TRON 2.0
Tags: psychedelic

Plot synopsis:
The story is centered around Alan's son Jethro ("Jet") Bradley. Since the film's events, ENCOM has been taken over by a company called fCON(NET/IND) (Future Control Network/Industries). After talking with his father who is kidnapped while on the phone with Jet, Jet is digitized by Ma3a, Alan's AI computer system, to aid her against J.D. Thorne, an executive from fCON improperly digitized into the computer who is now a virus throughout the system. Jet is mistakenly identified as the source of the corruption and captured by Kernel, the systems security control program.
After deciding that Jet is corrupted, Kernel spares Jet on the recommendation of Mercury, another program tasked to help Ma3a, and Jet is sent to the lightcycles game program. After winning several matches, Jet escapes the match with Mercury's help. After they find Ma3a, the server, corrupted beyond saving, is reformatted resulting in Mercury's demise. Jet escapes to the Internet with Ma3a and an uncompiled copy of Tron Legacy, an update of the original 'Tron' program written by Alan Bradley to protect Ma3a. After finding a compiling program on the Internet, Thorne appears to kill Ma3a while the Tron code is compiled and attached to her program. During this, Jet receives a communication from Guest, the User who had assigned Mercury to help Jet. Accessing a video uplink, Jet realizes too late that Guest is his father Alan, locked in a storage closet by fCON's officers Baza, Popoff and Crowne, begging him not to compile the Legacy program. Legacy activates, revealing that its sole function is to kill any User in the digital world. Jet escapes, and fCON inadvertently saves him by capturing Ma3a in a search program.
Having recovered the correction algorithms necessary to digitize a human, Alan is sent to Thorne's corrupted server. Assisting the ICPs and Kernel, Jet reaches Thorne at the heart of the server and kills Kernel before he can destroy Thorne. Thorne, regaining a moment of lucidity, begs for forgiveness and tells Jet how to enter fCON's server.
Alan and Jet break into fCON's server, which the corporation is planning to use to distribute Datawraiths - digitized human hackers - across the worldwide information network. After Alan and Jet crash the server, the CEO of fCON (possibly Dillinger of the original film, though this is never confirmed) orders Baza, Popoff, and Crowne into the system themselves. Alan, wanting to verify the purity of the correction algorithms, removes them to inspect them as the three are digitized, resulting in a monstrous amalgam of the three, which chases Jet into the digitizing beam; whereupon Jet diverts the three out of the beam and escapes the computer.

Review: We might look forward to new TRON games after all. With TRON 2 coming up 2010/11 , I seriously hope they do a good job in creating another game. I really loved TROM 2.0 and play it through at least once yearly (yes, it actually runs in Vista). Of course the game had it's faults, but they were and are easily overlooked since there are so much that is good. I liked the fact that the background story were delivered via emails, and the look of the world was stunning. Sure, the engine was a bit dated even when the game were released, but it sure does the job, even by todays standards. Very faithful to the movie. The game might be a bit hard on those who like a lot of action and less platforming, but really, this game cates for all tastes. A highly recommended game if you can find it!. Fun, nice visuals...but nothing really new.... First off the game uses the Lithtech engine which is a few years old now. What this means is that the engine isn't entirely capable of producing his resolution surface textures, but is perfect for light shading and other effects, big maps and reasonable performance on most computers.  The engine was previously used to very good effect on the atmospheric Aliens Vs Predator 2.  Improvements and enhancements for this game include far better models and animations and a genuine attempt at creating something that visually is very individual.The music is reasonable; it has shades of that 80's Junk Yard techno interspersed with more new agey stuff.  But really it's only there as background noise and is unobtrusive.  The sound effects are excellent, if rather unspectacular.  The voice overs are of a very high quality; both for the cutscenes and the NPC's ingame.The graphics are very good...or at least achieve the required effect. Everything glows neon along the edges, but is otherwise a single tone black, purple or dark blue (or gold when you reach the old mainframe) and is both authentic to the film whilst also taking in and incorporating more modern and familiar computer concepts.  Overall it's impressive if a little samey, though they try to vary the places you go to and show each in their own particular style so as to give some idea of the inner world not just being universal in appearance.  Indeed great joy was found when on the old motherboard with its state of the art "286" power.  Vrooooooooooooooom!Gameplay is typical FPS through with a few novel weapons such as the disc (which is fun, if not something I ever used too much once into the game) but most are merely your bog standard sniper, shotgun, close combat and grenades - though with new skins and approach as to how they're shown.  Badguys are stupid, very dumb.  No attempt to dodge or avoid most attacks and their scripted appearances makes them very easy to predict.  In order to make them a little more lethal in many situations you have to play in damage limitation mode because there's no way you can avoid being hit.  This is good and means you're constantly on the look-out for fresh power sources.The upgrading element is interesting but predictable in how it works, by the end you can have maxed out most of the upgrades anyway - the only difficulty is in recognising early on which aren't worth bothering with.  Personally I amped up the energy resource skill meaning it didn't cost as much to fire my ranged weapons (such as the sniper), amped up the sniper (to make it more deadly) and boosted the largest and most obvious of the defensive protocols (torso).  Logic states that a sniper in any computer game has the benefit of headshots and you can supercharge it making it probably the most lethal, accurate and easily wielded weapons.There's occasional platformer bits - a return to the 80's there - some climbing and mountaineering through leaps and hops atop infinitely high moving blocks, the light cycles section is fun if somehow unfulfilling (and the computer is sometimes annoyingly good), and it's all a bit linear (even compared to most FPS) and the character development upgrading element doesn't ever seem to let you achieve something that you can't achieve in some other way (i.e. there's no perk for being having 'jump gold' in the first few levels such as being able to reach otherwise unreachable bonus) and some 'big boss' type badguys; something that had been frowned upon since the early 90's in most "realistic" FPS.  Big baddies, whilst more just a matter of avoiding their obvious attacks, are novel.  I haven't killed a giant purple fire spitting worm in many years.I enjoyed it, very much so, and because of its fantasy elements it stands out from the likes of Medal of Honour and rightly so.  If you want combat combat combat then don't bother with this, but for fun and games and for people who aren't entirely FPS savvy then it'll be a real challenge and an intermediate introduction to the field (and also has no gore, so is good for kids really....kinda).Experienced FPS persons will blitz the game as it has the same exploits as most "lean around corner, headshot with sniper" games do.. One of the few video game masterpieces. *** Possible spoilers below ***I actually played this only a few months ago in 2005 and i never saw the Tron movie. After finishing the game i got the movie but it failed to leave an impression of something remarkable on me as it did, i'd presume by all the talk around, on many other people. I felt the movie was just one of then highly popular SCI-FI products with few strenghts, and it was among other movie related things, directed and acted poorly.I would probably think differently about the movie if i had seen it back then when it was released (although i hadn't been born yet) just as i would think differently about the game if i had played it in 2003; Thing is, the quality (or originality) of video games has downgraded so much in these few years (2003-2006) that playing Tron 2.0 now (and having not seen the movie) was so much fun that i was left wishing for much more. The same thing applies to the movie industry, and i believe many of the IMDb readers would agree on that.So my comments are from a standpoint of someone who is an avid gamer(and likes good movies ;), choked with half-products, and not a fan of the original movie by which the game is made. 23 years old.The game has awesome visuals, brilliantly designed and expanded from the original movie concept in such a way that it actually makes sense to the original. Glow effects, animated textures and animated 3D models are pretty much all from the technical department that is used in the game, but is wisely used, accomplishes the task perfectly, and breads life to the game world.The soundtrack is an expansion and modern reinterpretation of the TRON movie soundtrack by Wendy Carlos, who also did, an example, Clockwork Orange. The music plays seamlessly. It uses a dynamic play system and plays different variations of a theme depending on the current situation in the game. The soundtrack in the game is one of the key elements that made its' world so believable. I loved it. Unfortunately it was never released by itself. We have to thank Buena Vista Games for that, but more on that a bit later. Sound effects are top notch, just like in many other games, but in this one, they even get original in some areas, like resonance applied to footsteps which works nice.The game mechanics are very solid, the design is not rich but it's consistent, fun to use, and required to finish the game successfully. The storytelling is done via in-game cut-scenes between game areas, and e-mails you find in archive bins scattered around the game areas along with the subroutines and permissions. The story is typical to a video game, weak and aimed at a younger audience, but at least the voice acting makes up for the blunt dialog.I'm just baffled at how some of the game magazines graded this game so low. Maybe it was because of the game actually didn't bring anything new into the genre at that time, but maybe it was because they didn't know how awful games would be in just a few years time. In any case, if taken into consideration that this game does not try to realistically depict shotgun beheading and rocket launcher inflicted flesh dispersion like most of the ones that are being pumped out today, but is a game which is open minded in it's design, thinks different, looks different, plays great, they might have considered TRON 2.0 a breath of fresh air in the FPS genre and be more optimistic when reviewing it. I'm sorry for the kids today which have to put up with all these murder simulators. Call me a traitor, but despite Jack Thompson being a career chaser, he has a point there.So that would most likely be the reason why Buena Vista Games ditched it so soon after it's release and discontinued all the support for the game. Young people today are bombarded with diabolic perverted unoriginal cra*p, that they simply cannot appreciate this kind of games.I usually don't leave reviews. Especially not reviews of video games on movie sites, but i just had to light a candle for this sibling of a dying art form. If you are a gamer, give TRON 2.0 a try, if you're not, you may like it even more than we do. A perfect 10 game. And for the end, sorry for any typos, English is not my mother language :). Cheers.