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Sunshine The Opposite Than God

It is 9 a.m. on a sunny Los Angeles day, and a certain pink wigged, loud sweatshirted, Zac Efron-obsessed blogger is sitting at his pink bedazzled laptop ruining the lives of celebrities. His Tazo tea-toting assistant reads off a gamut of incredibly urgent news, for instance a Real New York City housewife has stabbed a puppy after mistaking it for a predator. Later that day, he must be seen at the week’s hottest A-list event: the wake of the recently deceased Britney Spears. The audience may laugh, but this just one snippet of the incredibly important life of Perez Hilton.

“Perez Hilton Saves the Universe (or at least the greater Los Angeles area)”, chronicles a day in the life of the celebrity blogger and his thrilling life spent bitching about people on the internet and saving LA from nuclear disaster. Love him or hate him, as Perez (Randy Blair) sings early on in the show, “he writes what the world wants to read.” Although he is mega famous, with both Kirstie Alley and Barack Obama on his answering machine, Perez’s rise to the middle has been surprisingly lonely. All he wants is “love, or at least a BJ.” It seems as though his luck is changing when he meets Kevin (Tim Drucker), on an X-rated dating website. Little does he know, Kevin is really Kebab, half of an Islamic terrorist duo hell bent on blowing up LA and achieving fame of its own. Shortly after their first date at the Olive Garden, Perez is kidnapped by Steve Urkel, who now works for a government-sponsored anti-terror unit, and is told he is the only person who can stop the evil plot and save the world’s most important city from nuclear disaster.

After given top-notch defense training, including the ability to create a fool proof decoy (a.k.a. screaming, “Hey look! It’s Mario Lopez!”), Perez must choose between “the first person to give him feelings… ever” and the city he loves. Many songs and celebrity cameos later, by the likes of Kathy Griffin, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, Tiger Woods, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, and yes, even Zac Efron himself, Perez is able to put himself in the center of the action and to go down in history as the hero who saved Los Angeles.

Highlights included a diva moment by Perez’s assistant, Alyssa (Dana Steingold), in which she laments the life of the assistant, with all of the work and none of the glory, a song about “shooting [a hot terrorist] in the face,” and a slideshow of images with Perez’s sloppy white handwriting all over them to add to each scene.

The show is colorful and kitschy to the max, and boldly attempts to delve into the psyche of this (in)famous blogger. In this show, men want him, and women want to be him, but all Perez really wants is to be rid of his own insecurities. It suggests that Perez is the way he is because he is able to take out his own neurosis on the people he writes about. However horrible that may seem, it turns out the celebrities really need him as much as he needs them. As the closing song says, bitching can save the world.

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Finally, and most interesting, there are actual instanced property spaces in the game that players can actually own and control. After clearing The Maelstrom out of their area, players can go nuts, building whatever they want with any Lego pieces they’ve found or purchased so far. There are some astounding possibilities here — you can build a full Lego castle piece by piece, or finally complete that pirate ship set you’ve had since you were a kid. Other players can join you in these spaces, and they can interact or experience your creations while you’re putting them together.

There are even various Lego animals and creatures that can be placed in the space, and NetDevil has created a “behavioral system” to govern their behavior. By connecting a few different variables and directions, you can tell objects to act a certain way when something happens, or move in a certain pattern. While the UI seems simple enough for children to use, I was impressed by how powerful it was — just while we were demoing the game, the devs created a small sequence with floating boxes that, when touched by a friend who jumped in the same space, would explode. In other words, they recreated Mario in the Lego Universe in a matter of minutes.

That was pretty amazing, and the mind spins to think what players of all ages will create with their Lego pieces when the game launches. The plan is to offer up access and content for a $9.99 monthly subscription after the initial game purchase. This week at E3, the release date was set for October 26. From the demo that we saw earlier this week, it’ll definitely be something to look forward to. {
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