King's Quest VI - Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow (Real Review)

If you’ve read all the way through this review series you may have noticed I’m not as giving as most people expect with what’s generally considered one of the greatest of all adventure game franchises. Think of me what you will for that, and I’m sure you have. But this…this one was awesome.

In the course of rescuing his family from the evil wizard Mordack, King Graham befriended the beautiful Princess Cassima, who Mordack had enslaved. Some time after the ordeal, Prince Valiant Alexander finds himself unable to forget the dark-tressed maiden. Unfortunately her homeland of the Green Isles is so far away nobody in Daventry knows where it is. But like in every single even-numbered game in the series up to now, the plot device mirror strikes once again, and after seeing a vision of Cassima against the night sky he tries to sail there navigating via the stars he saw.

Eventually he does reach the Green Isles, but in the process finds out about the treacherous shoals that are why they get and send so few visitors. And on top of that, the kingdom isn’t so welcoming. Cassima’s parents died while she was Mordack’s captive, and none of the islands are talking to each other anymore under the rule of the vizier Abdul Alhazred. Again as Paw points out, this was the author of the Necronomicon, the authoritative book on black magic in Lovecraft’s stories. Hence, obviously evil. That and well, the fact that he’s a grand vizier.

Well, there was Quest for Glory II...

Since the game doesn’t give Alexander the option to go home (AND WHY SHOULD IT???) of course he starts poking his nose into the web of deceit and double-dealing the vizier’s woven in his quest for power.

Let’s get the presentational aspects out of the way. Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow looks at least as nice as Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder, but this is also the first game in the series where, to quote another review I saw of it once, I later looked back on it and didn’t think "I remember playing that" so much as "I remember being there." Like I wasn’t in a tiny microcosm with a diversity of improbable geographical features right next to each other. Like in, well, a videogame. Each of the Green Isles is vastly different from the others, but it works better than in previous games because, accordingly with the setting being a cluster of islands, each is contained in its own little space. You won’t be in front of a dark forest on one screen then two skareen lengths west you’ll be in a desert.

While this also means each area’s smaller than any given area in the previous game, each area also feels more alive. As if they concentrated more effort into each area rather than spreading themselves thinner over the whole game. The settings are more vibrant and the characters you meet feel more like actual characters instead of a font of potential clues or items once properly satisfied. The setting had become strong enough that for the first time in the series I didn’t feel like I was playing a game, I was on an adventure. 

Like in the last game, a version later came out that had full voices. As with the last game it has multiple characters assigned to each actor, but this time they went ahead and got actual professional actors. Like Robbie Benson, Townsend Coleman, Don Messick, Linda Gary of He-Man fame, and Tony Jay. Tony, truly the world is a darker place without you.

Even if all your good-guy roles I can think of are giant anthropomorphic animals...

In terms of features, the game introduces one that would’ve helped its predecessor but lost one of the good ideas the predecessor had. The voiced version gives you the option of having voiced dialogue or switching back to the original textboxes if you’d prefer. With that dialogue being provided by seasoned talent this time and as a result the number of stupid-sounding lines being down from the last game, I usually kept the voices on unless I was sending gifts to Cassima so I could listen to that “Girl in the Tower” song without somebody talking over it.

On the other hand, in Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder the game would tell you if you were about to watch a long cutscene and give you the option to skip it. Here that option’s gone, and there are a few times it’s sorely missed. The worst offender is when you go to the Isle of the Sacred Mountain and get to the top of the cliff. The winged people who live there arrest you, then because of some prophecy shove you in a trap-filled labyrinth until you save their princess (voiced by Russi Taylor??) from a minotaur.

This being an adventure game of the old school, you can’t back out once you’re in, meaning you’d better have everything you need before you climb the cliff. The rulers will give you a chance to get the stuff you need if you don't have it already, but the game gives you no hint of what you need, of course. When you come back, you'll be escorted to the maze, ready or not. If you haven't been diligently saving at milestones, you could end up stuck and having to repeat that lengthy cutscene again very easily. If not most or all of the game!

The biggest new future, though, is the game offers two different paths to victory. The idea of a single puzzle having more than one solution goes all the way back to the first game. In fact, back in the day Sierra was kind of notorious for giving you a direct if violent option but giving you a higher score if you could think of a gentler one. But this was the first time the game actually gave you more than one nice little set of goals to reach the victorious ending.

Ultimately your goal is of course to get into the palace and save the princess from the wicked Vizier. This is obvious from the minute you meet him. But about halfway through the game you have the option of sneaking into the palace right away, or questing for further advantages with the help of a little magic you pick up along the way. The second option can lead to you getting not just all the puzzle points but also a much more complete and satisfying ending depending on if you accomplished certain tasks and just how thoroughly you unraveled the villain’s schemes.

Honestly, until I was partway through the longer path I didn’t even know there was an easier way to win the game (Give me a break, only two screens into the game the key item's just sitting on the counter of a store. As soon as you touch it, the guy even gives you a quest where he'll trade it for another item. In an adventure game, that's the equivalent of a flashing neon sign saying "YOU NEED THIS".). And since I was playing the most satisfying game in the series, even at the tender age of twelve I didn’t want to cheat myself of the full experience. Originally I just thought because there was a spellbook in the game, you were supposed to use it; that’s what you had to do the last time you played this character.

As for puzzles, for the most part they’re not bad at all, especially compared to Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder’s. A few headscratchers seem inevitable, though. As I mentioned, in the longer path through the game you need to find a spellbook, but since you don’t have any money you need to find an equally rare book to trade for it instead. If you’re the type to play this kind of game you’re probably investigative enough to want to read the rare book before handing it over, but all the game calls attention to is one missing page and the fragments of the border pattern you can make out.

See though, the rare book is a book of riddles, and you can find a scrap of that missing page nearby. Specifically, the answer to the riddle. Later on in the game you do use the answer, but it feels really weird that the scrap of paper with the answer’s supposed to be a clue when nothing about the riddle itself is given by the book. You’re confronted with a riddle, and the piece of paper from a riddle book with an answer is supposed to be the answer, was apparently the thought process behind that whole puzzle. I can't help but notice that the novelized version of this game in The King's Quest Companion actually says the riddle was still in the book, and only the answer was missing.

If I have one big regret about this game it’s that the final showdown with the villain isn’t as satisfying as it was with Mordack, even getting to hear I’d accomplished everything to get the complete ending afterward. Still and all, this is without a doubt where the King’s Quest series peaked. Too bad that also means it’s all downhill from here.

But talking about what’s wrong with The Princeless Bride puts me in kind of an awkward position. For now, this is probably the end of the King’s Quest articles. I’m sure that sound was the internet’s heart breaking.

King’s Quest V – Absences Makes the Heart Go Yonder (Real Review)

Ah, the jump to point and click, where you explored the world of an adventure with a mouse and a list of verbs or icons instead of arrow keys and your uncertain command of touch typing. Although whether the stories and puzzles made any more sense is up for debate.

We rejoin the royal family of Daventry, finding King Graham hale and hearty after Rosella delivered the magical fruit after her own adventure. If they aren’t prepared to go looking for trouble, though, trouble’s happy to come find them. While Graham’s out on his morning walk the evil wizard Mordack makes the entire castle disappear. When Graham gets back all he finds is a bumbling talking owl who relates the story to the wayward monarch and provides him with a bit of magic dust to fly to the far-off land where the owl’s master lives in hope of securing some help.

The bozo can't even stay in his stupid tree while he's talking to you.

Unfortunately while Cedric’s master, Crispin, proves to be a wizard too, he’s pretty far past his prime and not much help against a baddie as powerful as Mordack. All he can do is give Graham a spell to talk to animals, one of his worn out magic wands, and the company of Cedric on Graham’s quest.

And there you are, left in the land of Serenia with no inventory, no clue why Mordack would have a beef with you and no plan for how you’re going to get to him and save your family. But there’s a menacing desert and forbidding forest nearby where it’d probably be a good place for an adventure game character to stick his nose looking for the means to take on evil wizards.

Once again the presentational aspects of the game are a huge leap forward from the previous. We’ve moved away from the 8-bits of old and into lush hand-drawn environs, and, assuming you had a proper sound system (which I never did on my first computer), the potential for actual sound effects. And later, actual voiced lines! Not very good actual voiced lines, but at the time the novelty made up for some of it. Unless you’d already played The Manhole to death like some of us…

In terms of actual gameplay, though, things really haven’t changed an awful lot. The tiny universes of the original games are still present, with a vast desert, an overgrown forest, and a town with a rushing river nearby all within about two minutes’ walk of each other. At least things have progressed to the point where they’re willing and able to show that Serenia’s inhabited, unlike Tamir, Kolyma and Daventry itself based on what we saw of it in the first game. Hey, maybe they couldn’t have had a graphic adventure with a full village in the first couple games, but they still could’ve had a screen with huts and the stock message that you can’t get in because everybody’s locked themselves in their houses because of the evil rampant in the land.

And for as vibrant as the new technology allowed the world to be, this is very much the “use everything on everything else to proceed” kind of adventure game that non-fans are always harping on. Most of the puzzles from earlier games may not have been great, but they usually made some basic amount of sense if you looked back on them, especially if you were up on your fairytales.

Personally I thought the game started out okay on the puzzle front. Giving a bear a fish and a dog a stick were pretty obvious. The stuff in the desert was pretty much just a matter of finding all the major areas and piecing together the relevant information. Even if it was kind of tedious and involved lots of dying to make a complete map. But after getting to talk the fortune teller and finding out why Mordack would wanna start something with you, things got weird.

Because it’s about then that you’re likely to find a cat running past you trying to catch a mouse. Unless you throw an old shoe at the cat (which you’ll have to have exhaustively explored the desert to find), it’ll catch the mouse, which won’t be grateful to you and won’t save you when a bunch of cutthroats kidnap you and tie you up in a basement.

Looking back I can see why I’d be expected to save a mouse from a cat. The hero helping the powerless is a typical theme. But you’re expected to process all this, think of throwing that shoe, and then take action all in a split second. The game doesn’t do much to let you know you did anything wrong if the mouse is caught, either. Nothing like, “Graham hears the mouse’s dying screams in words he understands thanks to Crispin’s spell. He stands there dumbfounded as the cat trots away with its catch, realizing what he allowed to take place.” Just the cat catches the mouse and leaves.

Not all of us were Tom and Jerry fans, and there are those among us who hear the word "mangy" used to describe a cat, and feel the sympathy toward the cat. Like me. I hate Tom and Jerry! I never thought Jerry deserved to win because he was a cute little mouse.

It goes on. To escape the witch’s forest you have to catch an elf to show you the way out, and the way you do so is rather inane. How you finally clear the path the snake’s blocking. And through all of it you get to listen to Cedric tell you over and over how he’s not dumb enough to into that forest and how certain your demise is if you do…anything, really.

But not everything about this game is ridiculous or irritating. I feel like I should probably respond to a couple big knocks I keep seeing people (well, okay, Paw) make against this game that I didn’t experience when I played it.

I had no idea so many of Graham's old quests involved some serious shredding.

Number one, late into the game you’re expected to kill a yeti. By throwing a pie in his face, which makes the cumbersome beast stumble off a cliff. See, I grew up on a steady diet of slapstick comedies, and from those you learn that in a fictional setting a pie’s primary use is to slam it in somebody's face. Period. Anything else, like food, is secondary. The only difficulty I had with the pie was looking for a situation where throwing it would solve a problem instead of creating more. And really, when you’re starving in the mountains and you have the choice between a custard pie and a piece of mutton like you should if you searched thoroughly, are you going to think you’re supposed to eat the junk food??

Oh but that doesn’t count, someone protests. Devon Aidendale might have heard of the Three Stooges, but not King Graham! And I agree, in the best case the puzzles will be solved with knowledge your character would reasonably have. Seriously though, is metagaming really anything new for King’s Quest? As I said, not a few puzzles are predicated on stuff like the player’s knowledge of fairytales or info you’d only reasonably get by dying and reloading. And honestly, is hitting someone with a pie anywhere near as unintuitive as that snake-bridle thing back in the second game? Or hell, some of the other puzzles in this game? Like what you’re supposed to do to make nice with Dink or Icebella, or the thing with Mordack’s wand. I agree with “Sierra logic” for plenty of things in this game, but the pie one? No. You have my pity, Paw, for all the laughs you obviously missed out on.

Hey Mister Tambourine Monster...

Number two, and worse in the minds of many players, there’s…Cedric. The whiny, annoying, useless scaredy-owl sidekick with the grating voice. He almost always refuses to follow you into danger, and even when he does you just end up having to save his stupid feathery ass anyway. Again, my childhood. I grew up being taught a sidekick’s role in life is to fail to be funny and create bad situations for the hero to resolve. Orko, Snarf and the Wonder Twins had prepared me well, and while sure Cedric was annoying, he was nothing unexpected either. I never felt less like playing the game knowing he’d be there or found myself wishing death on the people responsible for that blight on the realm of point-and-click gaming. At least unlike the elves in The Malifestro Quest, who the book tried to present as actual companions instead of the annoying comic relief they were, saving Cedric or having to face danger on my own made me feel a little more validated as a hero when I came out the end of a quest line. Besides, when he finally does something helpful, it’s exactly what you’d hope somebody you hate would: he takes a bullet for Graham.

About his voice, yeah that was really unprofessional-sounding and often aggravating. But so was everyone else’s. That’s what happens when you get the cheapest voice talent available, including people around the office. Roberta Williams herself did a few voices, and I’d never heard of the rest of the cast.

Okay, I lied. I heard of Lori Ann Cole. Because she's the co-creator of another legendary game series.

 

Smaller points in respect to Paw’s review. Graham can’t break the spell on his castle despite just winning a magical duel because he knows dick-all about magic; those four spells he used to beat Mordack are the only ones he knows. And Crispin only shows up after you’ve already beaten Mordack. Where the heck was that guy? Well gee dude, maybe if you went back into his house you’d hear him tell you the people of a neighboring kingdom are already expecting him to come help with an emergency over there. What’s he going to do, tell them to screw off because the famed King Graham, previously the finest knight in the kingdom of Daventry who’s bested many an evildoer and trounced many a harrowing quest (not to mention whose children overthrew the tyrants of Llewdor and Tamir) needs the help of a broken-down old wizard? He was thinking of you and your rep, dude.

Nice of Mermaid Man to let Graham borrow the invisible boatmobile.

If you can put up with the game’s foibles long enough to actually get into Mordack’s castle it’s an appropriately creepy and moody place where death is around every corridor. And unlike previous games, you take the villain on in a direct contest of wits and magic to cap things off. No trickery and avoiding direct conflict, just good old good vs. evil. I went head-to-head with the evil wizard and I beat him. The victory was way more my own than sneaking a stupid cursed cookie into his porridge or shooting him in his sleep.

Didn't notice the squirming, mewling back in the corner? How much evil was Mordack up to just now?

Basically this game’s a retread of The Perils of Rosella: a step forward in terms of making use of its presentation options, but not so much the gameplay ones. At the very least they’d learned a couple things about improving the player’s satisfaction at the end of the exercise. That’s probably worth forgiving a few stupid puzzles. A few.

Loonatics Unleashed - Acmegeddon: Part Two (Snark)

Last time on Loonatics Unleashed, a new uber-villain with about the worst possible choice for a voice actor freed some of the Loonatics’ old enemies to plant some kind of device in their headquarters for no adequately explained reason. When the villains failed he sucked them back to his headquarters with Daffy tagging along for the ride. Then Zadavia showed up to explain how the new villain is…her brother!!

“My brother will exterminate anyone close me.” We’re going to find out something about her that makes that sound kind of dickish of her, not that Zadavia wasn’t pretty dickish anyway. But for the moment, also consider “If we do not act soon, Acmetropolis will be destroyed.” Everyone on the entire planet’s close to her, then?

After the theme song it almost sounds like Bugs is finally doing a little something to call Zadavia out on all her mysterious bitchy behavior throughout the season as he asks, “So chief, you gonna spill the beans or do we wait for Duck to end up as your brother’s main course?”

She does indeed answer, explaining she’s from the planet Freleng (get it?). She and Optimatus were born into the royal family, but Optimatus was…not very nice. Which nobody found out until the day he was a young man and announced to some kind of council or other that he wanted them to help him take over the universe. His megalomaniacal tendencies seem like something that would’ve come up before. I don’t care if you like this show, there's not much in the way of shades of gray.

When the council refused to back him, his (of course) robotic minions took them hostage and Optimatus installed himself as dictator of Freleng. Fearing his pacifistic sister would plot against him, he tried to capture her too, but she easily fought off his stupid robots and slightly less easily Optimatus himself with rainbow lasers from her hands. Because she has quite a bit in the way of superpowers herself, it turns out. Ultimately she fled Freleng in a spaceship. Optimatus was “accidentally” caught in the thrust as the ship blasted off, explaining his mildly mangled features.

She fled to Acmetropolis. “I thought I left no trace for him to follow. I was wrong. Somehow, my brother found me.” He was the one who tossed the meteor at Acmetropolis that gave everybody their powers, you see. It was her intervention, via some really big rainbow cannons, that prevented an apocalypse and just resulted in the show as we know it.

Let’s think a little about how, by Zadavia’s own admission, she just left Freleng under Optimatus’s absolute rule. No mention of all the other planets in the universe he intended to conquer she left to fend for themselves. No mention either of her intending to gather allies and go back. Zadavia came to Acmetropolis to hide out from her brother and that’s it. The creation of the Loonatics was a nothing but a happy accident. Ain’t Zadavia great?

But here’s what I really don’t get. If Zadavia had such great powers at her disposal, and Optimatus already knew she was there because he tried to destroy the planet with the meteor that empowered everybody…why has she been hiding behind the Loonatics all this time? What did operating at a remove achieve? At least say she was trying to get them ready to take them back to Freleng and overthrow Optimatus with her. I’m sorry, I just don’t get that. I get instead that she was too chicken to do anything but run and hide, and had a convenient excuse to keep doing so when there was a superhero team to do the dirty work for her. Until Optimatus finally decided to stop fooling around and get directly involved, anyway.

Hell, think back to The Comet Cometh, where Wile E. had to build the team a ship so they’d have a way to get to the asteroid that was about to pulp the planet. He mentions that now and the upgrades he’d have to install to get to that volcanic asteroid thing (where Zadavia detected his presence). She tells him no need, they can just go in her ship. And she made Wile E. build a spaceship from scratch when her new home was facing meteoric annihilation for the second time, because of her presence, which she damn well knows was why, because…??

He probably meant it as a joke, but I found it a little gratifying when Bugs looks at the ship and quips, “You been holding out on us.”

On the asteroid Optimatus berates the villains again and has one of his robot troopers take Daffy away. Because there’s no reason to just kill him and have it over with. Other than the writing sucking like I just described…

As the Loonatics speed to the rescue, Wile E. finds a gizmo that looks just like the chip the villains used on the Loonatics computers (which was supposed to do what, again?). Zadavia explains that her planet’s technology is universal and can be used to control any kind of technology. It makes even less sense than the problem it's used to resolve.

Oh, and Bugs, who was already driving, doesn’t ask how the controls actually work until they’re halfway there. *Whimpers*

Remember how I asked why Zadavia made the Loonatics do all the work when she had so much power of her own? Optimatus calls them and sends a taunting message that they’re about to meet their doom, then launches some really stupid-looking attack ships to shoot them down. When the Loonatics start to get overwhelmed Zadavia herself flies out of the ship and blasts the bogeys or throws them into each other with her own powers.

She does get zapped and starts to get dragged away by one ship, but that’s probably because Bugs distracted her by telling her it wasn’t a good time “to go for a stroll.” Taking a page from his beloved leader’s book, Bugs tells the other Loonatics to get out there and save their boss. He does promise to cover them, but he wasn’t handling the weapons very well, and that really was the whole reason Zadavia had to go out there…

The other Loonatics fly out in some stupid-looking jet-equipped spacesuits that were no doubt figure variants for the toy line this show mercifully didn’t rate. They’re able to take out a few ships (but not save Zadavia), but then their ship is shot down with Bugs still inside. They’re all torn up inside at the demise of their leader…for about two seconds before he reveals he got out in time. Lexi hugs him with relief, and maybe that’s supposed to be an indication of a romantic subplot, but…neither of them have personalities and the writers have put no emphasis on their personal lives and I don’t care.

We then cut to Daffy in the hoosegow, and get an idea of just how the show overinflates Bugs’s greatness. See, Daffy escapes by tricking the robot into giving him a glass of water, then throwing it on the robot while it touches the electrified bars, shorting them both out. As hard as it wants me to believe otherwise, this show's version of Bugs simply can't come up with a plan that doesn't culminate in him shooting lasers out of his eyes.

Optimatus has his sister brought in to watch as he destroys Acmetropolis. The villains protest because he promised to let them rule it. Massive’s actually the one to point this out, even though he was the one who thought Optimatus might just be using them. Besides, they failed to live up to their end, ergo their reward is forfeit. The villains ought to be glad Optimatus thought enough of their potential usefulness to let them live at all…except for how they’re villains.

They attack him, but are easily overwhelmed. And Massive calls him a “one-eyed Cyclops.” From that line alone, I can’t imagine how Warner Brothers thought there was a chance to save this show.

Clash of the Third Rate Villains.

Daffy sneaks in and takes his powers back from the unconscious Sypher just before Optimatus gates his former accomplices back to Acmetropolis to await its demise. Daffy gets in Optimatus’s face to stop him from getting doomsday started, and wreaks havoc on the villain’s robot forces with their stupidity and his ability to teleport out of the way when two of them shoot at him from opposite sides. I don’t know if the show’s more down on him than it has any right to be or the villains just suck.


Then again, the robot who brought Daffy his water seriously did have a slice of lemon to go with it when he asked for one. I wept for the fact that I was supposed to see them challenge the heroes, but I will admit to being a bit amused. See? I can even compliment this show when it earns it.

He keeps the stupid robots busy long enough for the rest of the Loonatics to get there, and then Zadavia and Optimatus themselves grapple in a struggle for supremacy that’s about as pulse-pounding as the one between Edward Cullen and Victoria, with all the stupid rainbows flying around.

While this goes on our idiot heroes tries to stop Optimatus’s new plan to destroy Acmetropolis (why does he even care if his hated sister is right there in his lair along with her protégés, surrounded by his army?). This one using a giant wormhole to send Acmetropolis to “some kind of cosmic meat locker.” Because outer space isn’t cold anyway. By the way, Optimatus never said that on-screen. Maybe the script did say that. Maybe it even explained that the chip he gave his flunkies to install in Loonatics HQ was necessary for that part of his plan. But neither made it into the show.

Unfortunately Wile E.’s too unfamiliar with Freleng’s technology to stop it. But then he remembers the chip Zadavia told him about that can be used to run anything, like Optimatus's computer. But the chip's still an example of that planet’s technology, and he presumably still has to program it to make the computer do what he wants, so I fail to see how we’ve moved from our starting point at all.

But it does let him stop the doomsday weapon, and honestly I’d rather they not try to get scientific. My head hurts enough already. The Loonatics keep the robots busy while Wile E. tinkers with the doomsday machine. And remember what I said about Zadavia hiding behind the Loonatics when she has so much personal power? Yeah, she wins the fight with Optimatus.

The “good guys” get away, Optimatus gets sucked into his own wormhole into “some cold, remote part of the universe.” And Optimatus is indeed shivering in front of a pathetic little campfire in the ruins of his command center. Look, Loonatics writers? I already know you guys aren’t very good, but space is cold. By default. There’s no reason for any part of space to be colder than any other if they’re equally distant from stars. And I suck at science. And I'm only bringing it up because they did.

Back on Acmetropolis everyone starts to realize the world isn’t about to end after all, including the villains. They figure the Loonatics probably sacrificed themselves to stop Optimatus and nobody’s left who can stop them from taking over the world. Even though they didn’t trust each other even when they were working for him. What’s to keep them honest now? They are freaking villains.

As usual it doesn’t matter because we know the Loonatics aren’t dead. They appear and rush to battle their lesser foes as things fade to end credits.

And that, my friends, is Loonatics Unleashed season one with the just plain lame episodes omitted. I don’t know about you, but I can sure tell this was a redesign slapped together in a hurry by people trying to develop a concept that was fundamentally unworkable in the first place. When the first version got smacked down hard, it seems they decided to play it as safe as a comic book-type cartoon as humanly possible. No characterization, no world-building, minimal explanations, an absolutely pathetic attempt at an underlying plot, and no effort made at all on the freaking jokes.

I know I’ve said multiple times I don’t usually take behind-the-scenes factors into account when I make my observations in these reviews, and I meant that. But I’d be interested in hearing what executive decisions took place after the change from the original “scary” version to the bland finished product. It doesn’t feel like a superhero show or a Looney Tunes vehicle, and barely feels like the latter even in the second season. It just happens to have more familiar faces than the main characters by then.

If anything, the first season’s many failings probably came from a tight deadline and the desperate push to salvage the show after the much worse original concept was thankfully dropped. But failings are failings no matter their source, and this was one of the lamest excuses for a climax I’ve ever seen. Technically Breaking Dawn's is worse, but after three books of nothing there was no possible way for me to be let down.

Did the show get better after this? Yes. A little. But was it doomed from the start? Yes. A lot.

The DVD set came without much in the way of bonus features, mainly the option to watch all the trailers again, but also a very dumb Dragon’s Lair-style game where you use the direction buttons on your remote to shoot down meteors. If you fail the Loonatics are annihilated in a blast visible from orbit.

I lost a good couple times before I got bored, let me tell you, buddy.