The Spoony Experiment

The Thing Review

by Scarlett on February 25, 2007 · 94 comments

Click here for a bonus commentary track.

This review of The Thing is brought to you by Quaker Oats. Wilford Brimley reminds you to check your blood sugar, and you check it often! Fight diabeetus!

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August 30, 2009 at 5:28 am

{ 93 comments… read them below or add one }

51
gshgsh June 20, 2009 at 3:50 pm

Love this review and the Snatch reference!

52
Metalsocks June 25, 2009 at 2:26 am

This is the greatest review I have seen from you so far. “Oh my god! 2 fuse boxes in the same room, what do I do?” Genius!

53
dorko4u June 28, 2009 at 9:59 am

Actually, games released long after the movie seem to do better. This game is an exception, lol.

54
bilery July 6, 2009 at 11:00 am

That medic sounds like Cam Clarke.

55
Hmmmmm July 13, 2009 at 5:39 pm

rofl on the description i have Type 1 Diabetes and i loled on the refrences

56
That-Green-Monkey July 20, 2009 at 3:15 am

did u find the recording mac-ready left? its in a shed near the ufo, just thought you’d like 2 know

57
fpj July 20, 2009 at 3:11 pm

Absolutely top-notch, Spoony!

58
TommyandtheAnts July 25, 2009 at 9:45 am

This was the first Spoony vid i watch and evn though its been years since that day this one still makes me laugh and evn now when im trying to turn the electricity back on after a power cut all i can think of is that little ping sound :3
amazing review funny as always :3

59
Bobbovski July 26, 2009 at 3:35 am

This is one of my favorites among Spoony’s reviews^^ I especially love the “Colins” part and the “What is love” bit XD

60
Loller July 27, 2009 at 12:40 pm

lol, u did a complete irate-gamer skit here, complaing on one particular thing so long that it wasn’t even funny :P
I got this game about when it was released and it was really a scary game but maybe you thought so to and tried to cover it up by complaining on the fuse-boxes.. thats just.. fail dude.

This one sucked ass

61
a guy doing nothing July 27, 2009 at 2:26 pm

u know what rips off half life as well. That the U.S. soldiers are against u, because you might be infected. (in half life, the headcrab zombie thing, and here the thing).

62
Rune July 29, 2009 at 8:17 am

Heh, good review man.

Hmmm, wasn’t the hand-made UFO blown up my Macready with the sticks of dynamite to keep the Thing from escaping? How the hell is it appearing in the game? Unless there’s another version of the movie which it isn’t blown up that showed the developers didn’t watched the entire movie and just the end, or simply didn’t cared enough and wanted to show people how ugly a hand-made UFO looked like.

63
The Wise Mankey August 2, 2009 at 6:13 am

The haunted house from the 2007 Halloween Horror Nights in Universal Orlando that was modeled after the events of the movie’s aftermath made more sense then this game.

64
Carbiner August 3, 2009 at 6:05 pm

Game over whitley

65
BrUS August 4, 2009 at 2:10 pm

This is one of my favorite vids, Spoony. For some reason, not to be a total dick, but I hope you incidentally buy more crappy games… for some reason.

66
Zera R. Yarano August 4, 2009 at 3:06 pm

Puke and Fuses! Seriously, people, get a grip on yourselves! No need to go stereo-hurling.
However, I still get a laugh from “Game Over, Whitley.”; honestly, obligatory Bobby-Badass hero line-much?

“I Love My Computer” – Bad Religion. Bonus points.

67
Dav August 8, 2009 at 10:46 am

lol collins danse!

68
Ryguy987 August 10, 2009 at 8:08 pm

To be honest, this game actually had a lot of potential to at least be half-way decent. The Graphics look average for the time and having “The Thing” license actually had a lot of things going for it. To bad they f###ed it all up.

69
XanltheCSG August 11, 2009 at 3:53 pm

actually, i was happy to see Macready alive and well, even though it’s totally improbable.
BECAUSE MACREADY IS AWESOMEE!!!!!!

70
Frederik28 August 16, 2009 at 12:54 pm

Just watched the movie for the first time. Very disgusting but good entertainment.

71
Chrissy August 20, 2009 at 7:29 pm

Well, I guess if there’s one thing you can learn from this game, it’s that if someone is river-dancing at random and won’t stop then they’re infected

72
wi11am August 23, 2009 at 7:04 am

i dont know,it sounds good every thing but the fuse boxs and the testing kit. i have had allys with retarted ai like in halo 3 on normal

73
Strelnikov August 25, 2009 at 5:58 pm

@Rune

I thought the DIY UFO bit the dust in the movie as well…Spoony complains that it isn’t big enough for Mr. Diabeetus to ride in, forgetting that the Thing could just send a headcrab. I always thought that the ship was for getting to somewhere else on Earth, maybe to set up a new base of operations (where a better ship could be buit) or to conquer the planet.

74
ctai009 August 27, 2009 at 5:26 pm

I remember playing this game – it drove me crazy with everything setting on fire for no reason or my retarded team-mates never trusting me (and they would all end up being the thing). The worst part was the end boss fight that I never got to play because my game disc jammed & would never work – I played the whole game only to not be able to finish – Noooooooooo!!!! Man I miss those fuse boxes…

75
Ninja Moogle August 27, 2009 at 11:17 pm

My God… This review was what got me hooked on the Spoon, and after archive binging on Curtis’ sexual experimentation and Naked Zombie Sean Connery I can safely say I’m glad for this addiction.
I guess this would be where I add my own memories of this game:
When I played it, I actually kinda liked it. Yeah, upon retrospect it was a very derivative and samey game, and I never noticed just how mannequin-like the character models looked when speaking, but I still thought it kinda fun. Though even then, the game’s forgotten promise of “multiple solutions” infuriated me. Oh well.
A couple years later a friend of mine had bought it used for dirt cheap and I got to watch him play through it. For those of you still reading: remember that bomb that looked like The Joker designed it? You have about 30 seconds or so to get to an elevator you passed on the way to that room before, well, yeah. Anyway. When you make the elevator, there’s this cutscene of the bomb asplode and the last thing you see before the elevator doors close behind you is the fireball chasing you down the hallway.
Now, when my buddy had finished that preceding boss battle, he still had two guys following him around (and no, the game didn’t think you’d have anybody left or I think they’d have scripted their monsterizing). He made the elevator.
The cutscene started: the bomb ticks to :00. Cut to the lead standing in the elevator, facing into the hallway and that fireball.
And the two remaining survivors, not 20 ft from the elevator, looking at the fireball as it rounds the corner, then both simultaneously turning around just in time to see the doors shut.
Words cannot do this scene justice, nor can they accurately describe our hysterical reaction. I think I wet myself from laughing so hard.
I still bring it up to this day, five years later. If I could, I’d do it again myself and YouTube that shit.

76
Zack Dolan August 28, 2009 at 12:58 am

I wanted SOOOOOOO badly to like this game…i really REALLY did. oh god but you’re right spoony, this game is infuriatingly bad. the trust system is pointless. I swear EVERY goddamn supporting character is infected anyway. and at the part where you showed the guy taking the blood test in the snowy tunnel (yeah, i know that narrows it down with this fucking game…) and then IMMEDIATELY not 5 FUCKING STEPS later, turning into a “thing”. I had the EXACT same circumstance. I died in the next scene a hell of a lot, so I got to run through that fucking tunnel quite a few times. so i tested him myself, and he came back clear, but still changed seconds later.

double yoo…tee…eff…???

is it a glitch? was he supposed to turn there according to the script? what the fuck man? and all your other guys are fucking useless even for the brief time they may or may not be actually human. they can’t shoot for shit, they piss themselves and have a nervous breakdown every 2 goddamn seconds…it’s recockulous i tell you!!

and here’s the worst part…I paid TWENTY fucking bucks for that game, like 2 years AFTER it came out and died a worse death than spider head crab guy. like you, the thing is one of my favorite movies and i was so goddamn excited to play it. i missed it the first run, but then saw a lone dusty copy in a game store years later and thought “hey 20 bucks is a small price to pay for an awesome little gem like this, right?…i mean, it’s the fuckingThing, right?…right?”

wrong…epic fail for me.

as usual, fucking hilarious review of a crushingly dissapointing game. though you forgot to mention, not only are bullets in the wierdest goddamn places, but they are everywhere…and i mean everywhere. you couldn’t sneeze in that game without getting 4 boxes of rounds wet…but the kicker was…BULLETS WERE USELESS!!! that’s right, totally balls useless!! if you were fighting anything (and i mean anything) more powerful than the tiny head crabs, bullets just basically annoyed it, and you needed fire to kill it. fucking nazi bastards!!!!

why? WHY!!!????
.
.
.
.
“ze germans,,,” HAHAHAHA aaah…i feel better. thanks spoony

77
Jake September 2, 2009 at 9:45 am

Nice review… It made me want to see the move ‘The Thing’ but I can’t find it online anywhere T-T I even tried on demand, but I couldn’t find it there too… Anyone who sees this… You know a link? X/

78
Zack Dolan September 3, 2009 at 8:44 pm

hey jake, i found a link to the movie for you online. it’s here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25_MNd-RDa8

but i’d hurry up though, youtube has been getting really paranoid about letting people upload this stuff and they tend to take down almost every full movie anyone posts that isn’t totally public domain anymore. i can’t tell you how many times i’ve found something and either said i’d watch it later or didn’t finish it all the way and came back to check within days only to find it has been removed due to “terms of violation” or some such thing.

good luck, i hope it’s still there for ya, it’s a truly awesome movie and everyone should at least give it a try. helluva lot better than the game, as you might gather from spoony’s hilarious review.

…DAMN FUSE BOX’S!!! (which don’t come up as an issue even once in the actual film you’ll note…well maybe they mention it when there’s a power outage, but you never see even one person trying to fix one, hahaha)

79
Elvenstain September 7, 2009 at 10:02 am

lol that end boss fight is like in gears of war2 so similar

80
Linuxkllr September 8, 2009 at 9:37 pm
81
Admiral Awesome September 11, 2009 at 6:54 pm

This review is mentioned in the Wikipedia article for the game, and is strangely the only negative review mentioned… Most reviewers for some reason gave it 7-9 out of 10! That’s pretty screwed up, ain’t it?

Dancing Collins was the best!

82
TheeSpongeman September 12, 2009 at 4:13 pm

Spoony, I’m so glad you’ve mentioned this game. This is one of my FAVORITE horror movies of all time! It wasn’t so much about blood and gore, (granted, there was alot of that) but more about paranoia. That’s what made the movie original, that the people had to constantly be aware of there surroundings and because they never could tell who was infected, they freak out.

By the way, when you made that “test” part in your review on the river dancing guy, I knew immediately what your were going to get pissed about. I had the same reaction. I recently tested to the guy, so I saved previously. I tested him, and after entering each room I would test him. (About 3 rooms). Then I finally cross into one door, that hallway. The moment I step in there, he turns into a monster.
OH! You know what you should of mentioned? That grenades can kill you even if you throw them over walls. The walls are untouched, but your dead a shit.
When I got to the part that soldiers were shooting at me, I gave up. I wanted to play a horror game, not some crappy army thing. I was being pissed about so many things, but the moment I had to fight armed gunmen, I blew a fuse.

83
TheeSpongeman September 12, 2009 at 4:15 pm

Oh! I almost forgot. If any game designer is reading this, please make a The Thing game. Not one like this, but something so freaking awsome that people will call it a masterpiece. It’s a great concept, great horror potential, and all it will take is somebody with common sense to make this. If I ever become a game designer, this will be my first project.

84
Alaska Slim September 16, 2009 at 1:41 am

Star wars games tend to be good.

85
John September 24, 2009 at 10:39 am

I remember when this came out, I was playing it with my brother. We were in some sort of compound with almost no ammo left and we were just running around, trying not to die. We had noticed that if you ran from the Things for a long enough period of time they’d stop following you and started sing that to our advantage, taking pot shots at them. It worked just fine for a while, until it didn’t. We thought the Thing had quit following us so when we turned around we both fuckin’ BUTT JUMPED out of our seats. It was funny as hell.

86
Alex September 25, 2009 at 10:01 pm

haha… great vid. One of my all-time favorite movies as well, too bad they can’t just seem to get the game-to-movie adaptations right… ever.

87
CMDBob September 27, 2009 at 9:40 pm

God, I owned this game. HURRRG. I owned the XBox version though, so the badness wasn’t too bad. Still, it could have been so, so, so much better

88
Rundkatten October 24, 2009 at 6:25 pm

very conveniently placed caracine barrels wonder what i shall do??

89
Toriyama October 31, 2009 at 3:58 am

lol really? the ‘one-ders’?
(yeah, i’ve seen this review, years ago, i forgot the reference…)
keep it up tho homie…

90
aaron deneau November 7, 2009 at 10:35 am

i deceided to do my own play through like you spoony i too love the thing so very much. you forgot that in one of the scenes carpenter lent his likeness to a docotor characters when you wake up at the base. you even showed his face and never mentioned it. not like it’s worth mentioning lmao.

but the controls fucking suck and you can’t remap them unless you do a selection,often times i found on the playstation 2 version that i’d shoot a guy who i was trying to give the test to and the others would gang rape me wit thier machine guns thinking i was the thing. our how about that selection bottons on the d-pad. or those team mates who just change on the fly and if you don’t have a gun ready how fucked you are because they’ll turn into the thing right behinde you and basicaly go hentai tenticle porn on your ass or puke thing juice all over you till you die.

and see if any part of the thing comes into contact with you you should become the thing how is if a little puke gets on you it doesn’t transform you? well obviously it would mean game over even faster but it’s not something that has any continuity whatsoever to the movie.

the mcready part doesn’t bug me so much because there was always a chance somehow they’d get rescued and if someone was gettign rescued i wanted it to be mccready. have you read the graphic novels at all? maccready usualy survives and childs in most cases ended up being the thing. in the novels most people didn’t want to militarize the thing it was just slowly assimulating the planet and in most cases they left the ending wide open like an homage to carpenters works. in most cases the novels pretty much blow because for plot convinence. where the thing just wastes so much fucking time incognito rather then assimulating way more people thus making it unstopable by sheer number alone.

i want a sequal i want kurt russell back for it even if it seems like utter bullshit to the enth degree that either him or childs would survive provided that they are human. but it seemed somewhat plausable that mccready finds an ice breaker ship like in the graphic novels but i don’t know i just liked mccready alot in the movie.

be that as it may the odds that mccready finds a ship gets a helicopter,finds you and just happens to be johnny on the spot is asking alot. now you see why this game and all other continuation media have been dubbed “unoffical sequals.” to the thing by john carpenter himself. carpenter has a script for a sequal but they studios don’t want to make it which is sad in a way i want to see how carpenter would have continued the movies in the 80’s. but as you may know they have a prequel dealing with the norweigen camp in the works as we speak. that could be either really good or really bad as prequeals sucks…god i hate you george lucas kill the force and the big reveal in empire strikes back you fucking idiot. but i digress cause it would be cool to see how everything happened and went wrong in the norweign camp…but the visial will never be the same and so the movie won’t rank as highely by comparrison unless they have good writting on it. meh i don’t know i love the thing and i hope they won’t fuck it up anymore then the damage done by this game good god it sucked.

also militarizing an alien they also ripped off aliens ressurection again not worth the mention but so much went into ripping off games that it was horrible because the controls sucked,you got the stupid fuze boxes and shit .anyways take care.

91
aaron deneau November 8, 2009 at 5:19 pm

can’t believe i forgot the even mention this. if you really want a thing like experience that doesn’t make your brain explode with anger and had things like…atmosphere they you should pick up and review EXTERMINATORS it was way more thing then the thing was and it didn’t suck aaaaand the controls weren’t stiff and ackward and best of all no fucking fuse boxes.

92
Noceus November 13, 2009 at 3:02 pm

This game is not a remake of The Thing it’s like a sequal it’s not that bad, they worked with what they can but they did kinda fuck it up they should make this game with modern graphics and better unit control and it may be good.

93
Paul November 14, 2009 at 11:58 pm

There is actually a place to hide from the “dangling penis monster”. All you have to do is crouch directly underneath it and it can’t hit you. Rediculous, I know.

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