The Four Color Media Monitor

A writer at the leftist Gizmodo wrote about a new computer game adaptation of Wolverine, which, perhaps unshockingly, appears to be another video game laced with jarring violence:

Last night Sony finally re-revealed Insomniac’s highly anticipated next step in the Marvel gaming universe: trading the high-flying webslinging of their Spider-Man games for a gore-soaked soiree into the realm of Marvel’s mutants for Wolverine. While we learned that this is certainly going to be a much more gory take on the studio’s trademark action, we also learned that Wolverine will be including a few familiar faces, factions, and locales from the comics, too.

Because that's all we need, and this is what's truly worthy of anticipation, huh? I don't think Wolverine's solo series from 1988 was ever that jarring, but in any event, this is another superfluous example of how gore has crowded out the entertainment market, and isn't doing a favor for it at all. This news report, oddly enough, does tell that:

Okay, this one might seem a bit obvious: most people know that Logan himself is from Canada, so it’s not too surprising that we’ll at least spend some of our time in Wolverine up in the chilly north of his homeland (a brief sign seen in the trailer points us more specifically around Squamish, in British Columbia). But what most comics readers may not be familiar with is the fact that the Canadian government has a pretty solid history in Marvel’s comics as being absolutely evil.

The Canadian government has long had branches to monitor and encourage official superhero activity, like Department H, the monitoring branch that operated the Canadian superteam Alpha Flight, but it’s also been repeatedly shown (especially during John Byrne’s legendary run on Alpha Flight) that Canada’s government is extremely corrupt and often up to no good, leading to its various heroes rebelling against the government’s machinations. There’s also the unfortunate bit that, perhaps more pertinent for Logan, where another shady department within the Canadian government, Department K, surreptitiously revived the Weapon X program after it had been shut down, conducting horrendous experimentation on subjects as it attempted to re-emulate the American government’s own plans to create the perfect supersoldier.

Seriously? I can't recall if that was truly the case, and I don't think it was in Alpha Flight, although Pierre Trudeau, who appeared at least once as an illustrated figure in Alpha Flight, was a communist sympathiser, and he even visited Cuba during the mid-1970s. But in all the Alpha stories I read to date, such history was never even so much as alluded to, so how can you say Byrne or even Bill Mantlo offered a seriously challenging look at the Canadian government in any incarnation? And it wouldn't be shocking if, in sharp contrast to what was published up to the late 90s, the more recent stories that may have alluded to figures like Justin Trudeau didn't present Canada's government in even a remotely negative light. If not, that just shows how badly the entertainment industry succumbed to PC, including communism. Government corruption may have been the case established in Wolverine's own stories, but I can't say the theme was explored that often elsewhere in the Marvel franchise back in the day.

Logan slices up a lot—a lot—of people in this debut trailer, and while many of them are spurting gallons of blood thanks to it, some of them are spurting gallons of blood and losing swanky cybernetic limbs along the way. Thanks to the Playstation Blog, we can presume that these cyborg mercenaries are the game’s take on the Reavers.

Nothing new under the sun, and "cybernetic limbs" is no excuse either. A case could be made that while Wolverine has had video game incarnations before, at least as far back as the early 90s, things have gone way too far since, and this new game is only compounding all that's gone wrong with modern video game productions, to say nothing of Marvel itself. Oh yes, and lest we forget DC has also suffered horribly from similar issues. One more reason why most video games based on their franchises are better forgotten too.

Labels: history, licensed products, marvel comics, msm propaganda, politics, technology, violence, X-Men