Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Sort of! You’ll forgive me pulling a very small amount of wool over your eyes there, but the idea of the world’s most absurdly macho action videogame embracing turn-based strategy, as Gears of War: The Boardgame does, is a wonderfully strange one. And also a fine confluence of RPS’s farther-flung interests – the original Gears was released on PC (though the second was a sad casualty of Epic doing a frightened little piracy-wee) and of course we’re prone to a healthy spot of boardgame coverage now and again.
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In their Epic issue, the Escapist pays me cash money to vent a little about the somewhat odd double-standard people have about adolescent games, specifically Gears of War.

Along with my peers, I chuckled at the “So Macho” remake of Gears of War as 2006 drew to a close. And this was only natural. Gears of War’s washed-out, hyper-macho vision of a world on the cusp of complete annihilation was more than a little silly. That’s fine. That’s videogames. But my first clue that this satire was solidifying into something else came with Eurogamer’s year-end awards.

Lots more, including usavoury metaphors, digs at Walker and euologising of hypermachismo in the full thing. In short: If wanting that gun Blaine has is in the Predator is wrong, who’d want to be right?

While Kieron has been making space-adventurers wear hot pink and disco-dance in Tabula Rasa, I’ve been feeling the effects of a swollen Y chromosome playing some Gears Of War on PC. Big, big men, see how they kill. I’m not sure what it is about Epic’s current design ethos, but I just can’t get over the hyper-solidity of these soldiers and their kill-to-be-caring attitudinizing. Marcus and Dom. It’s like each knows what the other one is thinking… Read the rest of this entry »