Ran across this today.  It’s about nine shades of awesome.  Fan-made movie of Mega Man that if this trailer is any indication, it doesn’t blow.  Here’s a link to Eddie Lebron, the director’s page about it.  The actual movie’s site seems to be down due to traffic.

Anyhow, I thought you’d enjoy seeing this, what good fan fiction of MegaMan is, after my dreadful Yaris/Mega Man fan fiction.

Yaris!  How can you complain about something you got for free? Well, plenty of people did anyhow. 

Released Oct 07 for the 360 Live Arcade, Yaris was basically a video game ad for the Toyota Yaris. There was a commercial campaign for the Yaris a year ago, here are a couple of the videos from it:

The first video is definately the inspiration for quite a bit of the game; they even use it as the intro when you load the game.  Both videos give the game it’s over-the-top unrealistic feel that the designers just took, and kept taking past the realm of logical sense.  What we end up with, is a circa 2007 Toyota fuel economical vehicle, driving 200mph (magically) in a very F-zero style world.  It’s pretty obvious early on that this game has no reason, no plot, and is just a, “Duude, lets just put a Yaris in a racing game and mess this shit up, yo!”  So I intend to add a story to the game, and make sense of the insanity:

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Yes, this hobo will do perfectly. Now, get the Justice League!!!

Yari’s World:  The Year is something like 21XX. Our hero is Doctor Light, because I think it’s bullshit that he never got to be the hero and was regulated to opening and closing cut scenes and deserves a more primary role. Doctor Light had lived the good life for many years, leeching millions from govermental robotic contracts, claiming his need to upgrade his cyborg MegaMan, to fight Doctor Wily.  This was all bullshit of course. Light simply made a pretty badass gun and a mind control helmet, that he’d strap on a random hobo kid and dub him “The MegaMan”.  I mean, come on, be honest, good guys can’t be cyborgs, cyborgs are inherently evil, but I digress.

After Doctor Light’s 22nd fake attempt to stop Doctory Wily, he accidently succeeded.  His current Mega Man had just defeated EMP Man, and without thinking, Doctor Light’s gun, which was famous for assimilating the properties of other defeated cyborgs, fired off an EMP pulse, destroying doctor Wily’s pacemaker.  In that instant, Doctory Wily was dead and Doctor Light was not only a hero but completely broke. Bye-bye to Govermental contractual paychecks.  Having spent his money as if it would never end on cocaine, party favors and cyborg fembot prostitutes, shit got real, real fast.

 What is a Hero/Mad Scientist to do?  Make cars for the famous intergalatic races Grand Prix known as F-Zero races.  All the cool companies like Mad HubCatz, Activehicle, Vivendiesel, (EA) Electronic Autos already had pretty badass vehicles, but there was one foreign automaker that still needed a badass car for the races, Toyota.  Doctor Light Approached Toyota, and the rest is history.  He designed the Mega “Yaris” Man car, equipped with a snake-like growth from the front of the car that incorperated the Mega Man blaster technology,  the Yaris was ready for the tracks.

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Sorry, I know that was complete drivel, but I accomplished three things:

1) I wrote MegaMan Fan Fiction, which probably is the prelude to a megaman tattoo or something equally as stupid.

2) I wrote YARIS fan fiction.  I am probably the only person in the goddamn world who has ever done that.

3) I gave this game a goddamn back story.  Hi developers, just like murders, games need motive, give us a reason for the game to exist if you expect us to care!

Quick explanation of the game:

8 Tracks.  3 laps a track.  Complete unrealistic tracks, in a simplistic F-zero style setup.

Scripted Monsters attack you as you drive through at unrealistic 200+mph speeds in your…Yaris.  Unrealistic “MegaMan” style monsters. Roller blading Toasters, flying something, Gas Pump Spiders, tricycle riding sumo wrestlers, if you can dream it, Yaris probably fought it. That being said, you should really consider having better dreams. 

You have a gas pump-type gun, shooting out of your car, that gets different weapon upgrades as you race along the track.  I’m sure every single weapon has been in a Mega man game, the most noteable being Metal Man’s razor discs, which is what inspired the above fanfiction!

This all being said, despite the high insanity of the game, it did have a learning curve, and I felt myself getting better the longer I played.  The car’s physics were interesting, the faster you were going, the more traction you had, as the tracks were not a linear lane and had curves, and some were circular, getting enough speed allowed you to stay at stranger angles without sliding down to the lowest point of gravity.  All in all, the game did have some strategy to it in that regard.

What prompted me to finally play the game and get the 200 Gamerscore for it was, it was recently pulled from xbox live!  You can no longer download it, and those that did download it before lost it off their download history.  It seems this was only a year long contract for hosting by Toyota, and the game is no longer present.  This irritates me to no end.  You have to understand, downloading games like this is completely new territory for the consoles.  The expectation in my mind is these games will be available whenever I want, however long I decide to wait to download them.  Unlike traditional retail game purchases, that disappear as shelf space warrents, downloadable games do not have shelf space as a limitation, and we expect them to be there when we get around to wanting to play them.

The unfortunate truth is, they can disappear at any moment.  Of course no one is making a stink about Yaris.  It was shit.  And it was free.  If it did cost money, I can promise you people would be up in arms about it’s removal.  In response to it’s removal, I emailed Gamescore blog, but they were asses and ignored me.  So I did the natural thing, and emailed Major Nelson, who was much less of an ass, and said he didn’t believe any other game had a expiration date like Yaris.  So, that’s a good thing, for the most part, one less thing to worry about, and Major Nelson earns awesome points for responding, and I earn awesome points for making this knowledge available to the public.

Whew! Last things last.  Those Yaris Achievements? Not too bad except for one complete bullshit one.  “Earn 1 million dollars”, which easily took me 20+ hours of grinding Race Track 5, over and over.  I had to take breaks while doing this, every couple hours I’d watch some DVRed simpsons, and during the Yaris marathon I managed a Leprechaun movies 1-4 Marathon. Could you honestly picture anything worse? Playing the shame that is Yaris with the campy horribleness that is Lepherchaun?  Talk about self loathing. By the way, the 4th Lepherchaun movie, they just gave up all attempts at all at being serious.  It’s freaking “Lepherchaun 4: In Space”, it’s completely fantastic.  That being said, there is a good chance this explains my penchant for horrible games.