Mutiny of the Things for sure made me curious of what's inside, as it hardly provides any hint of what it will be. Things can, by definition, not be alive or even stage a mutiny. The intro, styled as a newspaper interview, tells me of our hero (Jack Flash) who plans to use his so-called Succ-O-Matic to literally suck the life out of these animated things again.
Though let's start from the beginning. A certain Prof. Dr. Eng. E. Eddison – also going by Evil Eddie – a mad scientist, has put life into everyday utilities when experimenting with energy generators: shoes, false teeth, pressing iron, pencils, snowmen, but also pumpkins, carrots, sunflowers and much more. All these things now want to found their independent city in the middle of this beautiful country. On a government mission, it is now Jack Flash's task to contain this out of control horde and destroy the energy generator in each level, which they need to survive. If everything else fails, he can also dissolve aggressive things into a cloud of ones. You may ask, why do they dissolve into ones? I assume this is an allusion to the digital origin of the objects, a kind of rematerialisation into zeros and ones. They went for a child-like motif. So there could be no blood or explosions. Which is why we get ones. In general, the graphical presentation is rather playful, almost cute and should appeal to kids. A couple of simple music tracks accompanying the entertaining jumping and running do the rest. However, each track is fairly short and therefore the melody will dig its way even into ears trained by screaming children until you won't be able to get rid of it anymore. Unfortunately, there is no way to individually control music and sound effects so that you will finally have no other option than to disable sound completely.
Nothing stolen, nothing gained. While the world was anxiously waiting for the next generation of the Micro Machines series, Ignition came out of nowhere and took pretty much exactly the same line. OK, strictly speaking, they're not toy cars, but you do drive unlikely vehicles across unlikely tracks.
So you're in a school bus (obviously, the coolest choice), plowing right through the jungle, the 'road' leads you right across the top of a pyramid and oops… a boulder dropped down from above and flattened you good. Oh well, no worries – you'll be up and running again in a moment, just that you've lost precious seconds against the competition. So, like Micro Machines, Ignition is good, light-hearted fun racing where you can shove, push or crash as many times as you like – if you think it will be to your advantage.
The "Retro" Money-Making Machine
Alas, good old nostalgia! What is better than idling in a slightly melancholic mood while pondering the past? Almost anything was better in the good old days: Colours were more intense, one-liners smarter and verb lists longer. We were content with the little things. Who needed more than peeps, pixels and bizzareness?
Nowadays you can turn those nostalgic feelings into hard cash. At least if you can offer some familiar faces from back then too, which keeps you from getting lost in that flood of Kickstarters. Of course Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick had no problems with that.
