Enter the world of Tron! [VIDEO]

Hands down, the best presentation of Comic-Con? Tron: Legacy, baby! I’m a big Tron nerd, so maybe I’m a bit biased, and the fact that Disney set up an accurate recreation of Flynn’s Arcade, equipped with playable arcade cabinets like Pac-Man, Joust, and Centipede certainly holds a helluva lot of geek sway. But that was just a warm up. The whole shebang was less like a show floor booth, and more like a theme park ride you’d pay admission for. So instead of letting it go to waste as one of those “Oh man, you had to be there!” moments, a rag tag team of myself and Tyler Wilde did our damndest to capture the feeling of getting sucked into ENCOM’s mainframe and emerging into a neon cocktail lounge. LOOK:

My love for the all things Tron runs deep (you don’t want to know how many times I revisited the Space Paranoids world in Kingdom Hearts II), so it shouldn’t be a shock that I’m also ridiculously excited about the new movie and both of the games it’s bringing in tow. Tron: Evolution is a gorgeous third-person prequel to the events of the film, showing off some impressive PS360 gameplay set in a more evolved mainframe, albeit undergoing a plague of digital corrosion.

Surprisingly, however, I found myself won over by the Wii version, Tron Evolution: Battle Grids. Set in 1988, it not only more accurately represents the ENCOM environments we’re all more familiar with, the focus on multiplayer Light Cycle events was exactly the thing my little brain has craved since my first viewing of the movie. During a series varied events, four players can mount the iconic rocket sleds in an attempt to crash opponents in a high stakes variation on the classic Snake.

More importantly, the Wii version has the 90-degree turns Tron’s digital playing field is best known for, and they make the blistering races unlike anything you’ve ever played (with the exception of the handful of you who played 2003’s Tron 2.0 on the PC). And while I completely sucked at the single mode I demoed, at least it wasn’t due to the controls. I’d say Jamie ran circles around me, but it was more like he used his Light Cycle’s ribbon to surround me in a unicursal maze, all while jumping over me pathetic traps. Next time… I’ll be ready.

Jul 26, 2010