My Un-Marvelous Experience of The Marvel Experience

Featuring all of your favorite heroes...and The Vision

Pretentiousness is a bitch.  Far more times than we've been able to keep count, we've been hit by promises of creative games and toys wherein the only limit is our imagination, films and books that take us on journeys and adventures instead of just informing us of them, candies and drinks that take us on hallucinogenic drug trips, and similar bold-faced lies, and we eventually get numb to it there.  Yet once in a while, something unfamiliar, presented as a novelty belonging to a bold new era of culture, regains the ability to pull people in only to underwhelm them.  In this era, where Marvel fandom is no longer the exclusive domain of stereotypical nerds, The Marvel Experience is just such a thing, and its general banality is only made worse in comparison to its over-the-top presentation.

For a particular poignant point on pretense, see this ad for the event's showing in my area:

This is blatant false advertising; at no point in the event did I get to become Captain America, or even an average schmuck holding his shield.  More on that later.  As to saving the world...oi; I know nobody even buys that, so I'll move on.  Here's a more descriptive, but still inflated ad for what the event actually is:

Here's the truth.  The Marvel Experience is essentially a technologically powered revival of the circus, with a Marvel paint job, except worse.  That's a loaded statement; I understand.  Circuses have a seedy reputation, of being bad for their animal performers, not even very good for their human performers, forcing a life of cramped quarters and restlessness, pawning suckers out of money at side attractions, scaring more children than they entertain with their clowns.  They've been losing ground to television, and now the Internet, and for many it's good riddance to bad rubbish.  Still, the kid in me loves his memories of when the Carson and Barnes Circus came to my crummy little podunk (that I lived in then) and made it a little less crummy.  The moment felt particularly unreal because the circus set up right on our Elementary School's soccer field, which meant that in Physical Education class, we jogged our usual laps around the unusual big top, then relished going back to our campus at night for the big show.

The Marvel Experience briefly revived those experiences with the over-the-top way it stoked our fandom at the gates, but when we got into its modernized version of the big top (it's a bunch of white dome structures), it soon dawned how empty it felt.  Ultimately, it was a collection of quaint-but-cheesy sets, serviceable-but-short films, really terrible video games and live actors, and a mediocre 3-D film and motion simulator ride.

Through the thick of it all is an increasingly transparent message of "You're special!"  From the moment you get through the front gates, you'll be constantly hearing about how S.H.I.E.L.D. has recruited you all to help Marvel's named superheroes save the world from a new, dire threat.  An early attraction right out there takes the form of photo booths where you can enter information and have a photo taken for your own personal ID badge.

Hrehehehehe!

A brief anecdote about those illustrations: This was held at the Del Mar Fairgrounds, and we were presented fliers for an upcoming horse show at the toll booth.  I had the amusing idea to hold the flier up to the camera in the ID station, as I thought it would be funny to make myself a S.H.I.E.L.D. badge with a horse portrait on it.  Sadly, I will never know how funny it actually is, because at the end of the event, I was disappointed to learn I needed to pay over ten dollars for the badge, and I had no intention of doing that.

A particularly odious thing about this attraction's pretense is that it mandated crowds be delayed from entering at a normal pace, so more pep talks could be delivered, either by employees (who were, in my judgement, more likely to have been locally contracted proles than a troupe traveling with the show) or characters in videos.  This kept us stopping where we were, first outside, and then in a lobby where we watched some videos...and then in another lobby where we watched some more videos.

The two lobbies are marked in the lower-right quadrant of the map.

The first video we watched was by Captain America, the second by Iron Man (with Pepper Potts coming in to snark it up), the third a collaboration between a generic female reporter, a thinly veiled expy of Stan Lee played by Stan Lee, and J. Jonah Jameson, and the fourth by the whole Avengers team, plus a feminine robot hostess who may or may not be original to this event, and who was, but-for no visible nipples or camel toe, essentially naked.

The "Recruit Staging Area" was beautifully-lit by color-changing spotlights, for absolutely no reason.

Captain America talks up the weaklings.

Is "Megan Fox the New York Reporter" the new TMNT film's main contribution to pop-culture?

"Hi there; Virginerds!  I'm hear to make you not regret spending your money on this!  (No promises.)"

The "Shield Mobile Command Center" was full of glowing machines that didn't do anything.

A bit more about these videos.  They weren't bad; in fact, we chuckled a lot in the right places, but what's weird is that they chose to go with a cartoony CGI approach.  In an event that promoted itself as immersive, wherein Marvel characters came to life and interacted with real people, that seems like a bizarre choice.  Anyway, we "learned" via these videos that the world was under threat by "Super Adaptoids", evil robots that could replicate the abilities of Marvel heroes, and that's why they needed us to come train with the heroes and defeat the Adaptoid menace.  With that briefing out of the way, we stepped into the most visually impressive part of the exhibit, to begin our "training".

Well, this is neat, but what the Hell is it?!

The "Recruit Training Center" (Yes; I'm putting all of the official location names in quotes) was a visual spectacle that looked like some bizarre cross between a casino, a video arcade, and a museum, and it actually did give a surreal sense of immersion.  I really love colorful, practical set design, something I think some action films have lost sight of in the CGI era, and it felt cool to be stepping inside one such set.  The centerpiece was a defeated Super Adaptoid encased in glass, with mirrors beneath the container creating the impression of a larger void.

Is that sky?  Is this supposed to be the Helicarrier we're on?

Unfortunately for me, the immersion ended abruptly, because I needed to pee since getting into the front gates, and so rushed for the restrooms as soon as I saw a sign, only to be greatly disappointed by them being anarchronistic peripheral.  You will note on the map pictured above that the restrooms were not included in the main dome, but down what appears to be a hall, but it was even worse; there was no hall.  All there was was a Marvel-themed sign, pointing out a door to restrooms outside of the event.

Cute?

Lame.

There were both outhouses and a trailer of regular, flush toilets, like this one here.

Back in the "Recruit Training Center", I dove into the various attractions, many of which were informational.  There were touch-screens we could touch to play videos about various superheroes, diagrams of Super Adaptoids and their abilities, and one exhibit that was literally just a collection of book covers.

I actually own a book collecting these.  "Blablabla transistors bla!"

Cox made an interactive exhibit of sifting virtual Adaptoid parts out of virtual dirt and reassembling them.  Weird.

There was one bit of the informational side of the event that I thought was pretty cool, and that was its collection of iconic Marvel props in display cases.  Iconic weapons and armor are cool to see treated like serious museum subjects, with informational plaques and all!  The closer one got, the faker they obviously looked, but I still have a soft spot for such prop design.

Hey; I think I've seen these at Toys 'R Us!

Sometime between last Thor movie and now, I guess they developed walls that could hold up Mjolnir.

Pictured: Not vibranium.

Marvel villains are a metrosexual lot.

Nick Fury's nerf gun.

The more interactive bits of the event were generally not good.  One exception was "Avengers Encounter", which let people stand in a televised spot and strike a pose, which would cause members of the Avengers to join them onscreen.  Much as in the other videos, they didn't look terribly realistic, but it was still cool to see, and easily my favorite part of the event.  I took a lot of pictures of it, some of which I am in.

 

That picture was taken while I stood in line for the Iron Man "Mark 47 Flight Training".  That brings us back to the bit about Captain America mentioned earlier; at no point does this event simulate you being Cap, but if these simulations were anything to go by, it may be a blessing in disguise, because they were abysmal.  You would think that a "game" simulating an Iron Man suit would at least let you lie on your stomach in the pose Iron Man usually flies forward in, but no; it's a bad Kinect-style affair where you just stand in front of a screen, leaning right and left to steer and raising your hand to shoot--and I do mean bad!  Perhaps because there was a huge variation in size of the people who played the booth, the camera didn't seem to work well at capturing leaning motions, and the shooting, though better, was delayed.  It hardly mattered, though, as all you had to do was shoot pieces of junk that came and hovered in front of you.

If you're disappointed you can't see any gameplay, don't be.  It sucked.

There was another bad simulation video game like that, which let people "be" the Hulk, meaning they could stand in a spot and punch oncoming objects.  This was more amusing, as I decided to put actual power into my punches as my workout for that day, but the docents didn't explain it well, so I never figured out how to punch lower targets.

I don't have a picture of that one, but speaking of somewhat physically exerting tasks, there was also a booth where you could wall-climb like Spider-Man...except not really.  It was two standard rock-climbing conveyor belts, plus one that had a ladder instead, and a screen up above showing a video of Spider-Man monitoring your progress--maybe.  I did it, and it was fun enough, but that's not really how Spider-Man does it, at all--he doesn't need to grab outcroppings; he just sticks to things.

One other "video game" was available to play in the "Recruit Training Center"; this was a lightgun game in a theater where people all got a gun and shot at Super Adaptoids on a screen.  I put "video game" in quotes there, because save for the numeric designations of our guns appearing on the screen when we aimed and fired, I don't think there was any actual effect on the outcome, although they did tally up scores afterward, somehow.

After that, I actually stood in line for the Avengers Encounter segment I had photographed a lot while standing in line for other things, which means I finally got photos with myself in the action.

Black Widow kicks me in the face.

Now Hulk punches me in the face.  This was the highlight of my evening here.

On the subject of attractions involving Black Widow, on that map is marked a "Black Widow Agility Maze", but I didn't see it here, so I don't know what happened.  Also, some may recognize that as a Marvel-themed shirt I'm wearing.  I've had it a long time, and don't tend to wear it much these days because it's got some holes that need fixing, but here it felt only right.

Having done all of the things in the central dome, I went into what was supposed to be a Quinnjet, but they did a terrible job at it.  The thing had no floors of its own; merely walls separating its interior from the rest of the dome.  In this was one more really bad video game, entitled "Villain Tracking", where you watched videos describing villains, after which you touched an interactive world map with "threats" displayed, and after clicking them, you'd decide how much of a force you would need to dispatch to take care of them, and then read the results.  That's it; that was the whole game.

Are you sure this thing is aerodynamic?

These stills are from a video with Maria Hill describing Red Skull.  By the way, Nazis are never mentioned.

The "cockpit" was just a picture behind a window.

The door on the other side of the "Quinnjet" led to the "Transfer Dome", where we were given kitchy little bracelets that most of us couldn't fasten on properly without each other's help. (Remember that.)  After some time there, we entered perhaps the most bizarre portion of the event; the "Simularium".  This was one of those dome-shaped theaters with screens surrounding people, such as exist in some museums, plus 3-D glasses.  Such venues do well for science documentaries, displaying long shots of such things as forests and the stars, but for this sort of video, it just was strange.  The movie involved superheroes attacking a Super Adaptoid base, and because of the perspective, they looked like giants, or maybe viewers just felt small.  The 3-D also was not very good, but it seemed to put a focus on making characters' butts stick out; including those of all the Super Adaptoids when they were shown.  So if your fantasy about meeting Marvel characters involved you shrinking and looking up at their asses...you know; I'm just assuming it didn't.  Anyway, the movie concluded with the revelation that Red Skull, Madame Hydra and MODOK were behind the Super Adaptoid invasion, and we then departed for the "Transport Cooridor".  Here, we watched a video by Spider-Man, explaining proper motion simulator etiquette, at one point hacked into by Red Skull.

The video ended with Skull's goons shooting at what was supposed to be the place we were, and jamming the door out, after which Hulk leapt into action onscreen to yank it open, and we then saw a cute practical effect of his big green hand receding into a curtained nook besides the door.  Through that door was the "Transport Hangar", ostensibly a sort of mini-helicarrier embedded in the domes, in reality a mediocre motion simulator ride.  The ride's footage was supposed to depict the event itself, as seen from the outside, but there was one problem; the surroundings of the event simply didn't match.  Ahead to the right in the video were a bunch of generic tall buildings, which simply don't exist in Del Mar; also the region seemed to be a desert, while Del Mar consists of many flood plains; hence the name.  A bunch of stuff flies across the screen, and then the villains board a massive mech and attack.  After the heroes swarm over it, they request people's help, asking them to hold up their hands wearing the bracelets received in the "Transfer Dome", which supposedly caused a bunch of laser beams to hit the big mech on screen, and blew it apart.

There.  That was the whole "We help save the world" bit the whole event was building towards.  Wow.

After that was the "S.H.I.E.L.D. Shop", with a generic inspirational Stan Lee plaque, a quite limited selection of merchandise, a spot for people who actually wanted to to buy their own S.H.I.E.L.D. IDs, and very unconvincing fake incarceration pods for Red Skull, Madame Hyrdra and MODOK.

"Well then; onto the next endorsement!"

Final thoughts?  In case it isn't clear already, The Marvel Experience is not good.  It is outright bad at many parts, in other places its simply not good enough given the alternatives, and the few truly good parts of it, like the set design (in some places) feel wasted on something like this.  I've heard the defense that "It's meant for kids, and the people who are young at heart" multiple times, but that badly underrates both groups and their tastes.  A slightly more apt description might be "n00bs"; those newcomers to the Marvel mythos who want a lively primer, but even there, so many better alternatives exist.  There are far better Marvel video games people can play, far better Marvel movies people can watch, actual Marvel books people can read instead of just little blurbs, and for people who like summaries that let them absorb many characters' histories in a shorter time than it would take to read the books, there's www.comicvine.com, which is free.  The Marvel Experience is to these things what a Magnadoodle is to paper, pencil, and crayons; a trumped up technological amalgamation whose ostentation distracts but fleetingly from the fact that it can't do its job as well as the cheaper, simpler alternatives.

It's sad, because the idea itself isn't without merit.  If they were more interested in noting their competition and finding out the sort of themed attractions that actually appeal to people, they could've made an experience as good as its concept, but here they just got too ambitious, and tried to do too much for too many in too little space and too little time with too little money, to do any of it right.  It's my hope that since Disney now owns Marvel, eventually we will get something better, preferably a sedentary Marvel theme park that's bigger, better, and broader (in its demographics).  For now, though, The Marvel Experience is a waste of time and money.  In fact, whatever the Marvel experience really is, it's not this.

Super Smash Bros and Fandom Betrayal

Head-to-Head uber alles?

            As a lifelong video game player, something I’ve become more familiar with than I hoped to is fandom betrayal.  Maybe that term sounds too pretentious to some readers, but I feel it is applicable enough sometimes.  Children, which most gamers started as, view video games as something made just for them, but as we age, we realize that they’re big business, and as the industry continues to grow, sometimes that means doing things the fans will regret.  “Fandom betrayal”, as I have termed it, refers to the times when a company decides that appealing to their core constituency is less important than branching out into greener pastures; to the point that alienating the former is apparently justified.

            Among the times I’ve felt the victim of fandom betrayal in the past was Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, which deliberately removed almost all of the characters Rareware had added to flesh out the iconic series during the days when they were an arm of Nintendo.  Then Rareware itself, now a subsidiary of Microsoft, released a new installment of its beloved Banjo-Kazooie series, which was, in fact, a completely different vehicle-based game reworked to contain Banjo characters.  The Sonic the Hedgehog series has gotten so diverse at times that it’s now a given that no group of its fans will be happy with everything it does, leaving Sonic Team to scramble to find an optimal playstyle for a time.  Finally, for many of Nintendo’s original fanbase, the Wii came off Nintendo abandoning them in favor of attracting an audience of non-gamers, though it later reconciled with its old base.  Now, I’m starting to get ominous vibes of this same effect from the new Smash Bros for the Wii U, and some people may not like what I have to say about why, but this point needs to be made.

           I have been an unashamed critic of the “Final-Destination-with-no-items” players of these games for quite a while now (some prefer the term, “competitive players”, but I do not accept this designation, for reasons I will get into soon), and I’ve mentioned my views once in a while, but I’ve mostly been easygoing about it.  We all have things we do and don’t enjoy, and so as long as these people and I avoid each other, we all have our own version of fun and everybody lives happily ever after.  The recent Nintendo Direct devoted to SmashBros, though, has me thinking these playstyles are coming to blows in a way that will fundamentally change the way the game plays—not necessarily for better and not necessarily for worse, but decisively change it nonetheless.

            The basic criticism I and many others have of the self-proclaimed “competitive” SSB players is that they are not playing the game as it was intended to be played.  From the very beginning, this was designed to be dissimilar to other fighting games; instead of just head-to-head bashes fueled by memorized button combinations, it was designed to incorporate platforming, and an item system based upon various parent series.  The attempts to play it as an ordinary fighting game, by taking out the items and platforming, are not in themselves offensive, but what is offensive is alleging that this makes the game more competitive.  That is essentially declaring a belief that the simple act of fighting is the only sort of competition that matters.  While I will be willing to grant that certain items; due to their random nature, break the ability to determine a victory by skill alone, the fact that items can all be individually turned on or off means there is no need to throw the diaper out with the baby.  As to the stages undermining competition, I can see no compelling arguments for that.  Learning to roll with the asymmetrical nature of items and terrain is supposed to be part of the competition; claiming the game is more competitive without those bits is akin to claiming that basketball would be more competitive if every player just stood in one place and tried to throw the ball into hoops; there’s nothing wrong with wanting to play that way and it certainly enhances certain skills, but the fact remains that it is not basketball as it was intended to be played; the skills that it tests and hones are not the only ones entailed in the actual sport.

           This oversight is a big part of why SSB characters are commonly seen by competitive players as unevenly distributed into “tiers”; ratings of how good or bad they are.  FDNI matches commonly feature many instances of the same few characters, while others don’t get much play at all.  While it’s likely that no game can be completely balanced, in large part the feeling of radical imbalance in SSB is because many characters were not designed to fight up close.  Somebody like Captain Falcon gets by pummeling and smashing his opponents hand-to-hand, but with run-and-gun characters like Fox and Pikachu, they’re supposed to be able to win by using their superior mobility to capture the better real estate.  That is in keeping with the inherently non-symmetrical intent of the game, and I’m glad practically everyone can have his or her unique moment in the limelight, whether or not the unintended misbehaving periphery demographic wants to see them.

            Until now.  I know some people will claim that the Nintendo Direct video demonstrates no preference for one demographic over the other, that it gives players two choices of online stranger games; “For Fun” Mode—Smash Bros as it was meant to be played—and “For Glory” Mode—FDNI games.  While that’s true, the fact that Sakurai is now addressing at all a crowd whose mindset is against the point of the series, is still annoying.  I understand he’s trying to recapture some of the support he lost when making too many changes to Brawl, but pendulums can swing too far between a rock and a hard place in either direction.  It’s not like he would have needed to do anything but maintain options screens and recreate Melee’s old mechanics with added characters to bring these guys back into the fold, but instead, he’s giving them an outright ego-pumping shout-out.  By separating quick online matches into two distinct styles, the new game is lending undue credence to the wretched myth that there is a specific type of stripped-down match that is competitive, and all others aren’t.  Now, at this point, some people may offer “don’t like; don’t play” or the like, and maybe this is all just superficial…but maybe it’s not, too.

            Remember my explanation of character imbalance, and why, to FDNI players, it seems worse than it really is?  So far throughout this series’ history, characters have been tweaked to excel in different niches and handle different problems in different ways, based on the assumption of SSB’s intended playstyle.  Now that they’re marketing at least partly to a new demographic with new tastes, it stands to reason that they will go in and rebalance the characters specifically so they have a more-or-less even aptitude for FDNI matches.  Unfortunately, because such matches are different from the more asymmetrical nature of the other sort, a balance in them could easily mean an imbalance in other places.  For example, a character judged to be great because in Final Destination, his or her projectile was harder to dodge, might stand as crap in some other places that give people more room to, where they didn’t think of giving her a way to compensate because they thought too much about forcing an alien playstyle to work.  The gist of this fear is that the original, intended fanbase, of which I’m a part, could get screwed over in favor of people who just barged in and were loud enough to convince Sakurai that Smash Bros was theirs for the judging.

            If this all sounds like nitpicking, I should mention that this is not the first gripe I have with this game.  Much earlier, Sakurai announced that he will not prioritize adding new characters as much this time around—when the characters were the original selling point of this series, that sounds incredibly dumb.  Sakurai speaks as if he thinks there is some ceiling to the enthusiasm people will have after a certain number of characters, but this just doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.  This series has such an incredible engine that it can make all kinds of characters work, and it continues to show its versatility as more and more traditional taboos erode to let more and more characters in.  Once a series dedicated to Nintendo All-Stars known to be able to fight, they now have welcomed in more obscure Nintendo characters, third-party stars, and Nintendo characters whose fighting abilities are at least partially fudged out of non-combat ones.  It works; loads of people think it’s awesome they can finally see Mario fight or team up with Sonic (and now Mega Man joins those ranks, too), as do they to see a soft-spoken yoga instructor knocking game heroes flying.  Sakurai adding or revealing even a few new characters debunks his own thesis that fans will stop getting excited for characters; provided the most unanimously interesting get the highest priority. 

This is the same man who told us those aren't the actual characters fighting; despite such being the whole draw of the series.  And the one who thought random tripping was a good idea.

 

            Worse still, apparently Sakurai’s given rationale for having a character ceiling is that he is now making a game both for the Wii U and the 3DS, and wants them both to have the same amount of characters—because the 3DS has less capacity than the Wii U, this is problem.  I can’t help but wonder if part of his motive is that many players simply don’t own a Wii U, but I do, and so once again, my interest is getting subverted to cater to someone else in a way that is really overkill.  I understand I may not be the majority and 3DS owners are, but on their end, there isn’t any sting from a roster that is presumably extensive by 3DS standards; only the appeal of having a handheld Smash Bros game at all.  Is jealousy of Wii U owners really a huge factor for any of them; to the extreme that it justifies a communistic leveling of the console game?

            Sakurai has also decided not to give this game an Adventure Mode.  That has been a fixture since Melee, and refined to almost its own game in Brawl—questionable mechanically, sure, but since we already know he’s looking into improving the mechanics from their unpopular state in Brawl, why is that a concern?  For a reason just as dumbfounding as the roster limits: According to Sakurai, because all of the cutscenes were leaked online, there’s no need to have an extensive adventure mode with cutscenes this time.  This attitude I find cynical to almost crybaby levels.  First, not everyone played The Subspace Emissary for the cutscenes (I’m reasonably sure nobody did so exclusively for them); many of us loved it because it was a lone beat-em-up starring Nintendo characters, and just because the cutscenes were leaked online doesn’t mean that all of us watched them there.  I waited to play the Subspace Emissary to watch them, and I’m glad I did.  Furthermore, though, the fact that the cutscenes were leaked online alludes to a simple fact: People like them.  They want to see these things, and now because some of them can’t wait, he’s decided to deprive all of us of more such things; along with the connected mode that can’t be as easily leaked online. (But piracy of whole games does occur, which by Sakurai’s own logic means a new SSB shouldn’t exist at all; yet more evidence his logic is deeply flawed.)

            Those sorts of things shaped my attitude watching the Nintendo Direct video, which, sadly, just reinforced its negativity.  I can’t be the only one unhappy that we got only one new character revealed in a video that long (or, for that matter, that we need to wait for Nintendo videos to see any new characters at all this time), and in addition to the new emphasis on FDNI matches, they’ve gotten rid of multi-characters, an aspect that had been in the series since Melee and, so far as I know, nobody ever minded.

            I don’t think this game will be bad, but it’s not going to be my ideal Smash Bros game, from what I can see, and it’s quite possible that, should this new take on the series catch on, I will never get my ideal Smash Bros game in the future, either.  Almost everywhere I look in this new game’s publicity, it’s abandoning a lot of what appealed to me from the very beginning of this series, in favor of doing things that appeal to someone else.  No; this isn’t a new feeling of resentment, but that doesn’t make it ache any less.