about computers and electronic games, naturally there's been games based on them. So here's a thread for talking about any game related to TRON. Yes, feel free to talk about Kingdom Hearts II if you want.

Right now, I want to talk about Space Paranoids, originally a fictional arcade game from the first movie, that was much later made into an actual game as part of the promotion for the second movie. The game could be played on a promotional website, but that site is now gone. Luckily, some fans managed to rescue the game, and it's possible to download it to play on your computer! And it's actually pretty great, in my opinion. It's a tense arcade FPS, where you have to drive around in a tank that is tricky to maneuver, looking for energy to charge your gun so you can shoot down the enemies that are constantly chasing after you. The constant droning of the Recognizers bearing down on you gives it a pretty, dare I say it, paranoid feeling.

 

[Felicia]

So I went ahead and made a thread about TRON and TRON-related media. But I think it's better to write about the games here.

I've recently played through TRON 2.0 for the first time. It's a pretty great FPS, though maybe a bit on the easy side, with the fact that you can upgrade your health and weapon power a great deal, including the weapon you start with that doesn't take any ammunition to fire. In fact, I played through most of the game only using the starting weapon (the Disc), both because it looks cool and because it's very effective against almost every enemy. Then again, I'm one of those weak souls who make frequent use of quicksave while playing FPS games, which makes me think that I'm not the right person to review the gameplay difficulty. Anyway, any gameplay weaknesses are more than made up for by the presentation, both the graphics and the music. The digital world is beautiful to look at (though not as visually distinct and different from the original movie as the designs in TRON: Legacy was), and often frightening when you enter dark realms of glowing green corrupted code. The music riffs on the classic TRON music, but with several new tunes and interesting electronic sounds.

The story is also pretty fun, since it's obviously written by computer nerds, with many missions and puzzles based on computer-related concepts such as the internet, hacking, viruses, etc., something that was sorely lacking in TRON: Legacy. I've played some other games by Monolith, and this game has their signature funny conversations between enemies when you sneak up on them, this time peppered with a huge amount of nerdy computer-related puns. There isn't really that much depth to the story that I could see, only hints of a rough father-son relationship that is resolved fairly easily, and an evil organization that is pretty close to Bond villains (fitting for a game from the company that made No One Lives Forever). Like many other TRON media, the story ends on a slight cliffhanger, suggesting a sequel that we will most likely never see.

 

[Felicia]

Disney has announced a new TRON game! And it's... a visual novel? Made by Mike Bithell, of Thomas Was Alone fame? Definitely did not see that coming. I can actually imagine that some TRON fans could be a little resentful that while stuff like Star Wars and the Marvel heroes get big flashy action games, good old TRON, a series well known for its arcade game themes and with several memorable action games is now getting a comparatively more sedate detective story (most likely with graphics mostly consisting of still images rather than exciting 3D animations). I mean, is it truly a TRON game if you can't drive a Light Cycle in some manner? On the other hand, I find the weird choice of genre really interesting, and I am interested to see what a story-focused game will do with the series' many weird concepts (the focus of the story and puzzle gameplay is apparently the Identity Discs, which has always been intriguing, but only briefly explored in TRON Legacy and Uprising).

Speaking of TRON Legacy, apparently the story of this game is based on events and characters from that film, which probably isn't very suprising, since there honestly isn't much other TRON media to build a story around, and it was the most recent incarnation of the franchise. What I'm really curious about is wheter this game will somehow tie into the supposedly in-the-works third movie, or if that film will be a... ahem, reboot.

The announcement might be a little underwhelming, but I'm still excited as a TRON fan to see the first new game in the franchise since 2016, and the first new story in any form since 2013.