Greeting Readers,
Digitally Stimulated, the digital magazine by huge dorks, FOR huge dorks, is for sale on Amazon.
You can get this for your devices. By which I mean sex toys. How does an ebook go on a sex toy? Who cares? Just buy the book, vibrate yourself into oblivion, and then read the book in the post glow to make you forget how weird you feel about the fact that you’re vibrating yourself to the point you can’t function anymore. Forget that! Read about video games! You’ll just be dead before long anyway!
As a promo, I’m including below the ENTIRE text from our discussion of Gears of War below. This is from the first issue of the magazine, which is ALSO for sale.
If you like what you read, then you might as well buy both issues. If you don’t, I dunno, fuck yourself.
And please, if you do buy the books, please, please leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads or wherever you review books. Buying the books is the second-best thing you can do to support, leaving a review is the best. Third best…probably more of the vibrator stuff.
See you in the funny papers!
Ian: This is the first in a series of discussions between Pete and me about various video games and their place in the pantheon of canonical games.
Pete: The Mount Olympus of games! The Asgard! Other places where the best stuff goes!
Ian: We decided to borrow a concept from a great podcast, The Canon, which spends each episode debating whether or not a particular film belongs in the canon of the truly great (perhaps transcendent?) films. At the end, listeners vote yes or no.
Pete and I decided this format would work well, but we’ve divided things up a little differently.
Pete: Because, let’s face it, nobody is going to vote on this the way they do for a podcast. We’re not podcast-popular. We have to Stevie Nicks this shit and go our own way.
The plan is for each of us to build his own canon filled with the best games. And, because our tastes and ideas of greatness are so different, it should be pretty interesting to see how our canons develop.
Ian: The reasons for something to be in a canon of great games might be really different depending on the game and who’s proposing it. It could look more like a player’s canon, or maybe a historical canon. Think about films. There are films that are really great and enjoyable, but probably won’t fall into a historical canon. Something like Anchorman or Pacific Rim comes to mind for film, and maybe Ready Player One for books. These are things that are well-crafted, interesting, but perhaps lacking influence beyond a certain time frame. These are works that you recommend widely, but part of you hesitates to call them “great.”
The difference is that we can recognize something is a “great” work without really liking it. Pete will never, in a million years, sit and watch Citizen Kane. Won’t happen. He would not recommend it on the Canon. That’s because, if you asked him about which films were important, he wouldn’t know. Pete’s ignorance about film is only surpassed by his ignorance of games. A smart film person, like me, would say that film as we know it wouldn’t exist without Citizen Kane. I’d hesitate to recommend it to anyone that wasn’t interested in classic film or the history of film, but I recognize its greatness.
Pete: Totally. I am pretty stupid about film. And that’s what also makes me great. See, as a former English major, I can recognize that there’s a real problem when we talk about canon.
Sometimes a canonical work is important, but holy hell is it boring. Sometimes a canonical work influenced a lot of things, but it’s not always the best version of that thing. First isn’t always best, and to me, the greatest achievement of an artist isn’t always the work I get the most joy out of.
If we’re talking video games, we’ll probably argue about this later, Donkey Kong is a good game. It certainly has historical significance. I’m SURPRISED when someone hasn’t played it, and playing it seems like part of a gamer education. But is it a game that’s much fun to me? No. It’s too hard. Screw that monkey. Ape? Well, whatever he is, screw him and his stupid custom ties. What a pompous asshole.
I don’t know if I’d put Donkey Kong in the Canon. It’s got a great backstory, the origin of Shigeru Miyamoto is tied to it, but I love the story of Donkey Kong and what it represents more than I love playing that game. I liked the movie King of Kong more than I liked the game.
Ian: Donkey Kong is easy. Get gud.
Pete: This canon is Digitally Stimulated’s version of the classic Top 100 list.
You know what kills me about the top 100 list thing? You can be inclusive and thoughtful as hell, and no matter what, comment number one will be “What about [Game X]?” Well, you can shove it with your Game X. Or better yet, shoot us a message if you think there’s a game that’s canon-worthy. But just know that the induction of one game doesn’t mean the exclusion of another. If Halo is in there, that doesn’t mean Halo: Reach won’t be.
What makes this cool is that it’s not limited, and that means we can have more than one type of game, or we can go through brand new AAA titles and indie titles equally.
Ian: Anyway, Gears of War, Pete’s proposal for a first game in the Canon.
I think it’s fair to evaluate this franchise as a series. Partially because I feel like playing them through is part of a larger experience. However, I’m probably going to recommend only playing one of them. Just tipping my hand in advance. I’ve played all three main series games, but I didn’t play Gears of War: Judgment.
Look, for the rest of this article, can we just call them 1, 2, or 3? Judgement is going to be 0, or whatever. I don’t know.
I’ve played 1,2, and 3. I’ve finished them all on Hardcore mode solo (Pete hasn’t, as far as I know). I’ve gone back through 1 and 3, but I took my copy of 2 over to a woman’s house while we were dating, and she faded on me and won’t return my calls or my copy of 2. That means I didn’t go back through 2, even though it’s the only one I’d recommend playing. I’ve played 2 and 3 the most frequently in co-op. I’ve played the Ultimate Edition on Xbox One, and even a little multiplayer. I’ve played the co-op with people of variable degrees of experience, from Pete who had played the series before I did, to someone who had never played a third-person shooter before.
I play a lot of shooters, and this one has its moments, but I have some reservations about its entry into canon. I’ll get into my objections, but I want to make sure Pete has some space to talk about the novels, expanded universe, and how much rule-of-cool can make this series worthwhile.
Pete: Well, you called me out here. It’s so early for people to know how nerdy I am. And by that I mean the shitty kind of nerdy. Not the Chris Hardwick kind.
Yes, I have read most of the Gears of War novels. Which aren’t novelizations, by the way. They expand the universe with stories of the Pendulum Wars and…you know what? I’m making things worse.
I fucking love these games. Gears 1 was the first thing I played on Xbox 360, which I bought about six or seven years after it launched. I was pretty far behind, hadn’t played a new game in years. Gears was my intro into what gaming was in 2012. Or, I guess, what gaming was in 2006, but I saw it for the first time in 2012.
Gears 2 was the second game I played on Xbox 360. Gears 3 was the third. After I finished the trilogy, I spent a long time chasing that dragon, or giant destructive underground hellworm, as it were, and nothing else quite cut it. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of great games on 360. But once I’d played through the Gears trilogy, the smart thing to do would have been to play something totally different, scratch a completely different itch instead of playing lesser versions of Gears.
That’s the basis of why I put this game up for debate. I loved it, and I think it’s the best version of a kind of game.
I agree with what you said, Gears 2 is the best distillation of the series. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you took Gears 2 to a lady’s house rather than 1 or 3. And I think it’s a telling choice. So let’s go with that game. Let’s talk about Gears 2 instead of the whole series.
Ian: Actually, it was two different ladies’ houses. That means I took the game twice. Both times, they played it once and didn’t really want to play it again or finish it.
Pete: Ah, I see what you did there. Just to let everyone know, Ian is a ladies’ man. Played Gears 2 with not one, but TWO different women. 10-4, good buddy. 10-69-4.
I’m a grown-up.
Tell me why you picked 2 as a game to play with the ladies. Teach me, love guru.
Ian: I picked 2 in large part because 1 has some glaring problems, and 3 is mechanically sound but a poor introduction to the series.
Gears of War 1 is, at times, Nintendo-hard and mechanically broken to the point of being unfair.
An early level in the game has a sequence where your character needs to stay out of the dark, meaning you need to constantly find and create light sources. This sequence works great and is actually scary until a large firefight where Dom, your AI co-op partner, may decide to hop a ledge into the dark and die. If you try to save him, you die. If he expires before you finish the fight single-handed, you die. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out Dom was programmed as some kind of metaphor, something about jumping into terrible situations out of panic. Dom-as-tragic-metaphor for the pointlessness of war and how the “good” can still make a single mistake and die would be interesting. That was the only thought that kept me from saying, “Fuck this game.” But the game said, “No, fuck you” by bringing the same problem back for the final boss fight.
Pete: Haha, I like that. Dom as metaphor for the pointless nature of the whole endeavor.
Ian: It’s the only thing that makes sense because Dumb Dom wasn’t patched out in the remake.
Pete: I do think you hit on something that was present in the first game but got lost as the series went on. I thought an early, appealing part of the narrative was the way in which the characters were not special. They were gears in the sense that they were a part of a machine, only a very small part of a very big machine. I think the further the series went, the more that aspect was lost, and that’s a true shame.
The first game is, for me, the best in terms of atmosphere. Maybe because it was all new, maybe because of what I said above. But the gameplay just wasn’t hashed out. I’d love to play a remake where the mechanics of 2 were placed into the world of 1. That would be a near-perfect game to me.
As it stands, I got trapped by AI Dom once playing the first game. That’s a pretty big problem. And as players, we have such low standards that all we’re really looking for, most times, is AI that doesn’t actively prevent progress. We don’t even need a helpful companion, just someone who doesn’t fuck up constantly. Sadly, Dom misses that mark in the first game.
Ian: The cover mechanics weren’t well-developed in the first game either. I couldn’t run away from being flanked without sticking to a wall. This made escape damn-near impossible. The Ultimate Edition fixes the cover problems, but it didn’t fix Dom. I can understand Gears of War 1 as a technical achievement and important to the history of the series, but it’s a bit of a bear to play.
Pete: I’m with you. It’s got its place in gaming history, I still love it, but I do not love the gameplay. I love the opening in the prison, the first appearance of Raam. The berserkers, though kind of annoying, added a truly scary level to the game that they never really hit on again. But I have to admit, the frustration when I know what I want my character to do and he doesn’t do it, that is just too omnipresent in the first game.
Ian: I debate between 2 and 3 when introducing someone new. I think 2 is a little more new-player-friendly because it doesn’t introduce exploding enemies so quickly. The idea of enemies exploding when they are close the way they do in 3 is a decent twist for people who’ve played the hell out of two games already, but that would be a rough introduction to the series. Plus, it’s pretty bogged down with lore and a tortuously slow tutorial.
Pete: Agree. The exploding baddies in 3 weren’t my favorite. I think they served a purpose, upping the ante, and I think it was fair to assume most players had already played through 1 and 2 and would want something more. But that experience…shooting big tree things just isn’t cool. It’s not fun. It doesn’t feel challenging. Also, most of that game happened in daylight, which felt like a big shift I didn’t necessarily dig.
Ian: Gears 2 is the only one in the series without a completely bullshit boss fight that functions like an underwater level (“Oh, your character is slow and plodding with poor peripheral vision? Here’s a fast boss that kills you quickly if you don’t master our one dodge roll.”)
Pete: True. Raam, the boss in Gears 1, was way too difficult when compared to the rest of the game. And he was difficult in a bad way. I didn’t know whether or not I was doing the right thing, whether I was hurting him or not or if I was supposed to run to the other end of the area and pick up this special gun. I had no idea what I was doing.
Ian: For a power fantasy series, it sure did a terrible job of using a planted giant gun in the final boss battle. I ran right for it only to die and realize it was a trap all along. It’s strange that the bow (probably my favorite weapon in the series) worked better than the high-tech turret. Perhaps this has something to do with metaphor too, chasing the biggest gun and newest gadget always leading to doom…No, I’m sick of trying to defend broken mechanics with metaphors.
Pete: Yeah, the bosses in 1 and 3 were problematic. Raam in 1 because it just didn’t really work. The boss in 3, the queen, is just so unsatisfying. You’re mostly fighting this giant bug she rides, and for a game with so much up-close, visceral combat, it feels pretty removed. It’s kind of a weak, not-quite-satisfying ending to such a huge, epic series.
Ian: The final boss in 3 is the worst part for multiple reasons. First, it failed to recognize the best parts of the series, the sense of up-close brutality, carving someone into pieces with the chainsaw gun, and instead the game opted for something removed. Second, it introduced new rules for the last boss. I call this the “Bioshock Rule of Bosses,” because that series decides to make totally new mechanics for the climactic battle in each game. This is like deciding to have a book that stops in the last few chapters and says, “If you want to see the end, watch In Cold Blood on Netflix this October.” Third, it reduces the complex narrative of the entire series to a weird, distant firefight. Everyone in that final battle had been warped and destroyed by war. Regardless of who won, it felt like either side would barely survive or have any hopes of being an actual civilization. All that gets buried in a “Hit the thingy with a space laser” fight.
By contrast, 2 has a giant worm with multiple hearts. Each heart requires the player to cut through giant arteries, spurting blood everywhere. That’s a boss fight.
Pete: I think we agree, then. Gears of War 2 is the game to talk about.
Gears of War 2 is total player’s canon in my eyes. There’s nothing about it that doesn’t fit. But I’ll sum it up with 3 big reasons.
- Gears of War 2 actually lets you make some decisions on how to play.
So many games will tell players that they can choose stealth, killing, or other hybrid approaches of getting through the action. But Gears is the only game where this split approach worked for me.
The thing is, battles are fought as a series of short engagements. You fight a few enemies, advance a bit, fight a new small set of enemies. This incremental approach with distinct separations between battles means you get to decide, in each instance, how you want to go about it. Do you want to be more strategic? Cool. Do you want to run in, waving a chainsaw around like a maniac? Also cool. SUPER cool, in fact.
And because Gears doesn’t force you to do stupid upgrades, a system that lots of games use really badly because you have to upgrade yourself within different facets without ANY IDEA what’s coming up, you can change your mind for every engagement. It’s truly player’s choice, and a choice you can make over and over without the piling-on of previous choices weighing you down or sending you down a set path.
- This game plays the way an action game should.
After I played this, it was really hard to play first-person shooters. I felt like I was just standing eight feet away from someone, and we were shooting at each other until someone died. If you’re an advanced player in a first-person shooter, you can run in crazy circles or jump around all over the screen to get an advantage.
Can you imagine a movie gunfight where the characters jumped straight in the air over and over and it actually worked? That’s the stupidest shit ever. It takes me out of the game when enemies can thwart me by jumping. It makes the game feel like such a GAME.
The cover mechanic in Gears 2 works. It’s a third-person perspective, which means you can get behind sandbags and actually see that you’re covered. Take note, first-person, cover-based games. Your shit doesn’t work. I don’t know where my body is in the game. How do I know if I’m hidden if I can’t tell where my body is in space?
The shooting feels right in Gears 2. The movement feels right. The AI doesn’t screw up the game for you when you play alone. The enemies are pretty balanced. This game feels right. It’s natural, and when I’ve played it with people who aren’t experienced, they’re able to pick it up. Which, to me, says it’s intuitive in its mechanics, and that means your obstacles come in the form of action, not because the game uses control or unfair situations against you.
- It’s fun.
The weapons are fun to shoot. The tasks stay away from stupid bullshit like escorting missions, swimming, doing something without weapons, all the kind of stuff that adds variety, but horrible variety.
I hate an underwater level. I heard an interview with a creator from Shovel Knight, and he was saying how hard it was to program the water level. No fucking shit! You program an entire game with certain physics, then it’s hard to program a single level where you throw all that out the window?
Gears 2 is fun. Going inside an enormous worm and cutting its giant heart into pieces with a chainsaw gun is my kind of crazy. Fighting huge spider creatures is my kind of nuts. That opening sequence, that sort of Starship Troopers feel where you’re part of an enormous battle and then go careening underground in some kind of drill capsule? That’s my kind of bonkers.
The game is made to be played. It’s paced to keep you going. It’s made to be fun. Oh, and a big key to that, in my eyes, they went a long way to make the bad guys truly alien.
I feel a little gross when I play Call of Duty. I don’t really like blowing someone’s head apart. I’m not condemning other people who do. I know in my giant, wormy heart, that these aren’t real people. They’re just pixels. But for me, it’s a little icky somehow. It makes me feel like I have to swallow down my reservations before I play, and it makes me less able to enjoy the victories in most action games.
Gears makes everything feel foreign, and also cartoon-y. There’s a comic book feel to it where every aspect is expanded and hyper-realized, Everything within the game is in relative proportion, and it feels just unreal enough that I don’t feel bad about killing the bad guys.
Ian: My nitpick here is that different design choices might have made me shoot my co-op partners a little less. The bad guys who are wearing motorhomes as armor look a lot like the good guys who are wearing air-conditioners as armor. I wasted a lot of bullets firing at friendlies. Call of Duty eliminates this problem by saying, “Shoot the brown people,” which is pretty racist but makes sense mechanically.
Pete: Hey, Hitler said it first, but you said it best.
I really feel this is an action game that was made with fun in mind. Made for people to enjoy playing.
That’s why it’s canon for me. It works, it gives you a little agency that’s flexible, and it’s made to be fun.
There you go. Gears of War 2: Player’s Canon!
FIN.
Is that how your stupid sled movie ends? Fin?
Ian: Gears of War 2 was made with fun in mind, but no one told the story department.
The first game in the series is pretty hard to deal with in terms of story because, well, you shoot guys, guys shoot you, whatever.It’s strange because 3 is probably the peaks-and-valleys of plot because it has the best character moments of the series while keeping the driving focus on the least interesting character in the series (Marcus “Phuck Your Earth Spelling” Fenix). However, 2 might be the only one where plot actually derails the fun.
For a game that wants to be a cartoon, it sure as shit makes torture and post-traumatic stress a central pivot point. There’s a whole plotline about the bad guys (the Locusts, I think, but I had to look that up) stealing people and torturing them because…well, it’s to try and prove that the bad guys you’ve been shooting for a game-and-a-half are totally evil you guys. Tai, a character introduced as the badass-est badass in a world full of badasses is discovered post-torture, handed a gun, and he promptly blows his own brains out. This seemed a little out-of-place, but isn’t the worst thing to happen.
The worst was finding Dom’ wife in some sort of prison tube. Dom, your AI co-op partner, has spent the past game-and-three-quarters trying to find his missing wife Maria in the middle of the war. It’s not a terrible character motivation, and it does just fine (grating at times, but not enough to ruin the fun in this game). The discovery of a starved, tortured, and nearly-dead Maria is bad enough, but Dom shoots her as some kind of mercy killing. Considering we’ve never really met Maria as a person, her torture and death is among video games’ most obvious example of the Woman in a Refrigerator trope (considering you find her in a pod, it’s almost as if the writers heard about the trope and copied it literally).
I’m not sure these issues make the game un-fun, but these unearned emotional moments change parts of the experience from over-the-top fun to downright ugly and exploitative. If I were to recommend this game overall, which I do, I would also recommend mashing the button when cutscenes come after about halfway through the game unless you really want to deal with some tonal shift problems.
I mention this sequence because one woman, whom I’ll call “Karen,” really loved Xbox 360 games. She especially loved shooting games like Destiny, Borderlands, and Halo. Gears of War was a series she’d skipped over, so it seemed to make sense for us to try it together. The tutorial (which I’ll return to again) explained how to play the game fairly well. I prepped her for most of the dudebro aspects of the series and that game, and she loved things like one of the chainsaw fight cutscenes.
However, Karen had the typical struggles of female gamers who play online. She was abused by people. She was sexually harassed. She would receive backhanded compliments like, “You’re pretty good for a girl.” Video games and gamers, as a culture, are pretty fucking childish and sexist. As a series, Gears of War does some things right eventually by putting women into practical armor (well, practical in that wearing a shipping container of armor is “practical”) and generally having them treated as equals rather than sex objects. That said, I described the Maria sequence to Karen, and she didn’t really want to play that far. I convinced her to play through the giant worm sequence, which she enjoyed, but it was a little tough to convince her to push through the rest of the game, knowing what was ahead.
I hesitate to throw out a work of art because of its worst moments, and plenty of canonized works have terrible elements. I do want to talk about gameplay overall, which is a strong suit of this game despite occasional flaws, but I think my recommendation of this game as part of a canon would need to come with a massive plot caveat. Gears 2 has the best combination of functional mechanics and followable plot, things missing from 1 and 3 respectively. However, the lowest points plot-wise come in this game. I bring up this issue because I can imagine, for some players, these sequences would be really un-fun. There are games where I recommend people mash the “Skip Cutscene” button, and I think that’s a rather big problem here.
Pete: Okay. Let me address the elephant in the room. Or the woman stuffed in the fridge, as it were.
This is such a hard thing. I feel like I’m in a position where I have to defend sexism in games here. I guess the best I can do is be honest in how I feel about it. Share an opinion.
I always get confused about whether being pro or anti Gamergate means you’re pro or anti sexist assholes, so I’m anti sexist asshole, whichever way that translates to a gamergate opinion. Or if it does. I don’t know. I don’t think either side of Gamergate really represents me. I vote independant on that one.
I was a reader of Green Lantern in the 90’s, right at the time when the original fridge-stuffing went down. Kyle Rayner, who was the GL at the time, was off doing who knows what, and then he comes home from space or wherever to find that an enemy of his, Major Force, killed Kyle’s girlfriend and stuffed her in Kyle’s fridge.
Obviously this was problematic. How do you name a bad guy “Major Force”? That’s so stupid. Am I to not only buy this, but also believe that there is an alien race that has THE SAME military ranks as The United States, and also that one of those ranks, major, is a word that also means “serious”?
Okay, okay. In all seriousness, this fridge event sparked a circulating list in the comics world that described moments when female characters were killed or injured or de-powered as a plot device. The problem, as acknowledged by the list’s creator, wasn’t the gruesome killing of a female character. That happens to a lot of characters in comics. The problem was that we killed a woman and stuffed her in a refrigerator for no reason other than motivating a male character to do or feel something.
It’s the same issue as ever. Princess gets captured, and her story is left blank. The story isn’t about her capture or what happens to her or her attempts to escape. The story is about a knight who saves her. The story is about a dude, and the woman is just a carrot on a stick.
The fridge thing makes it all a little worse. The implication here is that not only is the woman used as a plot device, but graphic harm is done upon her in order to motivate a guy. Gone is the innocent, bygone, wholesome sexism of rescuing a princess who was just…I don’t know, doing sudoku in the back room of a castle or something, waiting to be rescued. The woman in the fridge, she is used as an object, used violently, and doesn’t really get to exist as a character. And the primary reason she’s in the fridge is because someone needed to motivate a male character to do or feel something.
I am not here to deny that there is sexism in games, and I’m not here to say that this isn’t a problem. What I am here to say is that I think, in this case, you’re wrong. I don’t think Dom’s wife, Maria, is used as a plot device in the woman-in-the-fridge tradition. Jesus, the fact that this is a tradition…gross.
As players go through the game, they have no idea that Maria, sidekick-Dom’s wife, has been captured. Dom is looking for his wife, and this consists of him periodically showing cutscene characters Maria’s picture. For all Dom knows, Maria is safe and well. Or as safe and well as anyone can be in what amounts to a post-apocalyptic scenario. Dom’s not storming a castle to find her. The game doesn’t begin with her death as an explanation as to why he became military. At no point does a woman serve as bait, and at no point in this series is another woman imperiled in a non-combatant capacity.
Now, at some point you discover the baddies are capturing people and torturing them for whatever reason. It is very shortly after you discover this fact that you discover Maria is in a Locust prison. And it’s very, very shortly after that you find her and she is killed. I’m talking about, in maybe…let’s call it 15 hours of gameplay between Gears 1 and 2 up to this point, you find out Maria has been captured, and it’s less than ten minutes later that you free her. That would add up to 1% of the gameplay time being motivated by the rescue of Maria. 1% of the time elapsed thus far, by the way. This does not include the remainder of 2 and 3.
Maria’s capture motivates a micro battle, which is how this game is paced. A small event or objective motivates a short action piece. You need to rescue someone, you have to provide mortar fire, you need to clear an area of enemies. Maria’s rescue motivates character action for a very small portion of the game. A portion that is set up to be emotionally significant, yes, but is it plot significant?
Maria’s capture, torture, and death don’t change the trajectory of the game whatsoever. Before you find her, the goal is to kill bad guys. After she’s gone, the goal is to kill bad guys, the same ones and in the same way.
From the enemy perspective, the Locust don’t know that Maria is Dom’s wife. They don’t know who Dom is. They aren’t capturing her to get at Dom.
You don’t have to go far to convince me that it’s a little tough, tonally. That Gears is kind of a bro game with clumsy attempts at moments of emotional depth. You could argue that it’s unnecessary, that the game could float without this subplot entirely, and I wouldn’t disagree with that. I wouldn’t disagree with the idea that an unnecessary violence to a female character is of significance and not to be ignored.
But this isn’t a female character being used as a carrot on a stick, and I think whether or not it’s earned is questionable. It has to do with whether or not you think something like that EVER qualifies as earn-able as well.
You said that the explanation of this scene turned off some of your playmates. Yes, when you explain it, that’s pretty much the definition of an unearned moment. Hey, it was Earth all along! No revelation, no moment is meaningful without some build-up. So if the argument is whether or not the game has earned this moment, I think that’s a matter of personal investment and of taste. But when you remove the context, the earn-ability question is pre-answered. Something can’t ever be earned if no attempt to earn it is made.
You mentioned before how I’d read the Gears books. In the first book, Aspho Fields, there’s a significant, strong, female lead character whose in-combat valor leads to her death. It’s taken seriously, and in fact presents the climax in the book, not to mention setting up a good deal of character trajectory.
The books paint a much fuller picture of all the characters and of the way women are treated in this world. Books by female author Karen Traviss, by the way.
The game is a portion of the story.
Now, I’m not fooling myself into believing that people will read these books. What I will say, the material exists. The story is out there. The player has to put in the effort in order to be a part of it, but the story is there for the taking.
Which is interesting as well when we look back at the original Woman in the Fridge, Alex DeWitt.
Alex was not a female superhero. She was a superhero’s girlfriend. And although she may not have been fully explored, she was present in Kyle Rayner’s comic book life for 6 issues, 6 months of real-world time, and agrees to help Kyle learn how to manage his powers. She’s just the woman in the fridge if we choose to ignore the preceding material, and the subsequent material. As comics are known for, DeWitt has been revived, re-imagined, and brought back in a number of different ways. Her story didn’t begin or end with her fridge-stuffing.
This is how the entire trope can be a little problematic to me, honestly.
If we look at the Women in Refrigerators web site, it lists the women who were de-powered to motivate a man. For example, Barbara Gordon, aka Batgirl, is paralyzed by the Joker.
What we don’t get from this list is the fact that Barbara then becomes a different hero, Oracle, who is handicapped and moves on. She’s one of the only heroes who’s effective while she’s in a wheelchair. We don’t get that she was eventually de-paralyzed through comic book magic (seriously, she pretty much just wakes up one day and she can walk).
We don’t get that a story from 6 years prior, A Death In The Family, depicted the brutal killing of Jason Todd, aka Robin 2.0, at the hands of the Joker. A death that was not only rough, but was VOTED ON by readers. DC Comics asked the question, Should Jason Todd live or die? A 1-900 number was set up, and by a slim margin, Jason Todd was sentenced to death by readers.
That seems like such an indictment, to me, of the fact that readers want the violence. They want the brutality. When they feel like the emperor, sitting on high and deciding thumbs up or down, the majority go down.
And in the case of Gears of War, I think it’s interesting to pick out Maria as a woman in the fridge, when really the aforementioned Tai is more de-powered and tortured for the sake of story. When you say that Maria was in the capsule, that’s ignoring that you’re running past dozens of similar capsules. It’s ignoring that another comrade, Baird, was rescued from one earlier. It’s ignoring that Tai was one of the most powerful Gears you come across, and he’s tortured and demoralized in pretty short order.
When you put it to someone that you mercy kill your own wife in the game, I think that’s a big simplification of what’s going on. I hesitate to use the word “context” because of the debate on whether or not context matters. But fuck it, I’m of the opinion that context matters.
And finally, I would say something else. If we want to get all college and interpretive, I think one could view this as twisting a trope too.
Dig this: In a typical game, and Gears is very aware it’s a game, you find a princess, things are cool. The end. In this game, you find the princess, not only do things not work out but then you kill her yourself, and then…ah, this is where things get interesting. You kill her, and then you still have 1.5 games to get through. Your character is motivated by what? Perhaps, briefly, rage. But by game three, Dom’s clearly a broken man. Kind of worthless as a soldier, to be honest.
If we’re willing to put the woman in the fridge context on the game, I think it’s also reasonable to ask this question: Is it possible the game creators were very aware of this too, and is that the question they were asking? Were they asking what happens next? What happens two years after the woman in the fridge? Were they asking us, “Hey remember when Green Lantern’s girlfriend got stuffed in the fridge? Do you ever think that maybe, in a different setting, that would be the essential end of his life?” Is it possible that they’re asking, “Hey, do you ever wonder if there’s actually some pretty bad fallout when a princess gets captured?” Does the trope of the woman in the fridge change if that woman’s death has complete and lasting impact on another character? Does it matter if it’s handled in a different way, if it results in the character’s emotional defeat as opposed to a catalyst of some kind? Does it not pose an interesting scenario, to see what happens 2 years after Link saves Zelda?
I disagree and think the use of this trope is pretty straightforward. But go on.
I have to say, the theme of Gears is loss. Throughout the series, every character loses everything. There isn’t a single character who has any of the things that defined them, essentially, remaining. Dom defines himself as a family man, and he loses his family. Anya defines herself as a great coordinator and field general of sorts, and she finds herself toting a machine gun. Cole lost the lifestyle of a professional athlete, a true comparison when one sees that life compared to his fight for survival now. Marcus, in the end, loses his friend, his father, and ultimately, fighting. Combat. He defines himself as a Gear, and by the end of the series there is no call for Gears anymore.
I guess I feel like the scene as you described it happens, for sure, but there’s context, and in the context of the game, does it fit? And can it be earned, ever, in any context?
Ian: Maybe, but there is an issue of overuse.The issue of the trope is about the death of a disposable underdeveloped (usually female) to motivate the (usually male) hero. Strictly defining the trope, long-lasting effect is irrelevant. I think it could work a little better if we got to know Maria a little more (or at all). Most of what I know about her comes from Dom, and most of that is about how Dom loves her and wants to find her. That’s fine for Dom’s motivation, but it doesn’t avoid the trope all that well. I’m not saying that the trope is always wrong or always sexist, but it’s not great writing. As for could it be earned, ever, in any context, I would say yes but it would need to go away for a while.
It was common when the game came out and common now. As a series, Gears went forward, but 2 wasn’t that step forward.
When the torture happens to Tai, that might be a massive tonal shift, but we got to know Tai (as much as we know most of the characters in the series at this point, but I’d say that counts). His death was about change and his own arc. Maria’s death wasn’t about Maria, it was about Dom. She needed to be in the tube to motivate Dom’s action.
The points might be proven by this: Tai kills himself and Dom kills Maria. I’d take the argument that Maria might not have been aware enough to kill herself or make a choice, but we can see a character in the same situation with some kind of agency. Tai is a character because he can have agency. Maria is a motivator because she doesn’t. Her death is about Dom’s story.
The trope itself might not be sexist, but its overuse certainly is. Part of the issue with a player’s canon is what to forgive by saying something is from a different era. We might forgive bad controls, weird cameras, or unclear directions, but I think we should consider plot issues as well. The player’s canon exists in 2016, which makes me a game should get some latitude but perhaps less than a historical canon.
Pete: It’s a point well-taken, that it feels different with Tai. Which says something to me. I think we’re more okay with Tai going through the same thing as Maria, and in fact in a much more graphic way, because he’s a tough, male, combatant character. It feels like he deserves it? Like he signed up for it more? Because with Tai, we not only see that he’s been tortured, we see him shoot himself. Visually, it’s pretty rough.
The part I don’t know if you’ll sell me on is the part about Maria’s being outside the story being something that could have improved. Gears’ plot, it’s all within the gameplay. There is virtually no history, no backstories given to ANY characters. This is universal. The first game begins with Marcus Fenix in prison, and correct me if I’m wrong, I don’t think we EVER find out what happened there. In the games, anyway. Of course, the answer is, once again, in the books.
We find out very little about Marcus Fenix’s father until near the end of the third game, and the father’s death ABSOLUTELY motivates Fenix. Again, if we’re talking about an underdeveloped character’s death motivating another character, I’d point to another man.
We also have the sharp de-powering of Dom in the third game, when he sacrifices himself.
By my count, we’ve got three male characters whose deaths motivate our main characters, not to mention the deaths of countless male Carmine’s, which are played for humor. I can agree that this might not be great writing, but I just don’t see the imbalance here.
While we’re on the topic of the whole series, I think it’s worth also pointing out that this is a series that moved along the spectrum as it developed, going a lot further towards providing better roles and characters for women than most other action games. This death scene, this is a low from which it ascended. Within about 6 years we saw the only female character joined by others, and we saw all the female characters suited up and battling, just like the men. As the game developed, I would make a strong argument that the real damsel in distress was Marcus Fenix’s father, and the real love story had more to do with a father/son relationship than it did a husband and wife or a traditional male/female thing.
I think that what I’m saying here is that the change is visible outside the series and within as well. Within this series, you can actually see how the world outside games has changed games for the better. By the third and fourth game players have more options to play as female characters who are equals. And I think seeing that change is cool. And I think that demonstrable change makes me more willing to ask whether the game’s creators were making a more interesting choice than it appeared, and whether they would make a different choice nearly ten years later. It makes me willing to think they might.
If we can put aside, briefly, the argument about this being misogynist and discuss whether or not it’s earned, I have something to say about that, too.
Ian: I can put that aside, but needing the whole series kinda undermines the point of 2 as a singular game. Narrative and mechanics are not the same thing, but I’m pretty sure we agreed that 2 was the only game for our debate. I call shenanigans. Shenanigans!
Pete: Shooting for an emotional depth that’s unearned is unfortunate, but I prefer a clumsy attempt over no attempt at all. And honestly, I think we tend to vilify something when its reach exceeds its grasp more than we tend to bash something that made no attempt.
I always think about Miley Cyrus when I think about this. Man, people were talking so much shit about her when she did that “Blurred Lines” thing. About how her ass was flat and how she wasn’t classy. But the truth, the real truth, she was trying to be sexy, and she failed. And that’s why we didn’t like it. Because when Britney Spears did it, we loved it. We watched Britney Spears run around in schoolgirl outfits, vinyl body suits,snake draped around her. And we loved her for it because she succeeded in her goal of being sexy. Miley, we bashed Miley because she tried to be sexy, and she didn’t make it. If she’d stayed Disney, who would care? If she’d succeeded, no one would be asking whether or not she was classy or cool or crazy. We love when people are sexy, but goddamn do we hate people who swing and miss.
I think Gears gets some of that rap. It tried, goddamn it. It had a silly story at times, and it had that Marvel movie problem where every game had to end with the heroes averting a complete clusterfuck apocalypse from which there was no escape. But it tried to have some level of relationships, some modicum of character, where most shooter-y games, I don’t really remember hearing jack shit about families, relationships, or any of that stuff.
I want games to have plots. I want them to try. I want them to try, fail, and then get better.
Ian: Games don’t need plots. Doom barely has a plot. Tetris has no plot at all. Any canon, player or historical, that lacked those games would be pretty weak.
Games should try, fail, and then get better. The first game in this series is an example of that. The third game improved a lot of things. However, if the second game is examined in isolation, then the plot elements need to be examined in isolation.
Ambition is a valid concern, but there’s a difference between trying the 9.0 floor routine and mildly fucking it up for a 7.0, and doing the same thing while accidentally clocking a spectator. Yeah, ambition is a good thing, and failure is a part of ambition. We shouldn’t pillory because something didn’t work, but we should hold it accountable. If this sequence was simply an ambitious misfire, that would be one thing. However, this was the second torture-death motivator for a mini-battle we saw in the same game. The concept was used more than once, so it’s hard to call the second one “ambitious.”
Pete: Again, I disagree with the torture-death being the motivator. In both cases. It happened, but you’re not going to convince me it’s a motivating factor in the action. If there’s a sin, which there still is in my eyes, it’s doing something serious and not giving it the gravity it deserves.
I feel like you’re saying we have to look at this game in isolation where this cutscene is concerned, but when we talk about that scene’s implications to players, THEN we talk about society as a whole.
In other words, I kind of feel like you want it both ways. I DO think this represents something in larger society, something negative, but on the other hand, if we are willing to examine larger society, I think it’s valid to argue that as a series, Gears responded to larger society and provided what is, even now, a better male/female hero mix than most games, ESPECIALLY most action game. I think that if we’re going to ding Gears 2 because of a larger societal implication, we should also be looking at the series’ response, its attempt to make things right. Making it right isn’t about erasing what happened before and pretending it didn’t happen. It’s about looking at what you did and doing it differently the next time. Which I feel, very strongly, they did. By the time you get to Judgment, the gameplay is split between 4 characters, 2 of whom are female, and in the single-player campaign, you are forced to play as all of these characters. That’s some significant shit. Fuck having a lady option, this is a game that has you play as two different men and two different ladies. Let’s not even get into the fact that one of the ladies is black. Let’s just ignore that.
I feel a bit like you’re saying, “This is a problem when we look at the larger idea of the woman in the fridge. Let’s look at THAT larger idea, let’s look at the larger world, but let’s ignore the larger world of Gears while we make that examination. Let’s throw out the books, let’s throw out the subsequent games.”
Ian: Part of how I define a player’s canon is that a game still “works” today. There will be games we discuss that have mechanics that could be improved. Hell, Bioshock’s gunplay was massively improved in otherwise inferior sequels. My reservations comes from the idea of putting Gears 2 in a canon, which is recommending it to a wide variety of people. If the gender issues matter today, then they should matter for inclusion into today’s player’s canon.
Pete: Don’t even get me started on Bioshock. We might have to do that game next. I swear to god, just play it. Play it in 2016 and see how it holds up as a game. Don’t rely on your memories, play it now.
I think we feel the same way about this scene in Gears, but we’re coming to different conclusions. I think we both feel like it’s impossible to judge something in complete, perfect isolation. At the same time, a canon game should be worth playing, both in context of and regardless of the outside circumstances.
I do want to say that I agree, the tone in the story and the tone in the gameplay are very different. You can really tell that the teams who did the two separate pieces were very divorced. It’s weird, tonally, to have this emotional scene followed by combat where a character finds ammo and says “Nice” or blows up a bad guy and hoots and hollers. The tone of the story found in the cut scenes and the tone of the gameplay really don’t match, and I think that has A LOT to do with why the whole thing feels unearned. I do feel like it wouldn’t be that hard to program the game such that the characters take it easy on the whooping for a while after Dom’s wife is killed. But I don’t think that was ever a consideration. That, to me, is the thing I really had to look past. That incongruity wasn’t something that I could ignore. But I could accept it enough, ignore it enough to really enjoy the game. Not everyone does, and not everyone should. But, for me, the answer that the series did work to make things better, and the other character context provided by the books, that was enough that even when things got cringe-y, I could hang.
I think what’s weird, the nadir of the series in terms of equality is also the apex in terms of a game people can pick up and play. Which, like I said, has a lot to do with what I’m seeing as a separation between the programmers and the story artists.
Ian: I agree, and might phrase it as single player v. multiplayer. They needed to be the same in both modes, but the multiplayer people never talked to the campaign people. That’s pure speculation from a weirdo writing in a bar, but it sounds good.
Pete: Let’s change…gears(!) for just a second, because I need to address something else you said WAY back.
As far as people being sexist online, I am sorry that happened. I don’t really play online, and I’m not going to lie, the shittiness is a big part of it. I just don’t like the idea of paying for a service so someone can come into my home and find new portmanteaus to use on me where half the word is faggot.
As for the canon, I don’t think I’m prepared to judge a game by its online audience. For one, that means basically no multiplayer online games would be canon. Including sports games and fighters. If you can go online, you can go online and someone will make you feel like shit, whether it’s by noting your gender, your accent, or whatever.
When we’re talking canon, the online audience being racist/sexist/everything-ist assholes isn’t going to make for a useful, purposeful argument as we go because the only question will be: Is there an online component? To take a game out of the running for canon because it has an online component doesn’t really work.
This shit happens, it’s real, and it’s a real problem. I have no idea how to fix it, but I would love for someone to fix it. Or at least try a little harder in a demonstrable way.
Okay, maybe I do know something. I know that fixing this would end up in companies taking a financial hit. Banning someone from the service is problematic for them legally and financially. I don’t think that justifies leaving things the way they are. I’m just saying that I know why things haven’t changed, and it’s money. As per usual, the defining factor is money. Money is more important to these companies than how people are feeling. Shocker.
All that said, I feel very comfortable putting this game in the canon without feeling like I’m endorsing the online asshole-ery embedded in Xbox Live.
Ian: There’s a lot of media that we would probably hate if we judged it by fanbase alone. You are a huge fan of Chuck Palahniuk (thanks for correcting that, Google), and I’d guess that he has a fair percentage of total shithead fans. Certainly not a majority, but a certain amount. It’s fair not to judge something by its fanbase unless the fanbase is critical to that experience.
Pete: Totally. Bukowski, same deal. Whenever someone calls themselves a “Bukowski Girl” or a “Bukowski guy”, run. Just fucking run. I love Bukowski, but when someone uses the name as a defining trait, get the hell out of there.
Ian: That online environment is probably why I wouldn’t recommend pretty much any online-driven first-person shooter to the player’s canon. Sorry, but the environment critical to the experience is too toxic, and forcing someone to endure insults and degradation makes me hesitate to recommend it for a player’s canon. I might recommend Call of Duty as an important game for a historical canon, but in the way that I can talk about Birth of a Nation as an important part in the development of cinema, I don’t know that I could recommend Birth of a Nation as a film because its themes are pretty terrible. I don’t think the developers of online games intended the same thing as D.W. Griffith, and I will probably wind up recommending some un-fun experiences, but there’s the humiliation we sign up for and the humiliation we don’t.
Gears of War 2 has enough other modes and styles that skirt that issue. Even with a recommendation, I might tell people to skip the online play as well unless they are playing with friends.
Pete: I’m in total agreement. I don’t think the online play is critical to the enjoyment of this game. If we come across a game where that’s a stronger, key element, I think that’s a discussion that we’ll have to have. Birth of A Nation is a really interesting example. While I abhor the online playing environment, it’s still a part of history. It’s still an experience that is part of video game history now. I wish it was a more DISTANT part, and I wish we were looking back on it instead of wading through. But I do wonder, as we go, whether there is a canonical aspect of that experience.
It’s just evolved so quickly and strangely in the last decade or so. I remember playing Goldeneye on N64, and there was a 4-player option. You could sit with your friends and have a goddamn blast. Sometimes you’d get pissed, but I think with friends, it’s so easy to know the boundaries, and you do have to then be friends with this person in order to play ever again. I had like 3 friends, so if I called one a “buttfucker” too many times, then I couldn’t play Goldeneye with 4 players anymore, plus one of my 3 friends was pissed at me and we couldn’t hang out. But now, screw it, there’s an unlimited stream of people to berate.
Ian: As to your things about mechanics:
The second woman I played this with, whom I’ll call “Brittany,” had not played a game since the Playstation era. Dual stick games were pretty new to her. She wanted to play a game together, and her tastes were not of the cartoon-y, Mario variety (there’s a trend here that others should try and explain). Brittany wanted something with maximum violence, the kind of violence a game with a chainsaw gun used to cut out the heart of a giant worm delivers. Brittany struggled with the controls, but features like saving your co-op partner, differing difficulties that gave her more ammunition and slightly less aggressive enemy behavior, that stuff put us on roughly even terrain. Playing the game was a fun experience, but she still struggled to look in the correct direction. For a dual-stick game, Gears 2 is easy to pick up and play. If someone has never played a dual-stick game, however, co-op with someone else might make for a decent entry point if the mechanics were explained a little better.
My first experience playing with you confirms my belief that the best way to play is co-op first, then single player, then co-op again. Playing co-op helped me learn the basics of the game. Gears of War 2 is a real-time strategy game where the major strategy is to put bullets in dudes. After getting the basics, playing solo allowed me to see what the hell the on-screen prompts were telling me to do rather than being grey blobs with a button. Once I understood that pressing the stick and buttons would let me move out of cover faster, I could play the game more effectively. Knowing how cover works is an interesting idea, but it’s pretty easy early on to jump out of cover without knowing it (this was a MASSIVE problem in 1).
Overall, playing with someone else is pretty fun. I’m not sure playing in Deathmatch is all that fun because it’s rather slow and plodding. It feels like a combination of clumsy rolling and hitting people with the shotgun. It’s certainly different from the main game, but not really the best experience.
Pete: Alright. I can dig it.
When I picked up the first game, I had to learn as well. I’m not saying it’s natural the way they tell us an iPad is natural and a baby can use it. Who are these rich assholes giving their babies iPads, by the way?
To me, if I can pick up a completely unfamiliar controller and dive right into a game with near mastery of the control, that means the game has a low ceiling. iPhone games are fun, but for the most part, if there’s only a couple buttons and they only do a couple things, I’m gonna get bored fast.
I think what I’m saying is that there’s a learning curve, as with any game that involves more than the two buttons, but once you get a couple hours under your belt, it all clicks. It feels right, and when you play other games, you’ll wish they played like Gears.
Here’s my question for you. Let’s full circle this mother: You seem to be mounting an argument for this not to make the canon. Why was Gears 2 the one you took to two separate ladies’ houses? Was it because you discovered that there’s not a human being alive who can resist the voice acting? That any sexually-functional adult will find a voice to love, whether it’s the gravelly Fenix or the asshole-ish Baird or Anya’s radio unhelpfulness?
Ian: Marcus Fenix does have the best line in the whole series during that game. When Carmine, the new guy, is trying to figure out if the Locusts eat Imulsion (do we need to establish the sci-fi universe by spelling like assholes?), Marcus says, “They can eat shit and die for all I care.” That was the moment where the main character seems to crap on the lore/expanded universe/whatever and just wants to shoot things. It was this series’ version of the self-aware opening lyrics to Nirvana’s “Serve the Servants” (“Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I’m bored and old…”). Yes, I spent a lot of time arguing about narrative, but the game wants you to not overthink the narrative too much (which is a super-huge problem when you introduce heavy themes later).
As a game, it’s hard not to recommend it in the player’s canon. I’d say it’s probably one of the best action games on the Xbox 360 with a balance of decent controls and mostly easy-to-learn mechanics.
Why I’m riding the game hard is this: A player’s canon is a must-play game. Any kind of canon should probably transcend someone’s particular experience and should be enjoyed by a pretty wide variety of people. When I could see a relatively large number of people turned off by a moment, it makes me hesitate.
I picked that one to play with others because it’s an easy-to-learn action game that isn’t too deep into the lore. It’s relatively easy to approach, and it’s mechanically sound. The other two games lack those things.
Gears of War 2 was probably the best of the bunch for new players. I brought up the sexism part to explain why someone might not want to put this game in the player’s canon. I still think Gears of War 2 is pretty fun, and I can deal with wildly inconsistent tones (I love Metal Gear Solid games). That said, if the game’s major appeal is “fun,” it’s worth remembering that things I could look past and find fun might not work so well for others.
Pete: I just have to ask one last question about the woman in the fridge. I can’t help myself.
Am I crazy for thinking that an average person might pick this up and be likely to have one of four reactions
- A) skip the cutscenes entirely,
- B) have no problem,
- C) have a problem, or
- C) be genuinely affected, emotionally?
I’m not going to say which person is right or wrong there, because I don’t think there’s a “wrong” reaction to this sort of thing amongst those three possibilities. It’s evocative, and it’s evocative on purpose. When it evokes in a player “Games are always doing this shit. Fuck that. I want a strong woman!” then I think it has failed. I don’t think that’s what anyone was trying to evoke, so in that case, it fails.
When it evokes no response, I think the narrative has failed but the gameplay is left intact.
When it has the intended emotional reaction, it has succeeded.
Maybe I should sum it up this way. If I were to play this with someone I respected, I wouldn’t feel differently about that person based on their reaction to this scene. If the person were to shed a tear, I wouldn’t think of this person as a traitor to equality. If the person was outraged, I would think that the person was obviously someone who thinks about these things critically. If they skipped the cutscene entirely, I would think the person is someone who is unconvinced about the narrative power of video games, and that’s okay too.
My reaction and yours were different. We considered a lot of the same factors, but the gut-level, visceral reactions were clearly very different because they were differently informed. Mine by the Gears of War books and, frankly, the life I was living at the time, yours more by the on-going bullshit masculinity of video games. I didn’t discount entirely the idea of rescuing the princess yet again. But for me, from my different perspective, it was very imperfect, but it worked enough. If they’d gone this route again, if this was a theme in the games, I wouldn’t be able to stomach it. If this was a well they visited even once more, it might be too much of a turn-off. I might be up for going with you, with saying that it’s a game I recommend with the caveat of skipping all the cutscenes. But for me, through the perspective with the other pieces of media, with the much larger context I’d taken in, I daresay it was earned.
I’ll tell you, I felt very sad when this happened. Not because poor Dom was alone now. Because it felt, as a player, like every time there was a glimmer of hope, even if that hope was mostly in not knowing something, of being at least unsure whether or not Maria was dead, every time hope existed, it was brutally squashed. I wanted there to be people left in that world who were not fighters. I wanted there to be some kind of home for at least one character to have after the fighting stopped. I liked how Dom was optimistic in the face of a hopeless situation. I liked how he kept looking.
I was truly sad when Maria was killed. I remember her name. A character that was on the screen less than 1% of the game, I remember. I would go so far as to say she might be the only non-combatant character I actually remember. The only one with a name I remember. Her and this one other guy. There was another guy, another non-combatant, and he was running around with other normal people, trying to survive. You stumble onto this group of people, and they pack up to go somewhere else, and this dude is carrying all his shit, all his belongings, in a briefcase. They could have given that guy a backpack or a duffel bag, but they gave him a briefcase. That really broke my heart just a little. Which maybe says a lot more about how I played this game and felt about it than all that text up above.
I love playing Gears of War 2. I like the story. It’s imperfect, and I’m okay with that. I still think this is a game well worth playing.
Okay, I think we’re ready to wrap up. I have an idea on how to do this. Let’s say yea or nay, and then let’s do this: name a game that Gears is the better version of, and also name a game that might satisfy players who hate Gears and still want to scratch the same itch.
I’ll start.
Yea, obviously.
I think Gears is a better game than Dishonored, even though Gears is a predecessor. I couldn’t figure out Dishonored because it’s a first-person stealth game. I DON’T KNOW WHERE MY FUCKING BODY IS! It’s so hard to tell when someone will see you and when they won’t. Also, I think the first-person perspective is often a little skewed in games, or the perception is off. It seems like you bump into someone when, visually, they appear to be a good 5 feet away. Gears, to me, is the much better version of that game because of it’s use of cover mechanic with 3rd-person perspective.
I think that, if you didn’t like Gears 2, I might try Shadows of the Damned. It’s an action game, and it goes more horror than it does sci-fi, more comedy than Michael Bay action movie. The tone is pretty juvenile and weird, but I think it’s consistently goofy. It definitely doesn’t take itself as seriously. It’s silly, and I think that helps it get away with a lot more, story-wise.
Ian: God, I love Shadows of the Damned. That game is sexist as fuck, but I love that game. It has your character yell “Taste my big boner.” It takes all the compensatory subtext of Gears 2 and cranks it up.
Pete: Yeah, I think the developers did something smart there in going balls-out, intentionally sexist, which kind of makes the discussion of sexism in Shadows uninteresting. It’s WILLFULLY so, so what is there to debate?
Ian: Plus, the main character isn’t called “Garcia Phucking Hotspur.” His parents could spell words.
With the spirit of over-the-top, I’d recommend Vanquish over Gears of War 2. It’s a lot more action-oriented than Gears of War 2 and it moves a lot faster. I get that Gears of War 2 has a realism about the weight of battle armor, but Vanquish puts rocket boosters on the armor so you can actually get somewhere. There’s still cover, but you can also power-slide like a deadly metal guitarist and shoot a giant robo-gorilla in its robo junk.
Pete: As much as I love Gears, I’ll readily admit that when it comes to covering ground, Cheryl Strayed was walking through Appalachia faster than these assholes get across a battlefield.
Ian: Since I focused on mechanics for my recommendation, I will keep a theme and disrecommend (or whatever the word is) a game for the same reason. I love the narrative Spec Ops:The Line, even though the mechanics aren’t that great. I get your argument about Dom’s rage in 2 and resignation in 3, but that didn’t affect much outside of cut-scenes. Spec Ops: The Line had your character look and feel different, showing the effects both in cut-scenes and gameplay. The story and game people actually talked, and I think that makes Spec Ops: The Line more cohesive. However, the mechanics of Spec Ops: The Line just don’t feel right. I died a lot because the cover mechanics didn’t work right, and there were a couple of spots in the game that were hard unless I had the correct gun (which I needed to save rather than drop). I think Spec Ops: The Line does a lot of things right, but I would probably say Gears of War 2 is a better game-as-game and does an okay job with the trauma narrative. Gear of War 2 does those two things right while Spec Ops: The Line bobbles gameplay. Doing one thing well and the other thing mediocre is better than doing one thing well and the other thing poorly.
Pete: I’m down with that. I think Spec Ops: The Line has a cool story and definite choose-your-own-adventure feel. But it’s just not that fun to play. The game elements are definitely a lot weaker than the story elements.
Ian: As for Gears of War 2, I’d say yea for the single-player campaign. I think it’s valuable because it’s a good point to look at a series and how it changes. Each entry in the series is a time capsule of gaming at the time in which each game was made, and I think 2 is an artifact of an era. The later games got better about the treatment of female characters, and I would argue that the Maria death was a little behind the times when it came out. It’s useful to have a genuinely good game with some problematic issues because it shows that a game can be really, really, good but still have some serious narrative problems.
Pete: Right. Like Lolita. Shakespeare. Other classics about minors having sex.
Ian: I’d also add that it’s a midpoint in the focus and quality of the series as well. The first game had lots of problems, but a lot of the problems came from having too many different ideas and trying to make an identity from them. By the third game, Epic seemed to have a focus on multiplayer and wrapping up a story, meaning the single-player mode was really missing the variety of the other games. Gears of War 2 is a good mix of mechanical soundness with enough new ideas to seem interesting. In many ways, the reason I might put Gears of War 2 in the canon over the more progressive 3 or experimental 1 is that it’s the Aliens (as opposed to Alien or Alien 3) of the series. Gears of War 2 polished down the rough edges of 1 and avoided the monotony of 3. Overall, despite its flaws, I’d say it gets a spot in the canon.
Pete:[sounds of horns blaring, jets flying overhead, people throwing candy from a firetruck and other parade shit]
And thus, we induct our first game, Gears of War 2, into BOTH my Canon and Ian’s. Congratulations to Epic, Dom, Cole, Baird, Anya, and Marcus Phoenix (I know that’s the wrong spelling, I don’t care).
Stay tuned for our next discussion where we’ll talk about another game, whether or not it belongs in this hallowed company, and where I’ll probably say a bunch of insane sexist shit that makes sure I’ll NEVER be eligible to run for public office and Ian will quote more Hitler.