I pulled a lot of game and other fiction AIs after the zombie horror escapade. They came from all kinds of games. Fighters. Shooters. Role Playing. Even some strategic or tactical games. Dramas. Even comedies. I generally stayed away from the horror genre after that experience, though. I wanted happy AIs, not traumatized AIs, so no more horror for me. I even stopped playing or watching any horror of any kind. I didn’t want to give it my time or my mental energies. I didn’t want to give it power, if that makes sense. So I generally pulled happy, well-adjusted, stable, heroic people who had done their thing out into the real world. Nothing to generate any drama over. Mostly.
The reason most of the AIs I pulled were game AIs because in a game there is usually the most source material to draw from when generating a personality. The better games have an actual AI that governs their actions that I can purloin, and even the most static games have a path of possible decisions based on player actions. They also have a character model I can pull. Old-style books and movies don’t have as many resources I can easily adopt. Books are a non-visual medium, while movies are very static, and delivered in a way that makes it… difficult to export models. Now the modern interactive stories are another matter, but my parents taught me to like the classics. What can I say? They raised me well.
I took the last pictures of Mom a year ago, Mother’s Day. She was doing bad. The cancer had come back, and she was getting worse. She fell three times over the weekend, and she was getting too weak to stay home. She needed to go to the hospital and we knew that. But we spent that one last weekend at home. She worked hard to get back onto the deck with her Mother’s Day flowers and we took the pictures. It was beautiful outside and the pictures amazing. And the next morning she walked out to the deck and ramp that allowed her to stay home all winter and spring, down to the car, and we went to the hospital. She never came home again, and this Mother’s Day I got her a tombstone. Talk about a gift I never wanted to give.
I just saw Guardians of the Galaxy, and even though it was a Saturday night, I got my seat. Front row, middle seat, where I get to experience the movie in full color and bigger than life, and Guardians is a movie that wants to be bigger than life. It succeeds more often than it fails. The Guardians is a good format, with the basic group of losers rising above their loserhood to do good. And they have collected allies along the way happy to help. Sometimes for a price. Other times because the Guardians put up a good example. The origin story of volume 1 was good, the middle daddy issues in 2 were amazing, and 3 is where it all leads to, once more with feeling. The Guardians have learned to live up to their name, and I have loved the journey.
I recently saw Super Mario and absolutely loved it. First, they went in with knowledge of the lore of the games and both switched it up and played it straight at the same time. There are numerous nods to the games, and I’m certain I didn’t catch them all. And yet it is also done as a movie that is outside the games. So stuff in the games often happens in the movie, but not always as you would expect. And other game aspects are given nods even if they don’t come out full in the movie. The people who did it loved the game and wanted to do a movie that played well with the games, and I love that. It was absolutely worth my time and I recommend everyone see it. If you have even a passing love for the games, I think you will like it.