The Spoony Experiment

The Thing Review

by Scarlett on February 25, 2007 · Comments

Click here for a bonus commentary track.

This review of The Thing is brought to you by Quaker Oats. Wilford Brimley reminds you to check your blood sugar, and you check it often! Fight diabeetus!

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  • I enjoyed this game with my friends when we got our hands on it... why? because we were like 12 13 and we enjoyed the puking and the cursing (in spanish) i don`t find this to be a bad game, maybe is some kind of nostalgia... but this review is freaking funny love the dance part and that fusebox shit.
    Keep it up because your reviews are hilarious and your vlogs are funny and sometimes kind of informative :)
  • I love this review even more everytime I see it
    Keep up the good work man :)
  • brentallgreenlaw
    Excellent Reveiw, I love in all these older games how their are these right old looking computer next to these incredibly futuristic looking ones, it does the same in half-life! Still, keep up the reviews!
  • thor55121478
    i saw this game in gamestop the other day for 5 bux and decided against it cause of your funny review.
  • DaBowse
    i sooo guessed max payne B-) but i don't think noah ever explained why he didn't have to blood sample his comrades? does anybody else know why? was it because he gets captured?
  • I loved it when Spoony dies for no apparent reason and says "Bullshit! How did I die!!?" The way he expressed that was priceless.
  • corezero
    I love the movie. I OWN IT ON DVD! BOOYAH!
  • invisiblecrane
    This review made me want to get the movie on DVD...guess that's a good thing
  • The Thing received a generally favorable critical reception with an average critic score of 80% for the PS2 version, 78% for the PC and 77% for the Xbox at Game Rankings. Edge magazine awarded it 7 out of 10 in issue 116,[2] highlighting the well-managed tension and atmosphere, and the impressive weapon effects (such as the flamethrower.) However, the reviewer was ultimately disappointed by the game's linearity.

    GameSpot also awarded the PC version 7.7 out of 10,[3] while giving the Xbox and PS2 versions an 8.4 criticizing the "fear/trust/infection" system (one of the main features of the game) as having little impact. However, the reviewer felt that the game still worked as a good shoot 'em up with almost flawless presentation. IGN rewarded The Thing with a 8.5 out of 10 for the PC version and their complaint about this game was its lack of replay value. GameZone gave it a 8 out of 10.[4][5]

    Official UK PlayStation 2 Magazine was very taken by the game's high quality, awarding it a 9 out of 10 and describing it as "top-class survival horror meets one of the best sci-fi movies of all time. Excellent."

    John Carpenter himself praised the game, saying, "You gotta play this one, it'll blow you away." This quote was featured on the rear cover of the game itself.
  • Paul
    There is actually a place to hide from the "dangling penis monster". All you have to do is crouch directly underneath it and it can't hit you. Rediculous, I know.
  • Noceus
    This game is not a remake of The Thing it's like a sequal it's not that bad, they worked with what they can but they did kinda fuck it up they should make this game with modern graphics and better unit control and it may be good.
  • aaron deneau
    can't believe i forgot the even mention this. if you really want a thing like experience that doesn't make your brain explode with anger and had things like...atmosphere they you should pick up and review EXTERMINATORS it was way more thing then the thing was and it didn't suck aaaaand the controls weren't stiff and ackward and best of all no fucking fuse boxes.
  • aaron deneau
    i deceided to do my own play through like you spoony i too love the thing so very much. you forgot that in one of the scenes carpenter lent his likeness to a docotor characters when you wake up at the base. you even showed his face and never mentioned it. not like it's worth mentioning lmao.

    but the controls fucking suck and you can't remap them unless you do a selection,often times i found on the playstation 2 version that i'd shoot a guy who i was trying to give the test to and the others would gang rape me wit thier machine guns thinking i was the thing. our how about that selection bottons on the d-pad. or those team mates who just change on the fly and if you don't have a gun ready how fucked you are because they'll turn into the thing right behinde you and basicaly go hentai tenticle porn on your ass or puke thing juice all over you till you die.

    and see if any part of the thing comes into contact with you you should become the thing how is if a little puke gets on you it doesn't transform you? well obviously it would mean game over even faster but it's not something that has any continuity whatsoever to the movie.

    the mcready part doesn't bug me so much because there was always a chance somehow they'd get rescued and if someone was gettign rescued i wanted it to be mccready. have you read the graphic novels at all? maccready usualy survives and childs in most cases ended up being the thing. in the novels most people didn't want to militarize the thing it was just slowly assimulating the planet and in most cases they left the ending wide open like an homage to carpenters works. in most cases the novels pretty much blow because for plot convinence. where the thing just wastes so much fucking time incognito rather then assimulating way more people thus making it unstopable by sheer number alone.

    i want a sequal i want kurt russell back for it even if it seems like utter bullshit to the enth degree that either him or childs would survive provided that they are human. but it seemed somewhat plausable that mccready finds an ice breaker ship like in the graphic novels but i don't know i just liked mccready alot in the movie.

    be that as it may the odds that mccready finds a ship gets a helicopter,finds you and just happens to be johnny on the spot is asking alot. now you see why this game and all other continuation media have been dubbed "unoffical sequals." to the thing by john carpenter himself. carpenter has a script for a sequal but they studios don't want to make it which is sad in a way i want to see how carpenter would have continued the movies in the 80's. but as you may know they have a prequel dealing with the norweigen camp in the works as we speak. that could be either really good or really bad as prequeals sucks...god i hate you george lucas kill the force and the big reveal in empire strikes back you fucking idiot. but i digress cause it would be cool to see how everything happened and went wrong in the norweign camp...but the visial will never be the same and so the movie won't rank as highely by comparrison unless they have good writting on it. meh i don't know i love the thing and i hope they won't fuck it up anymore then the damage done by this game good god it sucked.

    also militarizing an alien they also ripped off aliens ressurection again not worth the mention but so much went into ripping off games that it was horrible because the controls sucked,you got the stupid fuze boxes and shit .anyways take care.
  • Toriyama
    lol really? the 'one-ders'?
    (yeah, i've seen this review, years ago, i forgot the reference...)
    keep it up tho homie...
  • Rundkatten
    very conveniently placed caracine barrels wonder what i shall do??
  • CMDBob
    God, I owned this game. HURRRG. I owned the XBox version though, so the badness wasn't too bad. Still, it could have been so, so, so much better
  • Alex
    haha... great vid. One of my all-time favorite movies as well, too bad they can't just seem to get the game-to-movie adaptations right... ever.
  • John
    I remember when this came out, I was playing it with my brother. We were in some sort of compound with almost no ammo left and we were just running around, trying not to die. We had noticed that if you ran from the Things for a long enough period of time they'd stop following you and started sing that to our advantage, taking pot shots at them. It worked just fine for a while, until it didn't. We thought the Thing had quit following us so when we turned around we both fuckin' BUTT JUMPED out of our seats. It was funny as hell.
  • Alaska Slim
    Star wars games tend to be good.
  • TheeSpongeman
    Oh! I almost forgot. If any game designer is reading this, please make a The Thing game. Not one like this, but something so freaking awsome that people will call it a masterpiece. It's a great concept, great horror potential, and all it will take is somebody with common sense to make this. If I ever become a game designer, this will be my first project.
  • TheeSpongeman
    Spoony, I'm so glad you've mentioned this game. This is one of my FAVORITE horror movies of all time! It wasn't so much about blood and gore, (granted, there was alot of that) but more about paranoia. That's what made the movie original, that the people had to constantly be aware of there surroundings and because they never could tell who was infected, they freak out.

    By the way, when you made that "test" part in your review on the river dancing guy, I knew immediately what your were going to get pissed about. I had the same reaction. I recently tested to the guy, so I saved previously. I tested him, and after entering each room I would test him. (About 3 rooms). Then I finally cross into one door, that hallway. The moment I step in there, he turns into a monster.
    OH! You know what you should of mentioned? That grenades can kill you even if you throw them over walls. The walls are untouched, but your dead a shit.
    When I got to the part that soldiers were shooting at me, I gave up. I wanted to play a horror game, not some crappy army thing. I was being pissed about so many things, but the moment I had to fight armed gunmen, I blew a fuse.
  • Admiral Awesome
    This review is mentioned in the Wikipedia article for the game, and is strangely the only negative review mentioned... Most reviewers for some reason gave it 7-9 out of 10! That's pretty screwed up, ain't it?

    Dancing Collins was the best!
  • Linuxkllr
  • Elvenstain
    lol that end boss fight is like in gears of war2 so similar
  • Zack Dolan
    hey jake, i found a link to the movie for you online. it's here:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25_MNd-RDa8

    but i'd hurry up though, youtube has been getting really paranoid about letting people upload this stuff and they tend to take down almost every full movie anyone posts that isn't totally public domain anymore. i can't tell you how many times i've found something and either said i'd watch it later or didn't finish it all the way and came back to check within days only to find it has been removed due to "terms of violation" or some such thing.

    good luck, i hope it's still there for ya, it's a truly awesome movie and everyone should at least give it a try. helluva lot better than the game, as you might gather from spoony's hilarious review.

    ...DAMN FUSE BOX'S!!! (which don't come up as an issue even once in the actual film you'll note...well maybe they mention it when there's a power outage, but you never see even one person trying to fix one, hahaha)
  • Jake
    Nice review... It made me want to see the move 'The Thing' but I can't find it online anywhere T-T I even tried on demand, but I couldn't find it there too... Anyone who sees this... You know a link? X/
  • Zack Dolan
    I wanted SOOOOOOO badly to like this game...i really REALLY did. oh god but you're right spoony, this game is infuriatingly bad. the trust system is pointless. I swear EVERY goddamn supporting character is infected anyway. and at the part where you showed the guy taking the blood test in the snowy tunnel (yeah, i know that narrows it down with this fucking game...) and then IMMEDIATELY not 5 FUCKING STEPS later, turning into a "thing". I had the EXACT same circumstance. I died in the next scene a hell of a lot, so I got to run through that fucking tunnel quite a few times. so i tested him myself, and he came back clear, but still changed seconds later.

    double yoo...tee...eff...???

    is it a glitch? was he supposed to turn there according to the script? what the fuck man? and all your other guys are fucking useless even for the brief time they may or may not be actually human. they can't shoot for shit, they piss themselves and have a nervous breakdown every 2 goddamn seconds...it's recockulous i tell you!!

    and here's the worst part...I paid TWENTY fucking bucks for that game, like 2 years AFTER it came out and died a worse death than spider head crab guy. like you, the thing is one of my favorite movies and i was so goddamn excited to play it. i missed it the first run, but then saw a lone dusty copy in a game store years later and thought "hey 20 bucks is a small price to pay for an awesome little gem like this, right?...i mean, it's the fuckingThing, right?...right?"

    wrong...epic fail for me.

    as usual, fucking hilarious review of a crushingly dissapointing game. though you forgot to mention, not only are bullets in the wierdest goddamn places, but they are everywhere...and i mean everywhere. you couldn't sneeze in that game without getting 4 boxes of rounds wet...but the kicker was...BULLETS WERE USELESS!!! that's right, totally balls useless!! if you were fighting anything (and i mean anything) more powerful than the tiny head crabs, bullets just basically annoyed it, and you needed fire to kill it. fucking nazi bastards!!!!

    why? WHY!!!????
    .
    .
    .
    .
    "ze germans,,," HAHAHAHA aaah...i feel better. thanks spoony
  • Ninja Moogle
    My God... This review was what got me hooked on the Spoon, and after archive binging on Curtis' sexual experimentation and Naked Zombie Sean Connery I can safely say I'm glad for this addiction.
    I guess this would be where I add my own memories of this game:
    When I played it, I actually kinda liked it. Yeah, upon retrospect it was a very derivative and samey game, and I never noticed just how mannequin-like the character models looked when speaking, but I still thought it kinda fun. Though even then, the game's forgotten promise of "multiple solutions" infuriated me. Oh well.
    A couple years later a friend of mine had bought it used for dirt cheap and I got to watch him play through it. For those of you still reading: remember that bomb that looked like The Joker designed it? You have about 30 seconds or so to get to an elevator you passed on the way to that room before, well, yeah. Anyway. When you make the elevator, there's this cutscene of the bomb asplode and the last thing you see before the elevator doors close behind you is the fireball chasing you down the hallway.
    Now, when my buddy had finished that preceding boss battle, he still had two guys following him around (and no, the game didn't think you'd have anybody left or I think they'd have scripted their monsterizing). He made the elevator.
    The cutscene started: the bomb ticks to :00. Cut to the lead standing in the elevator, facing into the hallway and that fireball.
    And the two remaining survivors, not 20 ft from the elevator, looking at the fireball as it rounds the corner, then both simultaneously turning around just in time to see the doors shut.
    Words cannot do this scene justice, nor can they accurately describe our hysterical reaction. I think I wet myself from laughing so hard.
    I still bring it up to this day, five years later. If I could, I'd do it again myself and YouTube that shit.
  • ctai009
    I remember playing this game - it drove me crazy with everything setting on fire for no reason or my retarded team-mates never trusting me (and they would all end up being the thing). The worst part was the end boss fight that I never got to play because my game disc jammed & would never work - I played the whole game only to not be able to finish - Noooooooooo!!!! Man I miss those fuse boxes...
  • Strelnikov
    @Rune

    I thought the DIY UFO bit the dust in the movie as well...Spoony complains that it isn't big enough for Mr. Diabeetus to ride in, forgetting that the Thing could just send a headcrab. I always thought that the ship was for getting to somewhere else on Earth, maybe to set up a new base of operations (where a better ship could be buit) or to conquer the planet.
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