I like it a whole lot!

I mean, I’ve never been a gamer– never had the reflexes for it, and always been too focused on other forms of fiction to ever really try– and I admit this does hamper my ability to fully appreciate much of the Tron franchise.

But I did watch a very long playthrough video of 2.0 and I LOVE almost everything about it. The setting is sooo pretty, and feels practically perfect as an extension of what we saw of the Encom system in ‘82.

I like how the programs act. There’s some cheesy program dialogue that echoes the feel of '82 in a delightful way (I think one character says to another, “you’d lose your header if it wasn’t compiled on!”)… it all fits pretty beautifully into how I imagine programs living in that system.

I guess part of why I like 82 better than Legacy or Uprising is that I feel the programs on Flynn’s Grid were made to mimic a human-like life– to live as if their motivations evolved from the same biological instincts that human feelings do.

And, while it makes sense that Flynn would have made their world in that way– I’m really more interested to see a world that spontaneously formed for programs. The sort of world in which they act in ways where you can tell it comes from program motivations, and the influence of human life and culture is mostly a vague echo.

Sure, there are things about 2.0 I don’t like. The storyline of the human characters feels like the weakest element to me. The dead-mom/semi-estranged-dad motif that they ended up recycling in Legacy… not my thing, to be honest. The human villains also don’t really speak to me.

And of course I wish they’d actually included some of the Program characters we loved from '82. And there were a few things I’m not sure I liked about what they did with the program characters they had.

For instance, what exactly is going on when Jet gets constantly chased by antivirus programs and spam filters that think he’s a threat, and he’s just constantly massacring them in self-defense? Do they rerezz later? Or are they dead forever, and if so, does this sudden devastating hit to Encom’s whole cybersecurity system actually have any consequences? because it should?

…And yet, the whole feel of how this goes down? still really speaks to me, in both a computer way and a weird-human way.

You’re a program living in this world, and your job is to open a door if someone with the right permissions asks you to open the door. Do you care if you just saw that person murder 50 of your coworkers with a deadly frisbee? No, you do not care. That is not your business. You have one job, and it is Open Door.

Idk. The 2.0 programs just feel real to me in the right way.