Friday afternoon tidbits

No cute intro this week. Let's get to it.

-The news of layoffs at EA's Black Box studio must have been a punch in the gut, coming as it did on the same day that the company's Skate 2 hit stores. Black Box also made the apparently terrible recent Need for Speed games, but Skate is the real deal. Hopefully its core team is sticking around for the third game. Good luck to everyone else there in the hunt for work.

-Denis Farr questions the accepted wisdom that Gears of War is homoerotic. Interesting read, although you're never going to convince me that a bunch of sweaty, muscular dudes crouching together is anything else.

-How bad is Sony doing? So bad.

-Duncan Fyfe takes on Yakuza 2, as only he can.

-Jeremy Parish always does great, high-minded work, but a list like "The Worst Presidents in Gaming" is what brings the links.

-Speaking of which, are we what we link? I've always assumed that when I link something, the implication is that I endorse the quality of the article, not necessarily that I agree with the argument. Context helps, I guess. It's a bad idea to assume that people know when you're linking something ironically.

-I approve of Hardcasual's reinvention as Onion-style satire. Of note: "'Parent Killer 64' Had Nothing to Do With Me Killing My Parents," and "UGO Reverses 1up Buyout Thanks to Brave Actions of bdnjfbdenk."

-Is February the month of DLC? Sounds like it. I'm itching to get at Operation Anchorage.

-Iroquois Pliskin is back! I was starting to wonder if he'd died. Sounds like he nearly did.

Geared up

Above: Look, it's my blog and I can re-use images if I want to.

Now that nobody cares, my Gears of War 2 review is up at thephoenix.com. If you're a regular reader, you probably know the gist: campaign is good but not great, Horde is awesome.

With a little distance from its release, though, I have a couple more thoughts, neither of which necessarily has to do with the game itself. First, I understand that game publishers want to capitalize on holiday buying, and that's why they tend to release their biggest games in October and November. But as a gamer, it continues to frustrate me that I'm forced to choose between good games during this short period of time. If something like Gears had come out in wintertime or summertime, I probably would have happily devoted weeks to playing Horde. Instead, I pretty much had to drop it in order to move onto Left 4 Dead, which I like better. Granted, in different circumstances I might have bought Gears 2 and only Gears 2, and been quite satisfied with it. I still don't understand why publishers don't make more of an effort to release games when the spotlight will be all theirs.

Second, am I crazy, or is Gears 2 not making nearly the impact that the original did? When the first one came out, I feel like it's all people were talking about, and if I recall correctly it was the most popular Xbox Live game for a time. That doesn't seem to be happening this time.* It's not as though Epic did a faceplant or anything, and there's still not that much multiplayer competition this season. Far Cry 2's multiplayer doesn't seem to have caught on. Dead Space, Mirror's Edge, Fable 2, and Fallout 3 don't even have multiplayer. Is everybody playing the new Call of Duty? (Is everybody playing the old Call of Duty?) Or is everybody playing Gears 2 and I just don't realize it because I dumped it as soon as a good-looking newer game came along?

*Note: I am too lazy to look this up and confirm.

Crack horde

Above: Not Horde mode, but OMG look at that

Since yesterday's post was about an area in which Gears of War 2 came up short, in the interest of balance I may as well mention an area in which it, er, comes up long. (Parallelism!) I'm talking, of course, about Horde.

Horde is really, truly fantastic, worth the price of admission, a non-stop roller-coaster ride of chills, thrills and spills, and so on. I've talked often about my general distaste for online multiplayer gaming, which has its roots in a few distinct places. Specifically:

• I am shy
• People are jerks
• I suck at video games
• Generally, I'd prefer a storyline to pure competition
• Seriously, have you heard these d-bags on Xbox Live

Horde helps to do away with the Xbox Live troglodyte problem simply because it's fully cooperative. There's not an incentive to talk trash to your own teammates, and even my worst nightmare of a Gears player isn't so dumb as to hurl invective at the computer-controlled Locust. Even in public games, most of the chatter I've heard has been focused on the game, whether helpful ("Locust hiding under the bridge") or beseeching ("I'm bleeding out!"). It's a nice change from the usual pumped-up deathmatch banter.

More to the point, when I play Horde I feel like this is the game I remember. I haven't even made it to wave 10 out of 50 yet. The enemy advantage in both numbers and firepower becomes ludicrous by about the third wave, which is exactly how it ought to be. Flanking maneuvers with the help of your teammates become more important and useful than they ever are in the single-player game. Peeking out of cover for even a second too long can be fatal. There are numerous opportunities to feel like a hero for reviving your downed teammates, and your teammates in turn are much more willing to help you out than AI Dom ever seemed to be.

The fact that Horde doesn't follow a narrative arc isn't important, either, because with the benefit of two campaigns to serve as a backdrop, it's easy to picture it as a massive single battle in the context of the larger war. And it solves the problem I thought I had with the campaign: In Horde, the player is entirely on the defensive. There's no storming forward, no "lightmass bomb" to detonate. It's just head-in-the-dirt shooting, and the fear that comes with it. When I first heard about Horde, it almost sounded dumb to me. Instead, it's Gears of War stripped to its most elemental. It's genius.

(Now if we could just do something about that matchmaking system...)

Too dumb for print

Above: "Bro... you're overthinking it."

In writing my upcoming Gears of War 2 review, I started down a path of inquiry and then quickly retreated. It wasn't the kind of thing that would make sense to a general audience, I didn't think. Also, it was kind of half-assed. But I thought I'd run it past you all and see if you think there's something to it, or if it's a load of bollocks.

I was trying to figure out why the campaign seemed a little lackluster to me. Partly, it was easy to determine: a few too many turret missions, a bland vehicular sequence, and, ultimately, too many parts where the game got away from the thing it does so well. But that really wasn't all of it. I think the kids call it "ludonarrative dissonance," but I have a habit of picking these things up and misusing them later.

Here's how I see it: Gears' gameplay is essentially defensive. Taking cover well is more important than having crackshot aim. Using the environment, not targeting your enemies, is the skill you need to master in order to progress through the game. Most of the times I died during the campaign, it was because I had mistakenly dug in too close to the line, and was swarmed by foes. I learned to stay back as much as possible.

The storyline, though, puts the COGs on the offensive for the duration. It's all rah-rah, take-it-to-'em stuff. You get all geared up to fight, pardon the pun, and then spend all your time with your head down. That doesn't make sense.

I didn't feel the same way during the first one. In the original game, I felt very much on the defensive, overwhelmed and outgunned at all times. It made more sense for the story that I was playing it the way I was. The incursion into the Locust caves was presented as a suicide mission. In Gears 2, for whatever reason, the characters just don't seem to mind as much to be heading down there by themselves. That never struck me right. You could say it's because they know they have no other option, but I don't know if that's good enough -- even if it is the case, no one ever communicates it.

(Slight tangent: The sequel does a slightly better job than the first of making it seem like you're a small part of a bigger conflict, but why do they keep giving the most important jobs to just two guys? Is that some kind of advanced military strategy, giving your enemies as few targets as possible? Think of all the lives that could have been saved on D-Day if we'd had Marcus and Dom fighting for the Allies. "You two take Omaha Beach, and Baird and the Cole Train will take Utah." "Woo-woo! Pain train's coming!")

Like I said, it's a little half-baked and I'm not sure how much I even believe it, but there had to be some reason why the Gears 2 campaign didn't seem as gripping as the first. What do you think? Am I grasping for something that isn't there?

Picked-up pieces

(Update: Welcome, Slate Gaming Club readers! Scroll down for the bit about Gears of War 2 and Contra.)

Because you can't make fun of defenseless kids all the time, enjoy some scattered musings.

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All you need to know about why Rock Band is better than Guitar Hero can be summed up in five words: "Mission of Burma track pack."

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Which of these is the best joke:

"I can't believe I missed the first three Left Dead games!"

Or: "I can't believe I missed Left 1-3 Dead!"

Or: "Will I know what's going on in Left 4 Dead if I never played Left 3 Dead?"

Or are they all failures? (All based, by the way, on somebody I knew in college who saw a commercial for Cradle 2 the Grave, starring DMX, and said, "I didn't know they made a Cradle the Grave 1!")

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Last weekend I played Call of Duty 4 online for the first time in my life. Within 20 minutes of my joining, someone had called somebody else a "fucking little bitch" en route to mocking him non-stop for the remainder of my time in the game. Sometimes I think I unfairly generalize about the level of discourse in multiplayer video games. Then I, you know, play multiplayer video games.

Sub-musing: Why should it even bother me when a stranger cusses out another stranger during a game? I don't know. But it does.

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I never realized the extent to which games these days are just rip-offs of older games. It was suggested to me that a sequence near the end of BioShock, in which you assemble the pieces of a Big Daddy suit, was directly influenced by the plot of Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest, in which Simon gathered Dracula's body parts in order to put him back together and then destroy him once and for all. Who would have guessed?

Gears of War 2 doesn't even hide its influences. There's an entire sequence that's basically the last level of Contra. It's not just that your squad gets swallowed by a giant worm and has to fight its way out. You have to avoid giant chomping teeth, kind of like this:

Arachnoid parasites leap from the ground and scurry toward you, just like this:

At the end, you must destroy the creature's heart, which bears more than a passing resemblance to this:

The big difference, of course, is that in Contra you were never in danger of drowning in a quickly rising pool of arterial blood. Lack of technology -- or failure of imagination?

(Thanks to this dude for taking so many great Contra screenshots, which I stole with glee.)