De-rez, a show that parodies video games, got on TheEscapist.com by winning its film festival competition with a video that makes no sense to me and was probably filmed in creator Chris Slack’s back yard. It’s a reenactment of video game called Ghost Recon, which was written by Tom Clancy, who I thought was a novelist.
The award winning video has a few funny moments, and despite zero production quality and little coherence, I kind of understand why it won. Kind of.
De-rez comes at gaming from quite the opposite side of the fast-paced analysis of Escapist’s "Yahtzee" game critic. Slack and the rest of his friends make these movies in what looks like their parents’ houses, garages and back yards, reenacting video game plots with elements of the real world thrown in. You get the feeling that the melding of the gaming world into real life might be an accurate representation of their mind’s eye rather than a clever conceit.
###The only game they’ve done that I have played was Resident Evil
, which is a bizarrely addictive zombie shoot-em-up with terrible game play. Their parody is actually pretty accurate, even visually.
Slack and friends are very charming, but the show often loses focus, tending to digress into shenanigans after the minute-and-a-half mark. The most recent installment was by far the best, a mockumentary of "Clan Excelsior" (I’m sure this is some kind of gaming reference that I don’t get, but nothing revelatory on Google), which I suppose is a World of Warcraft team, and it basically makes fun of nerdy WoW players, but in a really good way.
I lost a good friend to World of Warcraft for about a year, so I may be more susceptible to that kind of humor than some.
This latest effort is a departure from their formula of satirizing game plots to satirizing, well, probably themselves. I think it’s a good direction.