For better and for worse, Michael Bay’s energetically stupid idea of the Transformers is now the most dominant version of the franchise in popular culture. I’ve seen all three of his swaggering, over-long movies and will most likely see the fourth instalment with Mark Wahlberg when it comes out this summer. But as someone old enough to just about remember the first generation of toys – boxy marvels that, through a complex sequence of manipulations, could become convincing muscle cars or fighter jets or cassette decks – I’ve found precious little to love in the maximal movie Cybertronians.
The absurdly detailed yet still practically interchangeable designs for these Autobots and Decepticons were presumably rubber-stamped by Bay in those rare moments when he wasn’t rubbing his hands with glee over the pre-vis storyboard of another endless CGI sequence in which a major US city is obliterated. Also, while I’m grudgingly grateful he kept “the noise” – that distinctive, crunchy audio cue that suggests a symphony of servos rearranging metal in a hurry – all of Bay’s Transformers films are just .
For some peace and quiet, you have to travel back a decade to 2004, a time when the movies didn’t exist and, admittedly, the Transformers brand was a little becalmed. But it was ten years ago that Atari released Transformers, developed by Melbourne House as an exclusive for PlayStation 2. No-one was expecting much from a game based on Transformers Armada, a short-lived and relatively minor cartoon reboot of the franchise, but in a ridiculously short development window – just a year, according to director and executive producer Andrew Carter- Melbourne House somehow transformed this unpromising licence into one of the most technically accomplished and downright enjoyable PS2 games of its generation.
Even for fanboys, though, the set-up is sheer hokum. During one of their regular smackdowns on Cybertron, Optimus Prime and Megatron are interrupted by a distress signal from the long-lost Mini-Cons. These diminutive Transformers, designed to enhance the offensive and defensive capabilities of their bigger brothers, abandoned Cybertron a million years ago and ended up crash-landing on Earth.