Face Me And Scream

Written by: Michael Enger

If you can read this, then you are using the Internet. Congratulations! It is a big step to take. If you are fairly experienced with using the Internet, you will have encountered an online community and the people who inhabit i (this website is one of those, but if you aren’t a member you can’t see that; all you see is a flaccid facade of magnificent proportions). Now, these people come in many shapes and sizes and flourish on their communication mediums of choice be it a forum, a chat room or artistic websites. They are all blubbering idiots.

You see, the Internet offers its users a degree of anonymity that results in the creation of the most simple-minded egotistical bastards the world has ever seen. These people “publicly” say the most horrible and retarded things you can think of and, in large enough numbers, greatly practice elitism when encountering an opponent. They huddle in their gathering places, which are specifically created to nurture certain interests and ideas that they all share, and “discuss” with vigor the many topics that revolve around this interest or idea.

This can range from a single video game, international politics, European gardening and even extremist ideas and have become a very popular form of communication in the short years it as existed. New people are discovering this wonderful world of free-flowing opinions and statements every day and are joining the already over populated mass of mindless morons.

It is easy to see that I am not a big fan of this form of expression, but I base it on the fact that people can say (and mean) that they hate everyone of a different creed and skin color and nobody does anything about it. In years past, when small groups of American rednecks would gather in their all-white towns and talk about how “them damn blacks” are ruining their country it seemed better, as their ideas would never pass the borders of their stagnated society. The problem arises when such ignorance is free to travel the world, poisoning anyone it touches.

Albeit this is a serious problem, it is not the only thing to consider. The members of these online communities are also a force to be reckoned with, as they are to blame for most of the trash that is to be found on the Internet. I have never encountered an honest, decent conversation between strangers on the Internet. When you are with friends who know you, things are different. Mockery and slander is done in good fun and any harsh truth is accepted with a desire to better oneself. On the Internet, where nobody knows who you are, things are very different.

I will point you towards a conversation I had a while back on the Trackmania Exchange website. I was really into Trackmania at the time so I took it upon myself to test every single track that was added to the website over a certain period of time. I commented on many, sometimes giving a good review (along with a reward, as they had a system for that), sometimes letting them know what I didn’t like so that they could ignore it or acknowledge it at their leisure. One of these comments started what I like to refer to as the “genius argument” and is a situation which I bring up every time someone asks me to explain why I hate public online communities.

I didn’t like his track. It wasn’t fun to play and I thought that he used too many extra pieces to make it look interesting (something I deem simply annoying as it causes my poor laptop to lag too much). I told him this and he responded quite negatively to it, claiming that I am too negative (as he had seen one of my comments on another track). In my defense, I told him that what I said was not derogatory; it was simply my opinion (which is what the website is made for) and he can ignore what I have said if he wants to. To this he replied with quick, brutal comments about my intelligence and social status. I wondered why he needed to be so aggressive, as I apologized for what I said. This just resulted in him claiming that I was a “pussy” and that the Internet would do better without the likes of me. Now I thought he was being silly and childish, to which he replied that I am the childish one, simply based on this infamous quote:
“Ever heard of the genius forum? Well, I’m part of it!”

This, of course, was the most excellent rebuttal that I have ever encountered. It makes the assumption that the membership of an Internet forum makes you superior in some way. My dire loathing of this person grew into a form of humorous pity and I ignored his request that I end the argument but after my “I’m not scared of your damn forum” reply I never heard from him again, although he had taken the time to discredit me by mocking my comments on other people’s tracks.

If the spreading of false information and ignorance wasn’t bad enough, the people who are doing it insist on being the worst they can be. I don’t understand the constant need to enforce their opinion on others or to show off to complete strangers. It is not impressive to see a person berate another over some stupid comment, or to witness how much of an enclosed arrogant bastard he can be. I don’t understand why they find it so hard to be courteous, well-spoken and kind…

Well, that would make them “pussies”, now wouldn’t it?

Written by: Michael Enger

The term “Web 2.0″ has been around for a while now and it’s still being used to describe the new generation of web development and presentation, but what does it really mean? For most of the web users, the term just means a lot of round corners, drop shadows and loading indicators (all of which will be available in CSS3) but there is a lot more going on underneath the pages than might be assumed. There are cross-server communication via APIs, complicated effects and background processes called via AJAX and usability and readability have become the main focus over direct content presentation. Web development has stopped being the simple mashing of styles and markup and has become a transgressing medium for the new age. For web developers however, it only means one thing: more work.

Click to enlargeAh, the inevitable return of clip art.APIs are available from almost every large website (flickr, digg and twitter all have them) and are used to allow external websites to access their internal information. API stands for Asynchronous Penile Insertion (known as “double penetration” for those of us in the porn industry), but it also stands for Application Program Interface which is more relevant to the web industry, although I am not here to claim that porn and the internet aren’t intertwined like butter on toast. An API is used to extract information from one website to present it on another. How does it work? I actually don’t know, but that’s just because I have never sat down to make my own. The idea is simple however: the API works as a middle man between the website and the main server. The website asks for information from the API (and in some cases can send information) and the API communicates with the server. This is very useful if the website provides a service (like photo sharing, news posts and personal updates) that the user would like to have on their website without having to code it him/her-self.

Click to enlargeI can’t draw…AJAX is an extension of an already existing web development tool: JavaScript, which is a method of changing a website’s content dynamically after the website has been loaded. AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and is simply the mashing together of JavaScript and XML (or in the case of websites: XHTML which is the “language” that websites are written in). It regained popularity (and the term “AJAX”) when it became possible and popular to load websites in the background after the main page has been loaded. This is used whenever you see one of those “loading” images (or the spinning lines) and has completely taken over the web. Now it feels cumbersome to navigate a page that doesn’t use this method of quickly changing the content without navigating away from the main page. AJAX also encompasses a lot of other things as well, including effects (fading, scrolling and color changes) and handling forms.

The slew of new technologies and concepts that has flooded the web development scene of late has left me feeling very old. I am a part of the generation of web developers that made static HTML websites without a stylesheet, JavaScript or server-side scripting language. Despite the fact that I have evolved to accommodate the new methods, the fact that I am a dying breed hit me quite hard a while ago when I came to the realization that the web really has changed since those days when I was learning my first HTML-tag, so many many years ago.

Note: I use this page as a testing ground for techniques and if you want to see true Web 2.0 action you can go to the media page and check out the scrolling image viewer. It uses AJAX to scroll and the images themselves are gotten from flickr via their API.
But if you use Internet Explorer then you can just leave, because we don’t want your kind here… the web may have evolved but that browser didn’t.

Edit: My exploration of the flickr API grew into a little example app which shows a little of what you can do with AJAX and API programming.

Written by: Michael Enger

Well, you got to give them credit at least. The United States of America (not one of the other united states in the Americas that have names) has succeeded in creating a totalitarian Christian-fundamentalist controlled government work under the guise of liberty and democracy. How, you ask? By using the term “the American way”. This does not mean American as in the two continents that bear the name, but the nameless combination of states that have been the source of most of this world’s controversy and pointless aggression (along with the creation of the use-and-discard pop culture) in the past century.

They create all these forms of entertainment, spread them around the world and when things get “out of hand” (otherwise known as “not controlled by us”) they ban and censor and basically hurt the creators and end-users. With another state falling into the “let’s make selling games harder” mentality, I doubt that game creators actually deciding to make games only for kids is not too far away.

As I was saying “the American way” has been an excuse for all forms of extremist behavior over the many years. The obese population of that country are brainwashed into believing that certain things are done because “it’s the American way” to do it. Sure, the American way is to murder the inhabitants of an area and claim it for your own. The American way is most definitely to drop bombs on innocent people in an attempt to win a war. And the American way is an explanation why people can get away with teaching creationism as a science*.

Seeing as they are a global superpower, one of the most powerful countries in the world, it really scares me that they can go ahead and do things like this. They hide behind “the American way” when someone yells censorship but when people say that fundamentalist Christians shouldn’t really walk around calling people wrong and stupid, they pull out the freedom of speech. Well, guess what, laws to restrict the sales of a piece of creative work is censorship. And if those were games that contained Christian ideas or “the American way” propaganda, nobody would be questioning them. I still think that watching 3D people die from gunfire is not anywhere scarier than knowing that you are going to eternally suffer unimaginable pain when you die.

That having been said, I do believe that we should protect the young, impressionable ones from things like erected penises and the insides of a decaying human being, but making the sale of such things (or things remotely like it) to minors illegal by state law is going too far.

* “Creationism” is a Christian belief that god created the universe, contradicting evolution. This piece of information was featured in ‘The Daily Show’ as a part of their Evolution Schmevolution week.

Written by: Michael Enger

As the internet has progressed, from its conception to the infamous (and retarded) “Web 2.0″ era, the content on the millions of websites have followed certain patters. Hyphen-rich addresses have been replaced by obscure words, frames have made way to positioned divs and well-formulated articles have given in to the flood of illegible user generated content. Where once people boasted about their own internet sanctums; now elitist groups huddle and hate, gathered in the online community of their choosing. The pride of individuality has been destroyed by every man’s desire to be a part of something.

Whether it’s deviantART and DMusic with their creative concoctions or MySpace and LiveJournal with their drama, user generated content has become extremely popular. Even this website relies on user generated content, although we are more like Something Awful in the way that every contributor is hand picked. The problem with such practices is that the users, when left with the freedom to add anything and everything, usually end up spewing forth an idiotic creation riddled with spelling mistakes, factual errors and needless hatred.

Let’s take deviantART for example. Incredibly skilled artists and writers are lost under the piles of talentless teenagers who are out to prove themselves. For every picture or poem that touches you is another hundred that makes you wish you never entered the website to begin with. This may sound mean because the internet should be open for everyone and everyone has to start somewhere, but when these artistic blasphemies are accompanied by a journal where the person complains that he isn’t getting any comments on his latest “masterpiece” then things have gone too far. The internet is completely crammed full of people like that and when I say something moderately constructive (aka: I criticize his work and tell him that he should get better before boasting so much) I get chastised and chased off the website.

People are afraid of the truth. They hide behind a community built up of mediocrity and revel in their egos, ever regressing their social skills. This brings me to MySpace. I am afraid of MySpace and all its followers. Of all the internet communities available to the common surfer, MySpace is the biggest and has even extended its reach to beyond the confines of the internet. It wasn’t the first and it clearly isn’t the best, but everyone and their grandmother is a member (including me). Don’t get me wrong, I am aware of the implications of using MySpace as a promotion device for bands, artists and attention whores but as far as user generated content goes it is on the bottom of the cesspool.

What I don’t understand is people’s obsession with pages like MySpace. There is nothing there! There is not reason to visit the website, to join the website or even to acknowledge its existence. The website is just a haven for pedophiles on the hunt and attention whores looking to expand the amount of people who have seen them flash their tits. After many years MySpace finally gave people the ability to add content like music or videos, but 99% of the people on MySpace are there to comment. Is someone’s blog really that interesting? Whereas I can spend hours jumping from article to article on Wikipedia, a MySpace user spends hours jumping from profile to profile looking at pointless bullshit!

I think it’s time that content providers take back the web. There are too many blogs, too many complaining idiots and too many angle shots for us to need any more! I want there to be some sort of filtering mode on the people who get to be active on the internet. If you have nothing to contribute, get the fuck out!

And if I come upon another MySpace profile with a blinking background and three different audio/video items that are all set to auto-play, I will fucking punch a hole through my computer screen!

Written by: Michael Enger

Gamespot (or rather, the UK version is my one-stop source for gaming goodness and I probably go there more than I check my email (the university one, my personal email is downloaded automatically). Recently there has been a game that has caught my attention, peeking out from under the million messages about Halo 3 or Madden whatever; namely Clive Barker’s Jericho. After having seen the total of 2 pre-rendered teaser movies I promptly decided that this game is going to be awesome.

Now, I may not be a Halo fanboy but it seems that, due to my preemptive decision on the game’s entertainment value, I may not be far away. The difference is that I have a reason for my love (and a little more than a single piece of concept art).

Click to enlargeI think that it might be a first person shooter of some kind…As I stated in my previous article I am a big fan of horror games. They fill me with an almost inhuman fervor and desire to bask in their radiating glory. The gameplay mechanics (and admittedly sometimes the graphics) can ruin the gameplay experience, but if the story can scare the shit out of me then I will decree that it is time well spent. This may mean that my opinions towards horror-based games might be slightly biased (about as biased as a devout Christian’s view on homosexuality) but I reserve the right to be a little biased on this, highly subjective, topic.

So now that we’ve decided that I love horror games, I can explain why the movies titillated me to such an extent; they contain story elements! The story elements might only hint at small events and measly introductions, but the pure emotion I got from watching them filled me with glee and anticipation. Whereas the Halo fanboys have the classic Halo story to look forward to, I have this mythos-based horror story to delve into (once the game is released, of course). I must say that I am at a certain advantage here.

I know that what I did was sacrilegious, at least in the eyes of an avid gamer; I made up my mind about a game before I had played it. Not even to a subtle, hype-infected, degree but to the extent that I could have given it a score on the spot; I didn’t even know what the gameplay would be like. It was a mishap and spending ten minutes on gamespot reading up on the game gave my excitement true credibility, albeit not righting the error I had made. I spend a lot of time chastising the fanfolk so I have no plans of joining them.

Written by: Michael Enger

I am am avid supported of open-source software. I always try to run an open source alternative to proprietary software (with mixed success) and I tell my friends and family about this brave new world that I live in, where software continually grows, expanding to encompass greater and greater degrees of customization and is even free. The end result of this appreciation is that I’ve been labeled an anti-establishment hippie.

It has been noticed that open-source aficionados are a tag over-zealous in their advocation, but we shrug our shoulders and claim that we’re trying to combat the mainstream marketing machine that runs behind proprietary software. The problem is that whatever excuse we have for not praising the iPhone as god, accepting Windows 7 as an actual step up from XP or for abolishing every pre-installed program from our computers we always end up looking like we’re anti-mainstream for the sake of being anti-mainstream.

But can we blame them? When articles praising Linux clutter the web and are more plentiful than AOL trial cds. Maybe all those reasons for loving linux are true, but the everyman sees an elitist pounding his chest and proclaiming that the way he does things is better. It’s not helping.

I like open-source software because it’s always changing, it has tons of customizable aspects and it’s free and there are tons of choices to find the program that suits you. iTunes, my old nemesis, came out with a new version recently which disabled your ability to switch of the “go to music store” links next to song names and removed the standard list view. In contrast, the latest version of Songbird is highly skinnable and even lets you move the interface around to suit what you like most. I may have my reasons for ditching Apple’s stringent software, but suddenly I am jealous of their success and hate them for being big and popular? Can’t I just hate them for being control freaks without having to be labeled some anti-corporate anarchist?

My pet project is open-source. It’s free to edit and is steadily growing thanks to the community that are all aware of the intricate workings of the system. The code isn’t hidden behind a wall of legal issues so people are free to suggest improvements or even release their own versions, improving the software in ways that we never thought about. Maybe having such distributed contribution isn’t feasible for companies that want to make money off what they make, but without it we would still be fumbling in the dark, not having the money to hire a team of testers.

The point behind this barrage of angry words is that software becomes better if people help out. I trust that my open-source music player will get better and better over time and I would like to be able to stick to my sometimes-buggy-but-has-lots-of-character software without someone shaking their head in exasperation of my anti-establishment mindset. How about this… when Stephen Fry celebrates your software’s birthday, I’ll ditch my hippie thinking and join you on the rigid side of the fence.

Written by: Michael Enger

I was watching an interview with the Chief Executive Officer of Obsidian Entertainment about their recent work on Neverwinter Nights 2. He was very excited about it and went on about the graphics, the gameplay and it’s claimed back-compatibility with modules from the original Neverwinter Nights. One quote that stood out from the rest was one he said while talking about the updated gameplay possibilities and that you “can also play in a direct-drive mode in that you can go into sort of a third-person mode almost like you’d play WoW”.

Wait. Back up a second. Did he just say “like you’d play WoW” as in World of Warcraft? Isn’t that a brittle bridge to be walking across for a professional game company? Blatantly saying that they are copying the gameplay style of another game. It’s easy to understand that geeks will be geeks, whether they work on the engine or tell other people to work on the engine. I can imagine that he, along with thousands of others, has enjoyed an adventure or two in the mighty land of Azeroth. But I have a sneaking suspicion that if EA owned that company, he’d be fired.

It seems to me, and this could be a misconception, that the further up the chain of command you go, the less knowledgeable are the individuals you encounter. Take for example the team working for Obsidian Entertainment. The graphics programmer knows every minor detail about the graphics engine, the lead programmer knows what techniques are used in the development and implementation of the graphics, the programming manager knows how the progression of steadily better graphics due to steadily more complex programming and the CEO knows that the graphics look pretty now. If Obsidian is owned by someone else that person will probably just know that it will be “better than last time”.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, seeing as the programming manager doesn’t need to know how the shader function works to do his job, but I get a feeling that the higher up you go, the less successful you are at grasping how things really work. The person on top (if there is such a person in Obsidian’s case) could be yelling at the CEO for what he said in the interview.
“How could you say that we were copying another game? Are you completely stupid? The marketing and legal teams will have to fight against this for months to come!” Now if I was a person who liked World of Warcraft, I wouldn’t be put off by a comment like that. My head would be excited.
“Movement like WoW and the ability to make my own adventures? Where do I sign up?” The target audience wouldn’t see it as a bad thing and such a comment would more likely make people who didn’t play Neverwinter Nights interested in the sequel, just because it plays like something they are already used to.

Now I don’t know how Obsidian Entertainment works. Maybe the reason for that comment was that it was the simplest way to explain the gameplay style as it moved up the chain of command. The gameplay programmer would tell the lead programmer one thing and as he told the programming manager about it, the description would be simplified as to accommodate his superior’s lack of knowledge in that field.

The point behind all these allegations and pointless ranting is that I think that upper management should learn to shut up. Take for example the people who go to “manager school” and get a degree in pushing people around. I feel that it doesn’t make them eligible to start working “on top” in any field, since they don’t know what that field is concerned with and so they can’t make effective decisions. What can we do? This is how the world works and I doubt that one idiotic article on an unknown website will have that much effect.

But I still hate EA.

Written by: Michael Enger

Gaming is a hobby of mine and a very important one at that. When I was a little emo kid in high school my only real friends were the local arcade and KaZaA. In this sense, I have experienced a great range of games but nothing really hit me as much as Myst did. I got to play Myst, for the first time, in late summer of 2004. Being many years after it’s release, the graphics were no longer a selling point so pure game play is what really enthralled me about this game.

Myst, like many other “ground breaking” games, has it’s critics. One review said that the game was boring because it lacked game play and was for only obsessive compulsive people who are willing to spend months “breaking” the puzzles. Right… let me guess… the game was too hard for you, right?

Let me explain the basics about Myst. Myst is a game where you start out with no instructions on what to do and basically no back story. You see through the characters eyes and using the mouse you can interact with the environments, whether it be walking along a path or pressing a button. That is where it stops being simple. The game is filled with puzzles. If you want to complete it you have to solve many puzzles, which is probably what people find so hard about it.

The thing is, the puzzles aren’t hard at all. It’s just about exploration and logic. Now I am going to explain one of the puzzles in the game to demonstrate what I mean. If you don’t want to know it, then skip on to the next paragraph. Through exploration you find a certain time (say 3:15). It’s obviously not a part of the background, so you note it down (keeping a notepad close is quite handy). Somewhere on the island is a clock tower which you can’t get to but you can get to two dials which turn the hands of the clock. I hope it’s obvious enough that you are supposed to turn the hands to the time which you got earlier. I do not understand why some people have such a problem which seemingly easy tasks.

Another complaint of the game is the first person perspective, which is usually found in shooter games. Certain induhviduals claim that the game sucks because you “don’t kill anything”. Way to label yourself as a primitive idiot! I get the concept of people having different opinions and tastes but labeling a game as bad simply based on that fact is quite ignorant.

A funny thing to think about is how this basically reflects most of the entertainment in the world and how people feel about it. To make a simple example I will use the infamous film Donnie Darko. I was introduced to this film through a friend of mine (which is how all things should spread, by word-of-mouth) and when I watched it I loved it. The actors were great, the storyline superb and it had more substance than the currently popular film (which I think was one of the American Pie things). It quickly became my favourite film and I would spread it to as many people as I could.

Fast forward to a few years later and Donnie Darko has become the current goth fave (not my fault, I swear). I am talking to a few people about the film and one person sticks to the fact that it sucks. Not that he doesn’t like it, but that it’s an objectively bad film. After asked about this he exclaims that it had no real excitement in it and that the only death scene in the film was boring.

It’s quite tragic that film/games/music/whatever that aren’t created to fit the mainstream really never get the appreciation they deserve. Myst was different because the people who played games back then really recognized how great it was and so it spawned a fan base and many clones. In current times I doubt Myst would be looked upon even once by the gaming community. Myst 5: End of Ages was supposed to be the great finale in the series and yet you hear almost nothing about it because it’s drowned out by things like 50 cent: Bulletproof and Need For Speed: Underground.

I loved Myst. I’m currently playing it’s sequels and I don’t think that I will ever forget the first time I heard the sound of linking to one of the ages. I may not get to kill anything and it can be deadly frustrating at times but it paved the way for games that went beyond such simple pleasures.

Written by: Michael Enger

Do you play video games? Of course you do! You love them and there is nothing you like better than to sit down and engross yourself in a well-created piece of digital entertainment. But have you ever played a game that was so frustratingly hard that you wanted to break the controller? Every attempt at progression chisels away at your patience until you are left yelling and cursing at the screen, damning the game and its creators to a violent death. What do you do then? Do you give up or do you cheat?

I am an avid fan of adventure games. To specify: not action-adventure games, such as Metroid, Tomb Raider or Jak and Daxter (although I am a fan of those too), but the true adventure games. The ones where there is (usually) no chance of dying and no fast-paced action sequences. Where the game’s progression is based on your ability to amass clues and objects and surmount strange and illogical puzzles. Grim Fandango, Myst and The Longest Journey are among the greats of this genre and its a passion of mine to divulge many hours to painstakingly traverse a universe of intrigue. It’s also the most infuriating genre in the world.

When you’re stuck in an adventure game you’re really stuck. It’s not about changing your strategy to overcome the odds before you, but simply a process of clicking on every single thing you can. Perhaps you missed the nail sticking out of the wall or you didn’t use the balloon animal on the bowl or some other form of obscure obstruction that you need to overcome. So you travel between the half dozen or so areas that you have access to, clicking on all the things you’ve clicked on before slowly growing more and more weary of the same locations and the same responses (”No, I don’t think that will work”), oblivious to that one little clue that you missed. This is where I think cheating is ok.

Click to enlargeThe Dig: In space, nothing makes senseThanks to GameFAQs and the Universal Hint System, I have overcome a lot of problems and been able to complete a lot of games that I would have broken in half otherwise. Snobbish perfectionists and game purists would probably say that I can’t claim to have “completed” a game when I received help form the internet, but I argue that sparing use of walkthroughs is no more cheating than asking a friend who has completed the game and who happens to have a photographic memory. The Universal Hint System makes it even “better” by providing progressively detailed hints instead of detailing exactly what to do. I could have done it myself, of course, by systematically clicking on every single pixel on the screen and using every single item I had in my inventory on every single object I discovered, but that would only cater to my OCD and would remove all fun from the game.

Sure, the entertainment aspect of adventure games is being able to figure it out for yourself, but after half an hour of not being able to get anywhere, where the choice is between quitting the game or to cheat I would rather choose to continue playing, even if by elitist standards I can no longer say that I completed the game. There are few games where I refused to check a walkthrough and I’m happy that I did, but I doubt I’ll go to gamer hell for wanting a little help completing The Dig.

Written by: Michael Enger

Flames = AWSOME!I don’t have major memories about the Transformers. The cartoon was not on TV during my youth in Norway and when I moved to other, more western-influenced, countries they had other things of interest to show me. The concept of transforming robots did not escape me, however, and I found myself playing with the toys of other children and wishing for one of my own. In my teenage years I discovered the Beast Machines (note: NOT Beast Wars) series and I still have a Cheetor around here somewhere. All of this meant that I had some excitement at the prospect of a movie based on the beloved Transformers.

Now, I am not going to get into how the re-design that the Transformers got (to make them more interesting to the same people who put neon lights underneath their Peugeot 206s) because god knows that the original G1 series could do with a little more detail. What really ticks me off is that Hasbro agreed to this whole charade so they could sell more Transformers toys (and it would have worked if I wasn’t unemployed), but they decided to fuck around with the toys. They are obviously created for a new generation of children who are completely unaware of the original iteration of the toy line, but some of the things they try is completely stupid.

Click to enlargeYou could probably melt the figure and then re-shape it into a truck if you really wanted to.First of all, the concept of “2 toys in 1″ isn’t really required anymore when that is the whole idea behind Transformers. You don’t see LEGO advertising “Take it apart and build something else!” on every figure they release, but for some reason Hasbro decided that people need to be reassured that this Transformer can actually Transform. I guess they needed to do this because they actually released a Transformer (or two) which doesn’t transform at all! Despite the fact that the name then becomes a misleading lie to whomever purchases the toy as I didn’t see a “Warning: Doesn’t actually transform” anywhere on the package. For 500kr you would think that I at least get to bend its legs backwards.