More courses soothe the early disappointment in an otherwise strong-playing game of golf With the wind at your back —” an 8-mph breeze is plenty enough — and a proper attribute boost equipped, you can rip a 400-yard drive on the first tee at Oakmont Country Club, the latest course introduced to Rory McIlroy PGA Tour. The downhill fairway will roll the ball within 60 yards of the pin’s Thursday placement.
And from there, it’s just an easy wedge shot to your first bogey of the day.
Even from 60 yards, any approach to Oakmont’s inscrutably tough greens will skitter and slide like a one-legged bobcat trying to cover his crap on a frozen pond. In real life, Oakmont is one of major tournament golf’s most difficult courses, and it is the last of six that EA Sports promised to deliver for free to Rory McIlroy PGA Tour by the end of this month.
Arriving in a title update March 8, Oakmont is an appropriate finish to a redemptive second-round performance for EA Tiburon’s designers, in how it showcases the promise of Rory McIlroy PGA Tour and explains why it took nearly a year after launch for the game to fulfill it.
“On the old Tiger Woods game, every course played the same," said Justin Patel, a longtime veteran of EA’s golf operation and a lead designer on this title. By this Patel means that a ball struck under the same conditions, onto the same surface on one course will behave exactly the same way on another.
That meant Oakmont, a links course featuring wide-open views and no water hazards, was one of the easiest courses in 2013’s Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14 despite being one of the hardest in North America for nearly a century. The U.S. Open returns to Oakmont this June.

But what about The Masters?

The Masters begins April 7 and, no, there is no news, no tease, nothing to share that suggests that event or its course could make any kind of a surprise return to EA Sports’ golf simulation after its run from 2011 to 2013. I asked executive producer Brent Nielsen, and he replied with a blanket no-comment.
Last spring, when it became apparent Augusta would not be featured in Rory McIlroy PGA Tour, an EA Sports representative still left open the possibility that it could be added later. This more falls under the never-say-never end of an ongoing cordial relationship than it suggests any license negotiations are actually in play. But who knows.
When Augusta National Golf Club left, a former EA Sports rep who worked closely with the game mentioned to me that the deal between the two was one of the more unusual licensing arrangements ever in sports video gaming, and I believe it. For starters, Augusta doesn’t need anyone’s money, so it can’t be induced to participate with a huge check alone.
It’s also a private club, meaning it has no need for publicity or "brand awareness" and has literally no obligation to the public. It’s a single course and event, not the custodian of an entire sport, like a league. Finally, despite the notoriety of The Masters, Augusta notoriously curbs the commercialization of the tournament and its course. This is a spectator event that still sells $3 beer and sandwiches, after all. If you can’t attend, watch it in three weeks; the only TV show CBS gets to plug is 60 Minutes if the final round runs long.
Bottom line, if Augusta does not want to participate in a video game — and given its ties to Tiger Woods, it may have lost interest once he left the franchise — there aren’t many appeals EA Sports can make to convince it otherwise.

"With the per-course physics we have now, we’re able to make the greens at Oakmont behave like the greens at Oakmont," Patel said. "You might learn how to putt at PGA West, but when the green speed changes, the break of the putt changes, and that is another exponential layer of difficulty to the game."
This kind of fidelity was possible thanks to the power of the new consoles and the new engine Tiburon would be using. But it would also require completely remaking every course. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14 had more than 40 courses, 20 on the disc and the rest sold digitally, and none of that data was usable for the Rory McIlroy PGA Tour reboot, Patel said.
"All those old courses were built in 18 separate environments," Patel said, meaning that each hole was a discrete file. In Rory McIlroy PGA Tour, all 18 holes of a course are rendered together. on a single layout. "It would have been a lot more of an effort to go into our old assets, pull out those holes and paste them together," Patel said.
"Even putting aside the licensing," executive producer Brent Nielsen said, "all of those courses needed to be recreated from scratch. It was a mountain of work to get through." The first course Nielsen’s team finished, TPC Sawgrass, took a very long time because designers were learning to work with Frostbite, an engine that powers EA shooters like Star Wars Battlefront and the Battlefield series. Subsequent courses took less time as artists became more familiar. Still, the work could be measured in months.
EA Sports’ golf franchise has long featured a roster of real-world golfers, but its real stars have always been the courses, and there was nowhere near enough time to create enough that lived up to the expectations set by Tiger Woods 14 two years before. Tiburon’s golf staff knew this. As early as a year from Rory McIlroy’s July 2015 launch date, they had made plans to develop parcel out additional courses post-release.
Still, Rory McIlroy PGA Tour, despite the fidelity of its swing mechanisms, ball flight and course physics, would be torn to pieces by reviewers — including me — for launching with so few venues in which to try it all out.
"We knew that there were going to be people calling out the fact that there wasn’t 1-to-1 feature parity with the last Tiger Woods game, and that these people would not realize this was because of a move to an entirely new engine," Nielsen said. "I wouldn’t say that it came as a shock."
Internally, an EA rep told me after the reviews published that they expected the worst, for the small course lineup, for the absence of game types and, significantly for a game where most play as themselves, the dearth of player customization options.
As disappointing as these supporting features were — and in some cases still are — it would be a lot different story if they surrounded a pedestrian game of golf. Despite the reviews and the comments and the forum posts, Tiburon from the get-go still believed it had delivered a truer-playing, more interesting and more challenging golf simulation than the Tiger Woods series had ever been.
In a meeting with colleagues who helm EA Sports other’ franchises, Nielsen learned that Patrick Soderlund, who as Electronic Arts’ vice president of studios is the publisher’s top development executive, was preferring to play early builds of Rory McIlroy PGA Tour over all the other projects in EA’s pipeline. "Here’s a guy who has access to every game that’s in development, like Battlefront, and Need For Speed, and he’s choosing to play Rory McIlroy PGA Tour with his friends," Nielsen said. "We knew it was a great playing game all along."

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Patel, meanwhile focused on getting word out to the EA golf community that reinforcements would arrive after the game’s launch — though this was received as bad news for the game on the disc until the first course, TPC Scottsdale, showed up a month later. It immediately joined the rotation of tour events in the game’s career, giving some much needed lift to a core mode of play.

Then came East Lake Golf Club in September, and longtime players took notice. East Lake was another course too easy to be believable in the old Tiger Woods iteration. Its greens weren’t differentiated enough in that game to make the course’s pack-a-lunch length particularly challenging. In Rory McIlroy PGA Tour, it is. Like Oakmont, East Lake is also a par 70 at more than 7,500 yards. Even with all the indulgences available to video games, East Lake’s lone par 5s, Nos. 5 and 10, are not reasonable eagle opportunities.
Oakmont’s greens, though, are a breed apart. Patel got a yardage book marked up with the super-secret layout the course superintendent is planning for the 2016 U.S. Open, and EA’s environmental artists visited it to take measurements, photographs and collect other materials to put it in the game. Yet Patel still went back to raw footage of past events, watching how putts traveled on the finish of Oakmont’s greens — which the club’s members still protest are not as fast as everyone complains.
The result is something properly infuriating, especially given Oakmont’s placid layout, which lacks bothersome trees or surprise bunkering. Its greens are like the skins underneath a pair of telemark skis, with traction in one direction and slide in the opposite. As most Oakmont greens slope away from the player, hard approach shots will land and roll as if on a mirror. Then when the player turns to hit it back toward the pin, he encounters enough friction to leave it well short, or subject the ball to a wicked break. My best round at Oakmont so far is -1 and I felt like Batman when I got out of there.

Commentators Rich Lerner and Frank Nobilo, who have a much better repartee than predecessors Jim Nantz and David Feherty — provided the game serves it up correctly — came back to Florida to record new lines for Oakmont’s inclusion. Patel handed Lerner the yardage book and the two gazed at it like a holy text. "Rich asked if they could have the book," Nielsen laughed. "They haven’t seen the course since it was renovated." Moreover, what is in this game is exactly what golfers will face at the 2016 U.S. Open. I’m here to say they will have a hell of a time.
Nielsen and Patel were mum if I asked if Rory McIlroy PGA Tour would start changing courses for the three major events licensed to appear in its career mode — the U.S. and British Opens and the PGA Championship. I took that silence as a good sign. In one-off play at Oakmont, Nobilo’s dialogue betrays a few lines specific to U.S. Open play; to mean that means it’s probably coming. Further queries about where the game goes from here were met with upturned palms. I didn’t take this as a sign the series is in danger, more that it’s because Electronic Arts is a publicly traded company whose fiscal year ends in 10 days, when companies of this type clam up about everything.
"We’ve seen some of our highest engagement numbers in the weeks when we’ve released new courses," Patel said, Oakmont’s debut two weeks ago being one of them. "More than the numbers we saw in launch week."
EA Sports may have hooked its drive back in July. But, mud in the grooves and grass wound around the hosel, Rory McIlroy PGA Tour has since made a fine recovery.
Roster File is Polygon’s news and opinion column on the intersection of sports and video games.

Could this have been the video game that finally got Superman right? Almost as a rule, Superman video games have been quicksand for their development studios, requiring tons of time and effort and licensing to pay off with a poorly reviewed product and sales to match. In 2007, however, Factor 5 was convinced it could get the Man of Steel right.
Factor 5 never got the chance. Did You Know Gaming?, chroniclers of all things canceled, got its hands on footage of this Superman game, from very early in development, and use it to tell the story of a perfect storm of circumstances in 2008 that took down Superman harder than any shade of Kryptonite ever did.
First, the game: as Did You Know Gaming? recounts, this was to be an open-world Superman game with an ensemble cast of iconic bad guys trashing the city and getting trashed by Superman.

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The most ambitious feature Factor 5 was going for was a means of Superman taking his foe and driving him all the way through any of the buildings located in the cityscape, which would require a destructible environment rendered in real time.

Factor 5 was also a big fan of the Wii, so much that they were going to build a version of this Superman game for that console even though they were not getting paid extra to do it. When Warner Bros. pulled Bryan Singer off a sequel to 2006’s Superman Returns and back-burnered the movie franchise, Factor 5 scrambled to keep its game going as a stand-alone title, rather than an adaptation of a film.
Then Factor 5’s publisher, Brash Entertainment, a venture focusing entirely on licensed properties, went under for reasons that seem entirely predictable: an inexperienced CEO, the high costs of licensing, and multi-game deals requiring them to deliver shovelware in order to get at the good stuff. The global financial crisis of 2008 seems like the least of anyone’s worries in a collapse that took down Brash and Factor 5 and ensured that “Blue Steel," this game’s code name, would never be anything more than a series of set-piece concepts that had yet to gel into a single game.
Still, it’s always intriguing to ponder what might have been, whether developers could have pulled off something as ambitious as plowing Doomsday through a skyscraper, and whether critics and the public would have found any of that fun. Brash Entertainment was definitely in over its head. Although Factor 5 delivered the very well liked Rogue Squadron series about 15 years ago, the open-ended, overpowered nature of Superman, his powers and his greatest foes have been nearly impossible to do justice in a video game.

3DS game nails down a new release date Sega will release Sonic Boom: Fire and Ice for Nintendo 3DS on Sept. 27, the company announced today. The news came out of a 25th anniversary panel dedicated to the hedgehog that was held during this year’s SXSW Gaming event and livestreamed on Twitch.
Originally set for a fall 2015 launch, Sega delayed the game into 2016 last fall. It did not specify a new release window at that time.
The game is the 3DS follow-up to Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal from 2014. Fire and Ice is, like its predecessor, based on the Sonic Boom cartoon and is developed by Sanzaru Games.
Sonic Boom’s previous 3DS outing fared better than the budding franchise’s poorly received Wii U entry. For more on the troubled production history of that game, Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, check out our interview with its developer, Big Red Button.

Games Henrike Lode wants to make, because everyone loves to play Game designer Henrike Lode has a long list of games she wants to make, games that stray from the typical “default human power fantasies" that dominate the commercial video game market (and even sometimes work their way into game jams, game development gatherings where creative ideas are encouraged to flow).
At the Game Developers Conference this week, Lode was one of 10 game developers, academics and writers who took part in the GDC Microtalks, which features a series of five-minute and 20-second presentations focused on a theme. This year, the theme of the microtalks was "everyone loves to play." Lode’s talk focused on making games for "everyone," not just the "default humans" — "You know, the majority of people you see when you look around ," she said — and the challenges inherent in making those kinds of games.
"Last year, at the Nordic Game Jam, I wanted to make a game about the role of an untrained helper during childbirth," Lode said. The slide she showed as she spoke was a photograph of a child emerging from the womb, that was both graphic and beautifully shot. "But unfortunately the people I was jamming with were too scared of what the graphics would look like, so instead we ended up making a racing game where you would have to drive a pregnant lady to a hospital before she gives birth."
That game was called Express Delivery, and is available on itch.io. After that experience, and time spent at the Lyst Summit on love, sex and romance in games, Lode said she didn’t want to make jam-style games like that anymore.
"I don’t want to make racing games … or fighting, shooting, action, dragon-slaying, strategy games fulfilling default human power fantasies," she said. "I go to a lot of game jams and I always run into this problem that most default humans want to make games about silly jokes in oversaturated genres, which of course is normal when you’re just starting out…
"My ambitions as a designer have completely changed. So I started compiling a list of jam games that no one wants to make with me."
The first idea she presented to the crowd was a mod for the game Rymdkapsel, Grapefrukt’s space station strategy game. "Instead of building and defending a space station, this game will be about pregnancy," Lode said. "You have to run errands and build up a support system while being attacked by more and more frequent waves of hormones and mood swings."

Next, a Grand Theft Auto mod, where you play as one of the game’s prostitutes. "You experience the dangers sex workers face when they get into someone else’s car and they put their lives into the hands of a complete stranger," she explained. "You have to decide who to ride with and defend yourself if they attack you, and make sure you get your money before you face your pimp."
"I want to play a new version of The Sims," she continued, "where I can select any gender and sexuality I feel like and the characters with vaginas can menstruate and suffer from PMS and mood swings and sometimes they make bloody messes and they have to clean it up and then they feel embarrassed about it —€” or not, depending on their personality."
Lode’s game ideas ranged from the personal to the satirical, like the game jam idea "Nipple Effect."
"I want to make game where you’re presented with a pair of breasts that you have to identify as male or female," she said. "And if you think they’re female you have to cover the nipples with a picture of male nipples, but if you accidentally place male nipples on male nipples, you lose. Because that’s censorship."
That one got a big laugh from the GDC crowd. She continued.
"I want to make a game that features women who don’t remove their body hair," she said, "and women who have , which means that they grow beards and chest hair and it has absolutely nothing to do with the gameplay. The other characters in the game don’t even mention it. No one cares…
"I want to make a game about xenophobia and racial bias where you are a courier who has to deliver packages. But every day, your avatar is randomized and if you appear like a person of color or a muslim, people receiving the packages might react in different ways depending on their bias."
Here, she showed a clip from a prank video of a man dressed in traditional Arab clothing who throws a backpack at two men who believe it’s a bomb.

Lode wrapped up her talk with three more ideas, noting that as a white female game developer, she doesn’t have the personal experience to create certain things authoritatively. "I can only speak for my experiences," she said. "If I want to do this right I have to get input from people with lived experiences."
"I want to make a game where your the parent of a transgender girl like Jazz ," Lode said. "On her 11th birthday, you have to decide if you will let her undergo hormone therapy, evaluate whether she’s able to understand what this means for her body, while dealing the backlash and judgment from your family and neighbors.
"I want to make a VR experience where your avatar is a private investigator in a wheelchair. You have to follow people around, take pictures, eavesdrop on conversations, but sometimes your targets walk down the stairs and you might miss part of the conversation while you wait for the elevator. You have to search apartments and hotels rooms for clues without leaving any trace. You have to get creative about reaching items that are placed in difficult locations and your condition might even come as an advantage if you use it to trick people, feign helplessness so you can snatch wallets and phones out of their pockets.
"I want to make games about taboo topics, like domestic violence against men. But I realize that I am not a man, and I don’t have any experience with domestic violence. But I would love to brainstorm this concept with people who do in a community where they feel safe enough to share their personal experiences."
Lode concluded with a twist on the GDC Microtalks theme — "I want to make games for everybody, because every single one of us deserves to play" — and a request that if anyone does want to make those games with her, to get in touch.
Henrike Lode’s work can be seen at her website.

If their YouTubers are paid to say a thing, they’ll say so Machinima, the video gaming YouTube network, has settled a Federal Trade Commission complaint that it did not disclose that its broadcasters were paid to make enthusiastic endorsements of the Xbox One during that console’s 2013 launch.
The settlement does not involve any monetary penalties, but rather an order, to wbich Machinima agrees, that “prohibits Machinima from misrepresenting in any influencer campaign that the endorser is an independent user of the product or service being promoted." In other words, if its broadcasters are paid to say a thing, they or Machinima must declare that.
In September, the FTC filed a complaint against Machinima, alleging that it had paid YouTubers up to $30,000 to say complimentary things about the Xbox One. The finely detailed arrangements, which included talking points, suggested video clips and a warning not to say anything disparaging about the Xbox One or its launch titles, were kept secret. Machinima’s affiliates were contractually obligated never to disclose them.
Microsoft was not cited for any wrongdoing.

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Because of the nature of the complaint, the FTC was unable to levy a fine. However, with this order in place, any violation now is subject to a penalty of up to $16,000.

In September, an FTC spokesman said the Machinima case is the first to address deceptive advertising by YouTube creators.
Under Machinima’s program, five "influencers" were paid to produce and publish two video reviews each, under explicit instructions about the content of the reviews. These reviews were examined and approved by Microsoft and its advertising buyer, Starcom, before publication. The FTC said one YouTuber was paid $15,000 for two videos and another was given $30,000.
Another arrangement paid other "influencers" $1 for every 1,000 views their Xbox One-positive videos generated, with a cap of $25,000. These "influencers" signed contracts that prohibited them from disclosing any detail of the arrangement.
Machinima’s YouTubers uploaded more than 300 praiseworthy videos of the Xbox One between the console’s Nov. 22, 2013 launch and the end of the year.

The heroes in a half shell team up for a tough co-op boss battle against Bebop Watch on YouTube | Subscribe to Polygon on YouTube
After bringing us a not-so-great take on The Legend of Korra and a slightly better riff on Transformers nostalgia, it’s no shocker that Platinum Games is back for a third swing at licensed games. But if our demo at this week’s Game Developer’s Conference is anything to go by, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhattan may be Platinum’s best and most confident licensed game yet.
The TMNT franchise lends itself to co-op, so Platinum has built a game with many recognizable elements from its other action titles but with a new four-player framework. The game is positioned as a brawler — not unlike the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle quarter-munching arcade games of old — but it has a more strategic element in each turtle’s ability to equip and use special moves that then go on cooldown. Comboing these moves together with your teammates will allow you to pull off more damage, which will be a necessity in the game’s tough, lengthy boss fights.
It also features an interesting mission structure. The turtles are unleashed in a larger open-world area, of which we are told there are several throughout the game. The game pulls from a list of possible missions to send the turtles on within that area at random, meaning each playthrough will be a little different. Once they’ve completed enough of these side missions, the boss fight to finish out the mission opens up.
In the video above, you can watch us, along with the game’s producer and director, play through an early level. We finish off a couple of sub-missions and then go on to fight Bebop, a difficult battle where we need to pull together our various abilities in order to eke out a victory.
You also get to witness some of the game’s incredible charm, including a move that forces enemies to dance and another where Michelangelo turns his nunchaku into a baseball bat and knocks an enemy out of the park. Hard not to crack a grin, at the very least.

It arrives with the Outer Rim DLC on Tuesday,, but it’s free for everyone Tucked into an announcement getting fans of Star Wars Battlefront ready for the Outer Rim DLC is this little nugget: a spectator mode is coming to the game, free to all players, with a title update on Tuesday.
It’s not mentioned in the above video, but it was inside a news release accompanying it this week. We’d seen teases for things like the “Hutt Contracts," which are a series of new missions, new weapons and the increased level cap, but spectator mode wasn’t known until now.
Also, this video confirms Tuesday, March 22 as the Outer Rim launch date, which contradicts an earlier GameStop listing that had it pegged for April 5.
The video above showcases the premium content coming with the $14.99 Outer Rim expansion, which is included for those who bought the $49.99 "season pass" option. Three more premium expansions will be released later this year under that schedule.
There are new maps, plenty of weapons and two new playable stars, Nien Nunb, the Sullustan, and Greedo, who has a so-apropos quick draw ability. Now you know why Han had to shoot first.

Joe Rogan will describe his own ass-beating in the latest update Well, here’s something new: The next fighter in EA Sports UFC 2 is the announcer who calls its action.
That means that Joe Rogan will talk about himself kicking ass or getting his ass kicked, making him the second sports video game commentator to do so in the past year. Steve Kerr was in the virtual booth of NBA 2K15 while also appearing on the sideline in his rookie year as the coach of the Golden State Warriors. (Kerr was replaced by Greg Anthony in NBA 2K16.)
Here’s Rogan in action, via YouTuber Z3E3E3.

To fight with Rogan, UFC 2 players must download the latest title update and then enter the Konami code at the game’s main screen (that is, the one where the only other command is to press the options/meny button to continue to the game).
The code on PlayStation 4 is Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, Circle, X and Options; and on Xbox One, Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A and Menu.
Two other like, you know, actual fighters also join the roster for free in this update; they are Jessica Aguilar and Sage Northcutt. EA Sports UFC 2 has more than 250 fighters on its roster.
For more on EA Sports UFC 2, check out our review. Polygon scored it an 8, praising the game for “solid, understandable and enjoyable" fight action.

It looks like someone making fun of virtual reality. The player crawls on their hands and knees, reaches to grab nothing and looks in every direction, headset strapped to their face, oblivious to the world around them.
That’s Unseen Diplomacy, one of the most aggressive uses of HTC’s Vive with how much it asks the player to move around. You play a secret agent and find keycards, hack computers, make your way through crawl spaces and generally move around a lot while playing. At one point during a demonstration of the game, I accidentally kicked the headset cord out of the attached PC.
But Unseen Diplomacy is not, at least for now, a game you’ll be able to buy. The developers at Triangular Pixels created it for public spaces and events, like this year’s Game Developers Conference where they recently showed it off. The game can involve actors in other headsets and various unique factors, similar to the ‘90s British game show The Crystal Maze.

“We don’t know what we’re going to do with it yet," says creative director Katie Goode.
For the time being, her team is taking it to events and installing it as a permanent exhibit at the National Video Game Arcade in the U.K. Down the road, though, she says there’s a chance it could turn into something for home use.
"We need to basically just talk to some people and just really see what our options are with it," she says. "Especially considering this was made in a month, and it’s just me and my partner, and we are working on another game at the same time."
Goode says if the team ends up going down that path, it would need to add a game loop, longevity, multiple areas, etc. "It scales massively," she says.
Currently, Triangular Pixels is also developing a dungeon exploration game called Smash Hit Plunder, which is a traditional commercial game players will be able to buy, with a demo now available for Gear VR.

Pee-wee’s Big Holiday doesn’t feel very big at all. Although the character’s March 18th Netflix debut — and first feature film since 1988’s Big Top Pee-wee — sends him from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic, the eternal man-child’s travels feel like a string of mildly amusing diversions instead of a grand journey with ramifications.
Pee-wee’s Big Holiday begins in the West Coast town of Fairville, where Pee-wee Herman is but one of many absurd townies. In the years since we last saw him, Pee-wee (played by a frighteningly unchanged Paul Reubens) has traded his classic Playhouse for something a little more quaint. But it quickly becomes apparent that time has had only the most minor effects on Pee-wee, who maintains his penchant for silly gadgets, comically bad puns and quick-witted snark.
Big Holiday is going for quantity over quality
The seeming timelessness of the character becomes the central focus, however; Pee-wee tells his friends of his resistance to change. In the film — which seems to operate in a canon in which Pee-wee’s Playhouse and movies like Pee-wee’s Big Adventure never happened — Pee-wee counters possible life developments by proudly claiming to have never left Fairville — and he never wants to.
That conviction makes sense for a character whose primary trait is his childlike demeanor. But it’s one that Pee-wee quickly abandons in a move that undercuts what could have been the film’s emotional core. After he meets and befriends a cool guy from the city, portrayed by a game Joe Manganiello, Pee-wee is offered the chance to give up his small town digs for a New York City vacation — an invitation he takes up quickly.

And so Pee-wee heads off by car to the Big Apple to be a featured guest at his new friend’s birthday party. In doing so, the film abandons the semblance of plot it had been building up in Fairville; the viewer is now subject to a series of cross-country hijinks with varying returns.
Unlike his very first outing in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, which remains the high-water mark for the character, Big Holiday is going for quantity over quality. There’s no memorable gag here that stands out above the others, nor do most of the characters leave an impression. Manganiello’s character works, thanks to the comic dissonance of the actor playing it straight in this ridiculous world, but the recurring girl gang is rarely funny in their myriad appearances. (And the relationship that builds between the babyfaced outlaw played by Alia Shawkat and the 60-plus-year-old Pee-wee is uncomfortable at best.)

What’s worse is that, despite the fact that each of these scenes unfolds quickly, the movie feels long. Really, really long. Pee-wee’s road trip feels like far more of a slog for the viewer than the traveler himself.
Even a Pee-wee fan who loved Big Adventure and grew up with Playhouse will likely concede that the character can get taxing quickly. In Big Holiday, his less endearing quirks are exacerbated by the film’s noncommittal storytelling, in which characters are dropped minutes after they’re introduced. It’s tiring to watch Pee-wee have the same drawn-out conversations and miscommunications with other oddballs over and over and over and over again.

The TV series worked far better than Big Holiday does thanks to its variety: There was a whole cast of characters at play, along with different skits and sketches that sidelined Pee-wee. But the Netflix film has its hero front-and-center for almost its entire duration. Scenes that cut back to Manganiello in New York as he awaits Pee-wee’s arrival are when the film is at its best, primarily because they feel like a reprieve. Pee-wee’s Big Holiday is anything but for the viewer who must try — and likely fail — to keep up with the spry and always-on Herman.
Sometimes seeing that something or someone you loved as a kid has stayed the same after all these years is comforting. But this film wears out its welcome fast, and those looking to relive their childhood Pee-wee Herman fanaticism are probably better off just rewatching Big Adventure on Netflix for the umpteenth time than dipping into this forgettable revival.