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Imulsion?

Posted 18:08 (GMT) 26th March 2008

Feel free to ingest and enjoy today's ripe comic offering. It was written in 2006 when I was but a lad so you have to understand how weird it is to finally see it up on the site. In fact, the whole comic (aside from a few anachronisms here and there) could well be set in 2006 and these news posts don't do much to keep us on the chronological cutting edge.

I really want to talk today about Gears of War, for example. But that game came out in 2006 and to any geek worth his salt it's old news. And even though there have to be people like me who didn't get a 360 until Christmas '07 and are now playing catch-up, I still feel like I'm sucking you guys into a time warp, albeit a very small one.

I also have reservations about presenting myself as a 'gamer' because that word to me presents a minefield. For some people it means discussing a relatively new art form with grace and intellectual integrity. For some people it means an easy way to rope in a demographic. But if I deliberately didn't write about Gears of War just to be different that would be just as fake. So here goes.

Gears of War is one of the dumbest games I have ever played. Playing it is like being hit in the face with a heavy, solid brick made out of pure, compact dumb - and liking it. I got this game plus a second controller so my brother and I could play it together in co-op. And it has been so much fun. Every time one of us dies, the other has to heal them. We formulate strategies on the fly, we bicker about me sniping from a distance too much and him running in with the shotgun too much. Aristotle said bravery was the golden mean between the extremes cowardice and stupidity. I'll let you decide where my brother and I fit on that scale.

It is a game that demands one's undivided attention and constant co-operation. Between squabbling over ammo and chain-sawing monsters through the face, we have a damn good time. We had the most fun playing on casual mode and last night we finished playing through on punishment mode (which the game calls 'hardcore', but I have been very vocal in my belief that this name does not convey the sheer humiliation the game subjects you to at this difficulty setting). Yes, punishment mode feels like the game is saying:

"What, you want to play Gears of War? Really? Okay! Ha-ha-ha-ha!"

I can only imagine what insane mode is like. I don't think I ever want to find out.

But I mentioned before that I considered games an art form and so I have to subject them to the same scrutiny I would a novel or a film. And this is where Gears of War falls short. It's really really dumb. Lo, behold:

The Title

'Gears of War' sounds like a good title until you play the game and find out what it means. The game constantly bludgeons you over the head with a motif of cogs and gears in everything from the architecture to the cog-shaped crosshairs on one of the weapons. Even the soldier's dog tags are shaped like tiny cogs. They are called cog tags. In case you haven't noticed, cogs are very important to these people. Even their army is called the 'Coalition of Ordered Governments' and you have to wonder which came first in their society, the acronym or the architecture. Or maybe it's just a coincidence? Anyway, the 'gears' of the title are the soldiers. That's what they're called. So, it just means 'Soldiers of War'. The whole title of the game, once you find out what it means, is a tautology.

The Characters

All the characters are hard-bitten, grizzled, scarred, aggressive soldiers with necks as thick as a normal man's thigh. They're ridiculously bulky and this is only accentuated by the five tonnes of body armour they sport at all times. They all get big hard-ons at the prospect of killing monsters, they all deal with the horrors of war with sardonic irreverence and they all played quarterback in high school. Considering the cocktail of adrenaline, testosterone and steroids coursing through their bloodstream, it's a wonder they have any room in there for blood. They all must have testicles the size of raisins. The problem is even though all the characters are hopelessly generic and clearly all cut from the same cookie-cutter, the writers think they're a diverse and colourful bunch, whilst in reality the only thing that separates each guy is the degree to which he is grizzled or sardonic.

The hero Marcus, for instance, is perpetually jaded and fluctuates schizophrenically between having no sense of humour and being able to take nothing seriously. One second he'll be delivering a cynical one-liner, the next he'll be muttering about society's 'lies' with all the specificity and world-weariness of a fifteen-year-old boy. At his most down-beat he sounds exactly like Eeyore from the Disney animations of Winnie the Pooh. His side-kick (and lover?) Dom does nothing but state the bleeding obvious and deliver exposition. Baird is meant to be the smart guy of the group but is just as dumb as the others - we only know he's meant to be smart because at one point he is said to have hacked something and at another he proclaims himself to be "the smart guy". That's it. Needless to say, this truly is excellent characterisation. The most laughable character is Cole (as in 'coal', as in 'black'), the unashamed stereotypical black guy, a walking cliche who says nothing but bombastic exclamations like "Wooh! Bring it on sucker!" and "This is my kind of shit!" He's like a mutant combination of LL Cool J's chef in Deep Blue Sea, Will Smith in Independence Day and the guy who attacks Marty with a baseball bat in Back to the Future Part II. In fact Cole sounds like a hollow, charmless version of 'Terrible' Terry Tate: Office Linebacker, which makes sense since they're both played by the same actor.

Sometimes the gears communicate with jovial informality, sometimes they use nothing but military jargon like 'wilco', and 'KIA', a jarring change in tone which is entirely dependent on what sounds coolest at the time. Some of the monsters glow in the dark - the voice-over lady describes them as 'lambent'. Jesus Christ.

The Monsters

The monsters, called 'Locusts', were once thought to be the eponymous 'boogey-man' but have revealed themselves to be a very real threat since 'emergence day' when they all came out of the ground and destroyed civilization. Actually, the real plot of the game is a lot dumber - the animalistic monsters just took over (such is a mindless animal's appreciation for fascist order) and the humans destroyed their own civilization out of spite.

The Locust females are eight-foot berserkers, twice as ugly as the males and completely blind. They use sound and smell to find their way about and charge clumsily in the direction of any sound they hear, destroying everything in their path, including men and walls. How a race with creatures such as these managed to take over a planet without destroying its civilization is a mystery to me. I hope you can appreciate how utterly alien Locust culture is, though.

Why, then, do they use the exact same technology as the humans? They wear pretty much the same clothing, build the same buildings and use the exact same weapons. They live underground! How does that make a lick of sense? They even look human. Well, they're ugly, hulking armoured brutes to a man but then so are the human characters. We had to keep friendly fire turned off throughout. They're that similar.

They speak excellent English. Why do they speak English? Even if they've learnt it from the humans, they'd still be better off communicating in their native tongue instead of shouting "Reloading!" every time they need to reload so you know when to shoot them. I thought they were aliens the first time I played through the game but the game never actually says they are, just that they came up from underneath the ground to kick humanity's ass - but 'humanity' in this case are the people living on the planet Sera, which leaves two possibilities:

1. The game is set in the far future, in which case humans have journeyed into space and colonised Sera so they are the alien invaders, which makes it (even) harder to sympathise with their plight.

2. The game is set in another universe in which Sera is the home planet of both Locusts and humans, which would explain why the humans were so God-damn surprised to find monsters living under the surface of their planet.

The Nomenclature

Calling the invading horde of monsters 'Locusts' only makes sense and is not confusing if there is no such thing as a locust already. The same thing goes with 'cogs' and 'gears'. These names would be very confusing in real life. It's like if I discovered a new species and decided to call them 'mice'. That name's been taken. That's why people make up new words all the time, why science fiction is full of made-up names. Because the alternative is calling them something stupid like 'Locusts'. There's even this glow-in-the-dark petrol-like power source called 'imulsion' in Gears. But that name would only have come about in a world in which emulsion does not exist. The first time they introduced this substance it was mentioned in passing, completely out of context - so I thought they were talking about paint. Even if my alternate universe theory is correct, not only would this have to be a universe without such things as locusts or paint but also one without cogs and gears but we know that isn't true because everything is decorated with cogs and gears.

The sad part is that people have spent years of their lives on something this dumb. Hearing members of the production team talk about Gears, it soon becomes apparent that they think they've made something intelligent, something you can take seriously. What they've made is something which is fun to play but painful to contemplate.

Am I asking too much of a video game? I don't think so. Is it too much to ask for a work - be it a film, a book or a game - to be set in a coherent, realistic world? Assassin's Creed and Bioshock deliver that and I would not hesitate to call either one a work of art. But, as in films, for every Alien there's a Predator.

Gears of War 2 is Steak

Posted 17:01 (GMT) 31st December 2008 by David J. Bishop

I am tremendously pleased to report that Father Christmas left Gears of War 2 in my stocking this year. It is an amazing game. Reading back over my comments about the last game I feel I might have been a little unfair. I described in detail the one-dimensional characters and the ill-defined world they inhabited but didn't go into much detail about what I liked about the game. Well, I felt at the time that those of you immersed in the world of video gamery as I am will be fully aware of what that game had to recommend it and the uninitiated would be indifferent. I thought that other writers, other points of view who would praise the combat and gore effects highly enough to render my input redundant. Well, if I can't describe chainsawing a monster in half in a way which is at once unique and accessible then I don't deserve a website.

Okay, here's what I loved about Gears of War. It wasn't just that you could cut a Locust in half with a chainsaw. It's the sheer unalloyed brutality of every second of the game which is epitomised in such stunts. That mentality of "it's not enough to just shoot the bastards, give them a chainsaw" - which in turn leads to "it's not enough to hack at them with a chainsaw, let them feel every second of it as the camera goes nuts and blood sprays wetly over the screen before pieces of the enemy fly in all different directions" - that mentality is evident in every facet of the gameplay's design. I complained about how the characters were unsympathetic but I cannot deny that when the grizzled and perpetually sardonic hulk clad in futuristic armour you control takes cover you can really feel it as he slams against the wall - a jolt on the vibrating controller, a whoosh of the camera and suddenly it's you taking cover, not some prick you don't care about. That immediacy, that physicality is truly ubiquitous. The feeling of a relentless force of scaly monsters charging at you, the desire to kill said monsters, the satisfaction of running up to them, sticking a grenade to their backs and running away, watching chunks of torso spray across the architecture as the bemused victims meet their timely end - these sensations bypass the brain entirely and are instead delivered straight into the spinal chord. It's like having morphine injected into your ass - the subsequent euphoria is almost instantaneous.

I'm not the person I was ten years ago or even five years ago... but a part of me still is. Part of me will always be a four-year-old on his first day at school, part of me will always be a nervous, sweating 13-year-old and part of me is 10 and just wants to see a lot of blood fly everywhere, the part that was on the edge of his seat throughout Michael Bay's Transformers. Gears of War taps into 10-year-old David, constantly. Every time I successfully pull off a head shot, my inner child raises his fist in triumph. Of course it's not a masterpiece but I am able to operate on different levels of sophistication. I mean, the writing in Bioshock appealed to the side of me that is 18 and familiar enough with early 19th-century philosophy to know what a categorical imperative is. Hell, putting down the controller and reading The Importance of Being Earnest appeals to the modern-day University-educated David. I can enjoy works of art that tax my knowledge and intelligence on their own level and even acknowledge that they work on a higher level to Gears of War. But I am not so discerning that I will turn my nose up at perfectly decent entertainment, especially when said entertainment offers such visceral thrills as sawing a monster in half with a chainsaw.

On this level Gears of War 2 manages to improve on its predecessor by cranking the awesomeness up past 11 in as many ways as is possible. Now, not only can you chainsaw an enemy, you can engage in a thrilling chainsaw duel and if you happen to catch your enemy from behind you can perform what I can only describe as a chainsaw colonoscopy. You can pick up locusts and use them as shields or break their necks with your bare hands. Head shots work the same as before - with careful aim you can instantly kill an enemy with a well-placed bullet and watch their skull explode like an over-ripe melon but now instead of just falling over the rest of the locust's body sort of stays in the same place for a second, like he hasn't figured out he's dead yet, before crumpling to the floor. It is immensely satisfying.

The thing that made the first Gears most compelling for me, and something I remarked on before, is the co-op campaign. There are disappointingly few games that allow you to split the screen and play with a friend but Gears of War was there for us - it allowed my brother and I to battle through its storyline co-operatively. The dialogue was our heated conversations as bullets filled the air, in the absence of any real story we created a sort of buddy movie narrative of our own - a story of two friends working together to defeat increasingly challenging odds, healing each other and watching the other's back. This fraternal bonding process is not something other players will have taken away playing the single-player campaign, this is something we created in our own minds and through our own shared experience. Yes, Marcus Feenix and Dom Santiago were unlikable thugs devoid of personality but we filled those empty vessels up with our own personalities - we made our own game within the half-scripted shell of Gears of War.

It was only after my brother and I had finished the game and breathed deep sighs of relief that 10-year-old David sat quietly while my adult self contemplated what had just taken place. Plot-wise Gears of War is merely a series of loosely connected series of gun fights and action set pieces leading up to nothing in particular. By all means feel free to skip the next few paragraphs if you want to avoid spoilers. Delta squad's mission is to put the locusts down once and for all. With this in mind we are treated to a three-act red herring which leads precisely nowhere, after which time the real push for monster genocide can commence. Another two acts of chainsaw-fuelled brutality pass - only then can they put the locusts down once and for all. Except they don't. It doesn't work! Not only is this borne out by the existence of Gears of War 2, they fucking tell you it didn't work right at the end of the game! This voiceover comes in over the footage of the destruction the Gears have wrought, a lady's voice, and she says "They do not understand. They do not know why we wage this war." And that's when I thought to myself "Hey, I don't understand. Why do they wage this war? And who is Dom looking for? And what's the deal with Marcus and his dad? And are the locusts aliens from space or have they been underground all this time? And who the hell is this talking, anyway? Some sort of locust queen? I thought their females were blind, unintelligible berserkers." Then the voice says: "Why we will fight, and fight and fight... Until we win..." Powerful stuff. Then the voice adds "...Or we die." Ruined it. "And we are not dead yet." No, there's no recovering from that.

Yeah, so the voice explicitly states that the locusts aren't dead. So all of this, this whole game, has been a hiding to nowhere. They did a thing and that didn't work. Then they did the real thing which was totally going to work once and for all and right at the end they say that didn't work either. Well, that was a complete waste of time.

Side bar, voice-over lady: if someone is willing to fight and fight until they win, they're not going to sit back rationally in mid-sentence and add that, on the other hand, ostensibly, they could die. But, that said, they're not dead yet. That's not good writing, that's actually the opposite. It's writing so bad it undermines itself. You can't say "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed," and then add, "or not. Who knows?"

Anyway, the toe-curlingly bad script punctuated with oblique references to fathers and people being searched for in lieu of storytelling was easily the worst part of Gears of War and in many ways Gears of War 2 is a drastic improvement. God damn it, there are moments where you actually feel for these guys emotionally, these men who but a disc ago were nothing more than aggressive slabs of ham with guns and frowns. There's actually a real story being told here, a sense of pacing and scale, of character and depth. That Baird is "the smart guy" is no longer just an informed attribute but an actual real facet of a (fairly) believable entity, one who says and does relatively smart things. There is a plot, which develops. I mean, I would expect this of a novel or an above-average film but you have to grade on a curve for new media - Gears of War 2 ticks a lot of the narrative boxes that culminate in a satisfying story. And those niggling questions from the previous game are all answered. First and foremost among the questions on my mind was "How come the locust aren't dead?" Turns out that underneath the locust tunnels which were obliterated was another layer of deeper, more ancient tunnels filled to the brim with even meaner monsters. No doubt if they are obliterated there will be a third even deeper level of even older locusts beneath for Gears of War 3 to tackle. This whole planet is like a giant gobstopper. How many licks does it take to get to the extermination of this stupid species? God knows. So, we can assume the locusts don't come from space and have been down there a long while. And that crazy voice? That was indeed the locust queen but whatever questions that raises about locust reproduction are swept under the carpet by the convenient absence in Gears 2 of berserkers. Yeah and also it turns out that Dom is looking for his wife. There, was that so hard? Why couldn't they have told us that in the first place - i.e. made Gears of War 2 the first game and not bothered with the cock-tease prequel?

I mean, aside from chainsaw fun, what purpose does Gears 1 have when all it did was hint at a story that wasn't told until the second installment? If we're suddenly supposed to care about Dom's wife by the sequel the least they could have done is told us he had one. All we got was "I'm looking for someone." If the Gears series was a film Gears 2 would be the film and Gears 1 would be an incredibly flabby opening credit sequence best left on the cutting room floor. It's like the Star Wars prequels - if you want to tell the origin story of Darth Vader we don't need to see him as an innocuous little kid, you start your story at the point of interest, in this case the point at which he starts becoming Darth fucking Vader (which incidentally occurs at some point between the episodes One and Two, since by the start of the latter he's already an egomaniacal douche). Gears of War 2 is the point of interest - all its competence only serves to highlight the narrative uselessness of the previous game.

And that's all it is - competence. This still isn't Oscar Wilde. When the exposition finally comes it's delivered in the clunkiest ways - voice-overs, speeches, question and answer sessions between characters à la My Best Friend's Girl. Poor Marcus Feenix is still the same guy he was in the last game. He doesn't care what the locust eat, he just wants to kill them. When Dom becomes frustrated and tearful about having lost his wife, Marcus looks like he doesn't get it, like he still doesn't understand normal human emotion. He's all like "Are you okay, Dom?" and Dom's like "I just need a second, okay?" He might as well add, "It's always the same with you, Marcus. There's more to life than killing monsters, all right? I miss my family! Jeez." Poor Marcus, he's in the wrong game.

I didn't notice the huge exposition dumps in the first third until I sat my girlfriend down in front of the game. Whenever the characters started talking about the plot she said "Derp a derp a teetley tum" and I knew what she meant. There has to be a better, less predictable way to deliver this kind of information whilst at the same time not leaving us in the dark. Why didn't I mind before? Well,

a) It was Christmas day and

b) I was just happy to have answers.

All of which lead me to the sad realisation that the difference between Katie and me was that I was invested in the story.

Despite the heavy clunks of exposition falling around us, my brother and I still had a blast ploughing through the narrative. I'm not sure if the sudden presence of personality and humanity in our in-game avatars didn't detract from the sort of buddy cop movie scenario we normally cook up on the fly. We didn't need to invent motivations for our characters anymore, they already had them. Perhaps something was lost because of that. It's like in the fifth Harry Potter book where Harry stops being just a cipher through which we see the world of Hogwarts but starts to develop a personality of his own, and a very angry one at that. I found that annoying. I felt me and Harry were desynchronised in our responses to what was going on (and yes that was a deliberate Assassin's Creed reference - I'm on a roll!).

I am being facetious. Chainsaw guns and explosions were Gears of War's raison d'etre and it could have been called Gears of War: The Quest for Pudding and the explosions would have been just as enjoyable. That the makers of the game acknowledged that more was expected of them and rose to the challenge, delivering something even remotely emotive and even more gripping action-wise is nothing short of a miracle. It's like if Mac Donald's brought out a gourmet burger made from 100% organic beef. Yes, it's still a burger but you wouldn't know it had come from the same kitchen as a big mac.

And I think beef is the perfect context in which to view such things as Gears of War. Those of you shaking your heads in bewilderment as I describe my joy over visceral head-shots need to understand that this is me at my most primitive. I can't help it. Do you think my time would be better served reading a book? Do you think I can't see your point? But I don't see things quite the same way. Different art forms have different flavours and some are undoubtedly more nutritious than others. But Gears of War and its delicious sequel are steaks. One is better seasoned than the other but they are both just unhealthy, buttery slabs of rare beef steak, bloody as hell and appealing to everyone's inner troglodyte. What can I say? Sometimes it's nice to just knock back a beer with your bro and tuck in.

Sorry, vegetarians.

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