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Yeah that sums up my distaste quite well. GOW is an in-direct descendent (in direction and tone) of Doom, but with an extra layer of unnecessary crap. In Doom you are the protagonist, but in Gears of War you are kinda cosplaying as these characters … and while some people might be enjoying some kind of wish fullfillment thing I just found the extra layer of man-cosplay really lame. It took a lot away from the fighting and shooting through dark places that was the draw for me.

For me the game would have been better without Marcus Fenix or Delta Squad. It doesn’t have to be a movie … just me and a friend against the bugs would have been fine – we can make our own stories because your story telling really isn’t that good.

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Theory: Mechanistically, I’ll go with you on Miyamoto. But a comparison of the sort of aesthetics Miyamoto games tend to have to Pixar is enormously, ludicrously complimentary to Miyamoto. They’re embarassingly badly written, badly designed, fairy-boy bollocks. The first two hours with any mainstream Nintendo game is me getting over my retch-reflex.

(What I didn’t deal with in the article is that I actually like teenage juvenalia more than I do pre-teen ones… but that’s neither here nor there. In the same way I wouldn’t dismiss Mario because it’s kiddy, people shouldn’t dismiss Gears because it’s teenage. Hell, there’s lots of other reasons to dismiss it, if you wanted to.)

CplTurboTurd: ” I’ve noticed that you have a peculiar interest in the convoluted, subtle and above all self-conscious elements of how people interpret and consume popular culture. ”

Guilty as charged. One note though – I don’t really mean liking it in an ironic way. In some ways, it’s beyond that irony – as a gent in the thread said, getting drunk and singing with your mates in the pub. That’s the bit of the mind Gears tickles.

Conversely, your critique is of Gears is a lot stronger than the IT’S GAY! stuff I was railing against. I don’t necessarily disagree.

KG

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Also, great point about the double standard regarding Japanese juvenilia. Personally I like everything that’s beautifully silly, whether it’s a misspelled Marcus Phoenix or Dante with too much hairspray. Everything’s better than a game that takes its own fictional military bullshit seriously, like those terribly boring Tom Clancy titles.

But… dude. You wrote “Panzer tank”. That means “Tank tank”. That’s just wrong. Unless of course it’s part of the intentional silliness in which case I suppose it’s okay.

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If you want to see idiocy of character go play Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter [either one] I guarantee you that the bullshit that comes out of both your team mates and YOUR mouth [as Mitchel] will drive you absolutely flag burningly insane.

GRAW… now there is a game devoid of any subtlety, humor or satire that needs a good postmortem kicking [although again it's aces in co-op].

Genre wise GRAW and GOW are pretty much the same [cover then fight] it’s just tonally GRAW gets it so very wrong and comparatively that makes GOW’s bear force one overload seem strangely on point.

btw Bear Force One: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twQlpFrm5iM

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culture. There’s clearly a fascination with people being drawn towards a particular niche because it fits their sense of self, and the thought processes they go through in order to reject or embrace a particular band/film/game. Phonogram seemed to focus on this a great deal, and I suppose such commentary is appropriate when looking at music, given the extent to which pledging allegiance to a particular genre or band is used as an expression of self, but it’s rarer for it to be as useful when discussing video game tribalism. I often find this analysis to be somewhat tiresome, like my brain is gradually forming a corkscrew shape attempting to keep up with the ‘irony wrapped in an ulterior motive inside a niche’ pattern of the discussion, which is always highly speculative given the psychological nature of the debate, but this article was really terrific.

The line from the Korean gamer asking “Why am I controlling the bad guy?” is so priceless, the most succinct summation of one of the shooter genre’s problems I’ve heard since “Edward Pistolhands” was used to describe the average FPS avatar’s inability to interact with the world with anything other than violence. It hits on what I imagine is the reason for many of the complaints regarding the Gears universe and others like it; people aren’t necessarily making a reactionary and highly personal objection to Gears due to a belief that engaging in its juvenalia is a violation of the sense of self that sees them as an intelligent mature being, it is perhaps a more measured assessment that rejects the game based on a revulsion of values it expresses that the commentator
feels should be universally despised. Ie, the former is a more selfish concern, a desire to maintain a particular sense of identity, whereas the latter is rather more communal, more altruistic, stemming from a belief that such crud is not good for anyone.

I say this because when playing GoW, I had no shame in enjoying it. Not enjoying it for ‘what it is’, not enjoying it ‘in spite of itself’ not enjoying it ‘in an ironic way’. I’ve always found that a bizarre way to engage with anything, the notion that you must have a fixed set of values through which you parse something, and if it doesn’t match them precisely you must find an alternate means of enjoying it that enables you to preserve your idealised sense of self. Perhaps that stance implies a self-consciousness of its own and…oh, we’re back to the corkscrew and Russian doll bit again.

I enjoyed it for its gameplay, which was brilliantly constructed and innovative (yeh, that’s right). My objections to it stemmed from the thorough unlikeability of the games protagonists and the ugliness of the values being implicitly espoused throughout the game. Games, and FPSs in particular, generally are appalling at doing anti-heroes, hence the bafflement of the quoted gamer at the avatar he was controlling. I think it results from the fact that the US produces most FPSs, and the fact that the unpleasant values of such a hugely conservative nation are inevitably expressed through their popular culture, and secondly, the violent nature of shooters themselves, where the easy option for expressing the anti- element of anti-hero is through sadism.

Witness the scene in the third act where your squad comes across a man trapped in the bowels of a factory, which has had the vast majority of its occupants recently slaughtered by the Locusts. Rather than escort him to safety or simply protect him, they sneer with relish at forcing him to help them fulfil their next objective.

He berates them for their attitude and suggests such coercion is typical of the military. Within minutes the unfortunate survivor is killed due to falling into a pit of wretches, which is met by unconcerned silence from Fenix and Santiago.

This is typical of how the Gears behave throughout the game and the mores the game expresses. The military is
to be respected and all those who oppose it are weaklings and cowards who deserve their inevitable grizzly fate. Being a sadistic, insensitive lout is cool and will make you a winner. To me, a well crafted anti-hero is a loveable rogue, whereas the Gears just seem like arseholes, as I suspect they do to anyone who finds American conservative morality completely alien. Hence any criticism I aim at the game isn’t the result of self-conscious desire to convince myself that I’m above consuming juvenalia in an unabashed unironic way, it’s borne out of an entirely sincere and unmanufactured disgust at what’s being inherently advocated by the game’s creators.

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It think the key is not having endless monochrome ugliness.

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GoW was great fun playing co-op, but the idiocy of the characters lessened it. (Seriously, I wanted to shoot most of the human “allies”…if these were what was left of humanity, then would losing it really been all that bad?)I’m not sure what the difference is, but the machidiocy (SWIDT?)of, say, Predator is great “laugh along w/ your buddies whilst you drink beer”, wheras Gears’ just made me cringe…

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There’s always a thin line between knowingly stupid over-the-topness and genuine emotion: as Radiant says, singing loud drinking songs with inebriated friends is both a bit of dumb fun and genuine male bonding. Likewise, something can be exciting and spectacular without being empty and meaningless. A good case is Apocalypse Now’s famed Ride of the Valkyries scene: I don’t know about you, but I watch it with a mixture of childish excitement at the explosions and machine-gunning and gung-ho blood-thirstiness of the soldiers, and uncomfortable shock at the callousness of the killing and the sheer scale of destruction. If it had been a pure action scene, or a scene designed purely for pathos, it wouldn’t have been nearly as effective. By combining the two, you get an uneasy mix that heightens the effectiveness of both. I remember reading an interview with a US soldier around the time of the invasion of Iraq, who mentioned that his company watched Apocalypse Now before the invasion. They weren’t watching it as a comment on the nature of war, they were watching it for the action and excitement of a war film.

I guess this is pretty irrelevant to Gears of War, which has no intelligent subtext, as far as I can tell. The whole thing is a framework for being able to shoot and/or chainsaw nasty monsters. I’m happy with that.

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