I've been wanting to ask this to the community forever: of the Quest for Glory games, which is your favorite, or how would you rank the games' fighting system?

My ranking:

1. QfG2: Trial by Fire
2. The rest of them 😜
   1. Kidding aside, maybe next would be: Qfg1: So You Want to be A Hero (A big part of me still wants to call this Hero's Quest) (btw, I'm only considering the EGA version just because I played it so much more than the VGA remake, so I don't remember the latter much)
   2. QfG4: Shadows of Darkness
   3. QfG3: Wages of War
   4. QfG5: Dragon Fire

Quest for Glory 2: Trial By Fire

Ah-hoo, werewolves of London...Ah-hoo!

For me, the combat system in Trial by Fire was simply perfection.

Movement was quick and responsive, and it expanded on QfG1's rudimentary combat system with a system that was quickly intuitive: the 9 keys on the numeric keypad mapping to 3 variations each of attack, parry, and dodge.

After coming off QfG1, where the response to your attack/parry/dodge keypress, was sluggish, this combat system was, gratifyingly, instantly responsive. And the variation to each movement type gave me a much-appreciated feeling of finer-grained control of the specific movement I wanted executed.

To me, this was, by far, the high point of combat mechanics in the QfG series.

Quest for Glory 1: So You Want to be A Hero

A hyper-realistic simulation of trying to get one's cat to take a bath

I went back-and-forth a bit, as I wrote this post, whether to place QfG1's or QfG4's combat system in the #2 spot. Finally, I decided, this is a personal preference list, not meant to be any kind of analytical take on the issue, so I gave it to QfG1's combat system. That choice might be mostly nostalgia. This great game was the first in the great series, and set the precedent for me, that action can coexist with traditional adventure game mechanics.

But objectively, I found the combat system overly simplistic, limited to an attack where it was never clear whether you could intentionally pick between a strong attack and a quick attack: sometimes an attack looked like a "quick" thrust, and other times it looked like a "deep" lunge, but I could never make a 100% correlation to my actual keystroke. And you were limited to rudimentary side-to-side and backward dodges (or raising a shield if you had one). Also, I found the response to keypresses to be quite sluggish.

So overall: the combat system was primitive. Perhaps intentionally so because Sierra was hesitant whether their "traditional" clientele would accept a more "action-y" combat system?

Quest for Glory 4: Shadows of Darkness

Eh...what's up, Doc?

The very first time I experienced the QfG4 combat system, I didn't like it because I thought it was too "action-y." It's obvious that this combat system's inspiration was games like Mortal Kombat, maybe Street Fighter, etc. I will confess: another reason -- a completely stupid reason -- I originally didn't like the QfG4 combat system was because the first enemy I encountered was the Vorpal Bunny, and at the time, the horror/comedy tone they were going for just didn't vibe with me. When I encountered a bunny as an enemy combatant, I just felt like they weren't taking things seriously, and that tonal shift from the prior games -- which were "self-serious" as far as enemy combatants -- was jarring to me at the time.

But I was young and naive. With the benefit of age and hindsight, my appreciation of QfG4 in general, including its combat system, has increased. I appreciate that the fighting mechanics were responsive. And in the same vein that all "action-y" fighting games stealthily sneak in elements of strategy and timing, so too did QfG4's. Not to mention, the game offers a modicum of "variety" of attacks (you can control the strength of your attacks, including magical attacks by holding down your keypress/click). It's obvious that the inspiration for this combat system was games like Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, and that

But I seem to recall the actual execution of this combat system was lacking: I seem to recall issues with the speed of certain enemies, relative to a human's ability to react, being out-of-balance. Perhaps this was an issue addressed in later patches -- QfG4 was notoriously buggy on its first release -- but that was the lasting impression the game has left on me.

Quest for Glory 3: Wages of War

That dinosaur is yawning

Mostly, I just thought this combat system was dull.

I wish I could flesh this out with more detail...but there's not much more to it. I just thought it was dull.

You had four icons you could click...the animations were like a slideshow...the backgrounds were some nonspecific abstract art (or blazingly ahead-of-its-time Windows wallpapers)...and that's about all there is to it.

Quest for Glory 5: Dragon Fire

If I could see what the hell was happening on this screen, maybe I could write a caption for it

At some point, I want to immerse myself in reading people's reviews of QfG5 because I have such mixed feelings about the game, and I want to see how much my feelings resonate with others'. So much about this game, including its combat system, feels like noble intentions with unintended consequences.

On paper, this combat system seems like it should have been the perfection of what I perceive as every prior QfG game would have wanted to do, had they not been hindered by technical limitations of the time: a seamless flow between "regular" onscreen game mechanics and the combat system. But in execution, I feel that this had the effect of eliminating the "immersion" and "connection" you previously had when you switched to a closeup of your enemy combatant. The onscreen characters were often so small with respect to the rest of the (gorgeous) scenery, that you couldn't make out any detail on what I think were otherwise similarly gorgeously-rendered enemy models.

I also vividly remember: because the combat was "seamless" with regular game environments, enemies would often navigate behind environmental objects, to where you couldn't see them anymore during combat, or the AI pathfinding would make them navigate to impossible-to-reach places...it all ended up being a mess.

Noble intent with unintended consequences.

---

Anyhow, that's my little take/rant on the Quest for Glory series' combat systems that I've been wanting to share. I'd love to hear others' opinions of the different combat systems from the various games in the series.

I just recently got around to watching the new Masters of The Universe movie, and I just fell in love with the movie...and I just wanted to post at this subreddit to give the community a heartfelt congratulations on getting a movie that so warmly, honestly, lovingly paid tribute to its source material.

I've been burned by other beloved 80s Saturday morning cartoon IP that was gutted, eviscerated, roided-up, and butchered beyond any recognizable connection to its source material on its journey to the big screen. So it truly warmed my bitter, jaded, burnt-out heart to see at least MoTU make it to the big screen with its original characters, tone, and themes honored. Congrats, you guys. The box office results may not have what was hoped for, but I think in time, a wider audience will look back and recognize what a well-intentioned, well-executed movie this was.

Off-the-wall thought inspired by another commenter here at r/Sierra: wouldn't it be awesome to have in-game developer commentaries for classic Sierra titles? I.e. imagine playing the classic Sierra games on a modern PC, where some kind of overlaid UI, etc., let you access a commentary from the game designer/contributor related to the scene/event/plot that you're current at.

In this day and age, I imagine the technology to do this is trivially available/creatable...and being perfectly blunt, we're in an era now when Sierra's cast and crew of game designers/developers/artists are aging and might not be with us for much longer. If ever such an endeavor were to happen, these'd be the last few years when it'd be possible.

Al Lowe is, famously, open to chatting up just about anyone about all things related to Larry, Al's own tenure at Sierra, and Sierra in general, to whoever contacts him (he even makes his email public), so if ever there was an enterprising person/group who would embark on such an undertaking, I imagine Al Lowe would be game to participate.

...

I have so many random thoughts about "one last hurrah" for classic Sierra games...but then I realize that times have changed, gaming tastes have changed, the rights to anything Sierra-related have likely been diluted and acquired and divested and amortized to the deepest depths of licensing Hell...so likely nothing can ever come of it. 😢

I know, I know...much ink has been spilled on the controversial/divisive Return to Monkey Island. I've been debating for months whether to even share my thoughts: what could I possibly add that hasn't already been said? Maybe nothing...but I came to reddit for the sense of community, sharing and communicating with common-interest folks just for the hell of it.

I grew up in the 80s/90s, so I experienced adventure gaming in its heyday. Eventually The Secret of Monkey Island made its way to my desktop, and I'm sure all the reasons I loved it have been described to death. It was witty, cute, charming, with just a dash of danger and violence...perfect for a fiction-loving adolescent. I actually never thought much about "The Secret" in the title until I heard other people fixating on "what is the secret of Monkey Island?" and maybe it was also a line in the sequel. At the time, I just assumed that the secret was just the fact that Monkey Island was hard/impossible to find without luck and Voodoo magic. Then came LeChuck's Revenge, which I loved, for it's snarkier, darker humor. Then Curse of Monkey Island, which I loved simply because it was a well-intentioned, well-executed sequel (abrupt ending aside). I personally didn't connect with Escape from Monkey Island, partly because the fad-following shift to 3D was aesthetically unpleasant (just a personal opinion), partly because of the "creative reinterpretation"/retconning of things like Herman Toothrot's backstory, and the Giant Monkey Head(TM) being a robot.

Anyway, decades later, I find myself with a couple of kids and a hope to pass down my love of adventure gaming to them. Return to Monkey Island had already come out, but I intentionally avoided it, because I wanted my first experience of the game to be with my kids. So we embarked on a playthrough of Secret, Revenge, and Curse, and, happily, my kids fell in love with Monkey Island and adventure games in general. For weeks after finishing each game, they'd continue to pepper me with questions and what-ifs about characters and events in the game, and my heart swelled from having those conversations with them. We played the Special Editions of Secret and Revenge because they are, honestly, spoiled from the precedent set by modern games and CGI content in tv/movies, and honestly, I don't quite have enough faith in them that they'd "appreciate" pixel art.

I obviously couldn't avoid the news around Return to Monkey Island: I was aware that it was considered controversial, but I avoided spoilers. I had suspicions that it was something along the lines of "it was all a dream" or something similar, because that's a trope that's been used often: Newhart (anyone reading this old enough to remember that show??), The X-Files, Dallas (if memory serves me right), so I was super nervous whether exposing my kids to it was the right choice, since I didn't know ahead of time what its content was. They were borderline old enough to understand that narrative trope of having the rug pulled out from under you...but I wasn't sure if I wanted to potentially expose them to that...part of me wanted to let my kids cling on to youth's innocence as much and for as long as possible.

But I decided to take the plunge. And so we embarked as a trio into Return to Monkey Island, a first-time for all of us.

I'll be straight-up right off the bat: none of us liked the art style. My daughter, who's generally the "nice" one among us, said outright and often, "I don't like the art." I tried to tell myself it was something that'd grow on my with time, but it never did. There was certainly a part of me that hoped Ron Gilbert would've followed through on his once-stated claim that he'd make his definitive conclusion to the series pixel-art. I know he was just spitballing when he added that item to his manifesto, but I feel like we (him and his fanbase) were on the same wavelength for the same reasons when he said that in the first place...so it was just a tad disappointing that that didn't make it to fruition. But art appreciation is personal, so the fact that I/we didn't connect with Return's art style doesn't say anything other than that we didn't connect with it. I'm aware that the art style was one of the things considered divisive when the game first came out.

My daughter commented a couple times that Guybrush felt meaner this time around -- I think the mop-tree desecration was a moment that didn't sit well with her. As for myself, since I was on board with Revenge's darker humor, I was okay with the tongue-in-cheek destruction. Other than that, the gameplay itself was quite fine. I thought the puzzle difficulty fit in quite well with prior games in the series, and did quite a good job of recapturing the feel of classic adventure games, in terms of puzzle design.

Then, of course, there is The Ending, which in some ways can be considered "the point" of the whole game. I thought the buildup to the ending was spectacular. I quite liked the monkey statues puzzles. Then, it came: the end. On our first playthrough, we got to the ending where Boybrush is lying atop a pile of his dad's gold and jewels. We did a couple of the other endings, but they're almost not important because in a way the "real" ending was seeing everything exposed as a theme park. Not quite exactly "it was all a dream", but it was effectively the same trope.

One thing that continues to be a bit heartbreaking for me is that after we finished, my daughter kept seeking reassurance from me: "Boybrush was playing in the treasure, so it was all real, right?" she would ask me. I answered as age-appropriately as I could muster that it was up to her. But I was torn up inside seeing how much it revealed my daughter had fallen in love with Guybrush and Elaine and LeChuck and the whole mythos that had been built up around the characters and the premise. My daughter's very empathetic, so I could tell she had really internalized the moment and was grappling with what was likely her first experience at reconciling a beloved mythos with a "it was all unreal" ending. My son keeps his thoughts more to himself, so he didn't externalize his feelings on it, but being able to read my kids the way parents can, I could sense a sense of feeling "deflated," a disappointment.

As for myself, being able to process this as an adult, I "understand" the narrative rationale behind that ending. It is witty, it definitely addresses the many clues and anachronisms littered through Secret and Revenge, and, ultimately, it is Ron Gilbert's prerogative to finish the story of the wonderful world he created on his terms.

That said, I was also disappointed. I keep making this connection to Star Wars, the series that seems to have grown increasingly divisive ever since the original trilogy and the original series of novels and games (the content now referred to as the Star Wars Legends continuity): sometimes a work of art grows far beyond, and strikes a chord in the collective imagination much more than the original artist could have ever imagined. And from what I've observed of the "culture wars" of the past few years, broadly speaking, the audience is mostly left somewhere between disappointed and angry when there is a significant or unexpected deviation from the established "tone" or canon of the original work...when expectations are subverted, to borrow a phrase. I find it interesting to ponder why people gravitate towards works of fiction in the first place. There are aspects of escapism, aspiration, the novelty of experiencing a time or place or setting detached from the drudgery and tedium and injustices and banality of evil that we experience in "the real world." For those who are prone to find comfort in those flights of escapism, I can understand why the "comfort" of their beloved fictional worlds can feel treasured. So, as with the tonal shifts of the Star Wars prequels, and the degradation of the original characters and their trumps in the Star Wars Kennedyverse sequels, I felt that Return to Monkey Island's heavily, heavily implied reveal that everything we experienced in the first two games were just in the heightened imagination of a theme park visitor was also a similar subversion of expectations.

Undoubtedly contributing to that subversion of expectations was that Curse of Monkey Island dove deep and head-first into the assumption that it was all real, providing very plausible and quite satisfying explanations on "the secret" of Monkey Island (that it was a portal to hell), albeit not quite addressing the various hints in the previous game that it was all a theme park.

I know that Ron has stated that "the clues were all there all along," referring to anachronisms like the vending machines, the inter-island plumbing and tunnels, etc. Personally, I had always simply accepted those anachronisms as harmless, throwaway little gags. Personally, I don't think an anachronism in a narrative necessarily has to mean that the setting is a facade over a recognizable reality. Sometimes an anachronism can just be to make a world fanciful and silly. So I somewhat "disagree" with Ron Gilbert's rationale for why those things necessarily had to mean the whole world was unreal.

And yes, I realize there is an intentional choose-your-own-ending. But I think we all know that the "realest" of those multiple endings is the one where everything is revealed to be in Guybrush's imaginative immersion in the theme park. I have mixed feelings about the choose-your-own ending: part of me feels like it was a cop-out...but not in a bad way...more like a cop-out done out of kindness in anticipation of the feelings of those like myself who wanted to cling on to the "reality" of that wonderful world.

I'll just quickly mention one standout moment from the ending: Guybrush's sigh when he's sitting on the bench after seeing off Boybrush and Elaine. That sigh said a million things in one quiet moment. That game series was a connective thread through decades of people's lives: both audience and creators. That sigh said so much in terms of speaking to the bittersweetness of conclusions, of growing old, of sending things off with a new generation. That sigh was a magical moment because it could be seen as affirming all interpretations and reactions to the ending.

The Monkey Island games were once regulars in my rotation of retro-gaming games. But I'm not sure I'd have the heart to go back and revisit that world anymore. The notion that none of it is real still weighs a little "heavy" on me.

No doubt some will point out I'm taking this way too seriously. It's just a game. And Ron Gilbert has said for a long time that his intended ending was something that would make the players go "well, that was stupid." Indeed, perhaps the ending is an allegory for taking things too seriously, for falling too deeply in love with a fantasy. To that I'd say that Ron Gilbert is a blessed artist to have inspired such love among so many for his invented world. I imagine that to be one of the grandest rewards for artists.

Oh my, look how much more ink I've added to what's already been spilled on this subject. Well, back to my boring flooring inspector job.

RoboCop: Prime Directives recently appeared in my Amazon Prime recommendations. It's something I'd been wanting to check out for ages after first hearing about it back when it first came out. I remember one of its advertising taglines being something along the lines of "returning RoboCop back to its dark, gritty roots," which intrigued me, because I was disappointed with RoboCop's attempted turn from Hard R to family-friendly-ish fare with RoboCop3, then some form of Saturday morning cartoon. But I'm getting on in years, and Reddit-fueled nostalgia had got me looking backwards to the "good old days" of 80s/90s-era movies, RoboCop among them, so I finally decided to take the plunge and check out Prime Directives.

The first 20ish minutes of Dark Justice went the furthest in setting my expectations: I was left completely confused by the tone of what I saw. The opening scene was the hostage standoff between the police and some kind of terrorists...and the terrorist leader was sending his bomb-strapped henchmen out to the police to "show them they meant business"...only all the henchmen ended up doing was walking out into the open and blowing themselves up...without hurting civilians or hostages or cops, or property...in other words the terrorist leader just sent out one of his own to blow himself up for absolutely no good reason. I also remember some explosions that looked like animated gifs pasted on top of the filmed content. Then suddenly the character Bone Machine shows up out of nowhere, and I suppose he's somebody's idea of menacing-looking, with his skull face-cover and weapon-integrated armor...but to me, something about the mask looked comically piggy, the armor made the character look unthreateningly chubby, and so his overall vibe was edgelord.

That's all, folks!

The tone was not "so bad it's good"...but what was it? Was meant to be some form of satire or social commentary that I just wasn't getting? Was this supposed to be "edgy" by early-00s standards? Was this trying to be "dark and gritty" and just being undone by an insufficient budget?

The next day or so, I sat down to watch the next 20ish minutes, and I remember another odd moment: Murphy and Cable were investigating a report of a rabid dog, and there was this scene where they were obviously meant to be facing off against this vicious dog...but they never actually showed the dog...just the sounds of barking, and shots of Murphy and Cable cautiously navigating around the dog. A fellow redditor explained the situation in a way that had me rollicking with laughter while suddenly making it all make sense:

>My favourite “low budget” part is when theres a dog barking at Alex and cable, but they couldn’t afford a DOG, so its all off screen.

Suddenly it all made sense: it was stymied by low budget. I love unintentional cringe like The Room and the Neil Breen movies, so I set my expectations, and settled in for what I told myself was going to be a film experience of that same ilk.

...Only it wasn't bad.

Or at least: it wasn't all bad. Prime Directives is one of the most tonally odd movie/miniseries experiences I've ever encountered. There were good moments and actually lots of good ideas alongside cringey special effects and bad acting. It was the most oddly mixed bag of a cinematic experience.

I won't make this a formal "review" per se...but I just wanted to share a couple thoughts and thoughts from the show that stood out to me, and see what resonates with others in the r/robocop community.

• There's a scene where Cable is visiting his ex-wife's -- with whom he's on bad terms with -- office, and on his way out he says something like "Nice office...could use a woman's touch," and I thought that was actually a nice line. That was quite a diss.
• They don't use RoboCop's iconic theme -- I assume because of the aforementioned budgetary reasons -- and instead they use this recurring theme, which I guess becomes RoboCop's de facto Prime Directives theme: it's a spaghetti-western-influenced theme, and it plays often when RoboCop draws his weapon, or an action scene is about to commence...to me, that spaghetti-western theme just didn't really work...it seemed out of place in this genre and cinematic world.
• If they were at all making any effort to make the environment feel like Detroit...it just...did...not...work. The scenery, the weather, the "atmosphere" all just scream "Oh Canada!" And I mean that in the most endearing way: I love Canada. Canada is, charmingly, no stand-in for Detroit, and every frame of Prime Directives shows it.
• In Resurrection, they set up a mini-rivalry between RoboCable and one of OCP's military-esque operatives named Carver. There's a moment where Carver has RoboCable in the sights of his weapon and says something like "I've got your shiny Black ass now" -- one of those sort of generic antagonistic phrases you hear in Hollywood movies -- and later in the show, when RoboCable is about to kill Carver, he burns Carver with, "I've got your fat Black ass now"...and I know that moment was intended to be like Cable throwing that taunt back at Carver, but I just thought it was funny that Cable added the word "fat" in his taunt...it sorta felt like the writing was slightly misaligned between taunt and retort.
• I curled up in embarrassment just by watching the scene in Dark Justice where Sara Cable is with James Murphy in a basement of OCP headquarters, where she invites him into into "The Trust" and all these execs reveal themselves from behind pillars and boxes and pose like Balenciaga models with shadows creeepily obscuring their faces. The thought that ran through my head at the moment was that that scene was trying to evoke the shady conspiracy vibes of The X-Files...but it just felt a little silly that all these execs were hiding behind pillars and boxes in a basement waiting to reveal themselves in dramatic fashion to a junior inductee to their little club.

What we do in the shadows

• There were many scenes in all four episodes of the miniseries where it felt like the camera lingered for an awkwardly long time after a line of dialog or a reaction shot...kind of like in soap operas, and I got the impression that they did this to pad out the runtime.
• I got wannabe-Matrix vibes from Kaydick's trio of former sister-wives: the black/leather clothing, the tech/hacker angle, and their martial arts-inspired fighting style.

https://preview.redd.it/q4p38exmpnxg1.png?width=1480&format=png&auto=webp&s=2b7c9f5ceb074e130ac489b55f84c92f2595f6bc

• Every time RoboCop got hit by electricity or some type of energy weapon, he does this motion that I know is meant to be uncontrollable spasms...but to me it came across as unintentionally funny because it looked like a little dance, and it happened so often I started calling the Robo-jig.
• In Crash & Burn, there's a moment when RoboCop, Ann R. Key, and James Murphy are about to jump a bridge that's been raised a few feet, and James Murphy says something like, "oh, what the heck...YEEE HAWWW!!!" I get it: it's supposed to be like something out of Smokey and the Bandit, or Dukes of Hazzard...the good old action set piece of a car going at high speed to jump across some gap or obstacle or something...but that scene irritated me because that "yeehaww" moment was so out-of-place, so out-of-character for James, there was no natural buildup that this was "that kind of movie," so the moment felt totally unearned. Like they were shoehorning a generic action trope in a movie where it didn't belong. You could also tell by the (lack of) motion of the car and the lack of reaction from discount-Trinity and RoboCop that the car was probably just sitting still, and that poor actor had to muster up that heroic level of excitement in a perfectly calm and pleasantly quiet Canadian evening.

https://preview.redd.it/2t66gv9xcoxg1.png?width=1486&format=png&auto=webp&s=a1c3b52562902b5f198acc750192fd78a9d81a56

So, during that initial watch, I focused on the cheesiness, the obvious budgetary shortcomings, the stilted dialog, the bad acting, the "edgelord soap opera", and the overall unintentional camp of it all.

But the frustrating thing is, while I was snickering to the unintentional camp of the miniseries, I equally could not deny the good that was woven into that tapestry:

• When I think about the progression of "bad guys" that RoboCop faced in the movies, it seems like the natural progression would be for him to face off against a newer version of his same "model" of robot cop. So I thought RoboCable was a great choice of nemesis.
• There was definitely plenty of remaining drama to be explored on Murphy's relationship with his family. Some of that family drama with Murphy's wife was explored in RoboCop 2, but there was definitely material left to be explored with the father/son relationship, so that was another great creative choice.
• I thought it was very interesting to observe this show's take on AI given the times we live in now. I thought there were some stunningly prescient takes and commentary on AI, given that this show was from all the way back in the 00s, where AI was purely speculative fiction, and not at all in the public zeitgeist.
  • There was the prediction of talking to AI in natural language. I realize this was just done to make interacting with the AI consumable by a TV audience, and not because of actual foresight or research into AI, but still, this "prediction" was eerily accurate.
  • The AI scientist, Ed Hobley, mentioned a period of "training" the AI -- again a surprisingly accurate "prediction" of how actual AI works all these years later.
  • The show referenced the general population's disgust with AI for "taking the thinking away from us" -- another on-point "prediction" for how many people feel about AI now that the reality is upon us.
• I thought the ending was unexpectedly moving: how RoboCable appeared to "kill" RoboCop with the spike into his skull. I actually would have accepted that as "the end" of RoboCop. It would have been nice, in a way, to finally let Alex Murphy die, as opposed to being forced to remain "alive" beyond his normal lifetime because of his cyborg form, and his dying act was protecting his friends and family and bringing them to the finish-line where they could stop a global catastrophe. So the twist was completely unexpected, and very sweet, I thought: in a last gesture of friendship, Cable "spiking" murphy in the skull was just using his UDB spike to inject a digital memory with a farewell message, and to keep RoboCop disabled for the duration of the EMP burst so that he would survive it.
• Given RoboCop's cyborg nature, the notion of a "virus" that could affect both humans and computers was quite apt, and easily believable as a truly world-ending event, given how intimately coupled the whole world is with computers now.
• I thought the friendship/rivalry/redemption relationship between Murphy and Cable was a good choice for the emotional drive to continue RoboCop's story, given the emotional beats that had already been explored in RoboCop 1 & 2.
• I think it goes without saying that no one can ever truly fill Peter Weller's Robo-sized shoes. He literally originated/inhabited the seminal onscreen portayal of Murphy/RoboCop, and it's no small feat to step in to a role that is so tightly associated with its original actor. Think Luke Skywalker or Indiana Jones. But that said, Canadian actor Page Fletcher was pretty fair in the role.

So, to this viewer, for whom RoboCop 1 & 2 are irreplaceably beloved, iconic movies, Prime Directives was a puzzlingly mixed bag. Some great ideas, some ideas that were absolutely the right progression of RoboCop's emotional and narrative storyline, undeniably undercut by a budget insufficient to give the onscreen events their due scale and grandeur, a hearty helping of cringey, underbaked dialog, and a lot of made-for-TV-grade cheesy acting...but not in an off-putting way, almost in an endearing way.

What do you make of an end product like that? A diamond in the rough? Bit off more than it could chew? Gold beneath the dust? A paper tiger? Misfire?

As for myself: I'm glad I pushed past my initial gut reaction that it was just going to be cheesy, irredeemable forgettable, made-for-tv shlock. It's very, very unlikely I'd ever rewatch the miniseries, or truly embrace it as canon in my own head canon. But it had some redeeming qualities, and some of that 90s/00s-era charm to it.

In the end I guess I'm glad I experienced it. It was paradoxically more and less than I expected. It was simultaneously cheesy enough to test my patience, but redeeming enough to make me glad I stuck through it.