gears of war II

gears of war I-pros:the best game I have ever played

cons: it gives me earth shattering body shaking migraine.

So anyone have this? Thoughts? Debating on whether or not I want to pick this up in the next few days.

I've got this. Play it on co-op mode with my broseph. Not finished it yet, almost at the point where you meet the queen, but I've been told there's still quite a bit of play after that. It's an improvement on the previous game, only reservation I have about it is that there's too much non-shooting orientated gameplay. They obviously tried to switch things up a little and so you end up doing platformer type shit for about 45 minutes.

i don't know why, but i'm having a hard time getting into this one. i really like gears 1 at the time. maybe its because i just finished playing dead space?

maybe because you're scaaaaaaaaared.

sure

why is that not as satisfying as i wanted it to be

This game really doesn't feel all that different that the first game to me.

than

Yeah, I never finished the first one so I don't see why I need to get this.

i read a few reviews that suggested that gow2 had expanded on what gow1 had done but for me, it feels like more of the same. i'm only two hours in though, so maybe it gets better?

gears of war I-pros:the best game I have ever played

??

does anyone else share this sentiment? and can they explain it to me? it looks nice at times but its pretty much a tech demo imo

The flanking stuff is very sophisticated and satisfying, and the violence is visceral in the right way. The cover system is really pretty nice. But the story and the main characters are irritating.

That fuckin' new yorker article.

wut new yorker article

climax of this game is weak-sauce. So easy, real anti-climax. No tough boss or anything. All in all, decent game, too many vehicle sections etc. not focused enough on the usual combat. But I enjoyed it plus will buy the next one.

canks: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/03/081103fa_fact_bissell?currentPage=all

Please enjoy the following overblown bullshit.

"The novelist Nathan Englander, a fan of the game, cites its third-person viewpoint, in which the player looks over the shoulder of the character being controlled, as a key to its success. “In literary terms,” Englander told me, “it’s a close-second-person shooter. It’s Jay McInerney and Lorrie Moore territory. You’re both totally involved and totally watching.” As for the collapsed architecture and blown-open spaces of the Gears world, Englander said, “There’s the hospital from ‘Blindness’ and the house from ‘The Ghost Writer,’ and I know that beautiful, ruined world of Gears as well as either of those.”

Much of the resonance of Gears can be directly attributed to the character of Fenix... He shows constant caution and, occasionally, fear. Although he can dive gracefully, his normal gait has the lumbering heaviness of an abandoned herd animal. His face is badly scarred, and his voice (excellently rendered by the actor John DiMaggio, who also provided the voice of Bender on Matt Groening’s “Futurama”) is a three-packs-a-day growl, less angry than exhausted. Unlike the protagonists of many shooters, Fenix rarely seems particularly eager to kill anything. The advertising campaign for the first Gears was centered on a strangely affecting sixty-second spot in which Fenix twice flees from enemies, only to be cornered by a Corpser, a monstrous arachnoid creature, on which he opens fire. But it was the soundtrack—Gary Jules’s spare, mournful cover of the 1982 Tears for Fears song “Mad World”—that gave the spot its harsh-tender dissonance. This helped signal that Fenix was something that few video-game characters had yet managed to be: disappointedly adult."

!!!

"The novelist Nathan Englander, a fan of the game, cites its third-person viewpoint, in which the player looks over the shoulder of the character being controlled, as a key to its success. “In literary terms,” Englander told me, “it’s a close-second-person shooter. It’s Jay McInerney and Lorrie Moore territory. You’re both totally involved and totally watching.” As for the collapsed architecture and blown-open spaces of the Gears world, Englander said, “There’s the hospital from ‘Blindness’ and the house from ‘The Ghost Writer,’ and I know that beautiful, ruined world of Gears as well as either of those.”

http://www.banksy.co.uk/cuttings/images/NEW/privateeye.jpg

i didnt know microsoft could buy articles in the new yorker

what an insanely offensive puff piece - lol jay mcirerney, get the fuck outta here tryin to tell me this shit about gears of war

haha I enjoyed it. But I hate games like gears of war so I guess it makes sense I would like an article that performs a definitive new-yorkerizing of it, the effete goofus blatantly attempting to make others of his overeducated ilk feel hip-and-with-it about some youth culture phenomenon two years too late

Bissell's constant bleats of "I'm a gamer too!" = "POW! ZAP! BAM! Comics aren't just for kids anymore!"

The offensiveness comes from them trying to inflate Gears of War into some complex vista of lost opportunity when there's genuinely artistic mainstream titles that get overlooked because of oddball mechanics or the art is too wacked out or there isn't a fucking chaingun at the center of the plot.

actually I think they get overlooked mostly because POW! ZAP! BAM! Comics aren't just for kids anymore!

Though I do think that there's an argument to be made (and what a seriously geeky argument it would be) that video games in the first decade of 2000 are actually very analogous both critically and artistically to what comic books were in the 1980s. That would make GOW II our Dark Knight, maybe? Fallout 3, our Watchmen? Still waiting on a Maus?

http://www.subtraction.com/2008/11/14/game-on

Still surprises me that people aren't aware of the gamer media revolution and then I meet with folks in their mid-forties or fifties who've never heard of guitar hero or played a game through to completion and the divide is real obvious. Articles like these are always good for a shrug and a knowing chortle; but I can't wait to see what stuff the two year olds of today will be into in their late teens that mystifies me. Three dimensional mind chess? Bi-Crystal Meth? Heavy breathing?

Tombot: Prolly so, but that's changing pretty quick.

It's way too early to call Fallout 3 the video game equivalent of Watchman (and what I've seen of the dialog is far too clunky to really be apt anyway), however the Gears / Dark Knight comparison may not be too far off (especially seeing the host of other games that have tried to follow in Gears footsteps, the same way a lot of comics tried to follow Miller's lead). I would add, gaming is FAR more mainstream big media / big money than comics EVER were in the 1980s.

Though I do think that there's an argument to be made (and what a seriously geeky argument it would be) that video games in the first decade of 2000 are actually very analogous both critically and artistically to what comic books were in the 1980s.

I don't think so, at all. I think video games made their major artistic leaps inasmuch as involving, interesting storytelling and appealing to a less juvenile audience a long time ago. I think both games you mentioned, and most of their ilk, are more like Image Comics, fancy dress meatloaf.

Tom, both genres started out in a form that's been appropriated by pop art, both went through mini renaissances early on that were embraced by the culture but less by the intelligentsia (underground comics movement of the late sixties/early seventies comes to mind and any number of reasonably bright artistic games of the eighties/nineties) and the current renaissance is about broadening play base, exploring new methods of interaction and shouldering new ideas. While artistic expansion was necessarily more at the core of the comic revolution of the eighties (it's a lot harder for one guy to create a game from scratch than a novel), it's still a player in what's being released in 08 q4.
As for "ilk" and "meatloaf", that's a you say tomato i say tahmahto issue: a quick reread of Dark Knight suggests about the same depth of storytelling as, say, a Fallout 3, just without some of the iconography. Plug in your favorites if you don't like the analogy.
In any case, there's two bugaboos to my kind of thinking; one is Spiegelman's suggestion that there will never be a comic book with the same imperial presence/respect/meaning as Moby Dick, just not gonna happen. It may be that there will never be a video game with the same visceral intensity/resonance/acclaim as Maus. Some things don't add.
The other is that it's difficult to tell what's going on when you're in the middle of an artistic movement and, while games industry is ABSOLUTELY about money and publicity and units shifted, it's also about (less and less tangentially in many cases) art. It's gonna take a few years till we can figure out what came out of this mess.
Regardless of if any of this strikes you as gold or as bullshit, I think we can all agree that GOWII is not going to be remembered as this generation's Bleak House.

and the current renaissance is about broadening play base, exploring new methods of interaction and shouldering new ideas.

I don't think any of the games you mentioned do that, is my problem. I think Guitar Hero and Wii Fit are the edge, warfare sims are just harlequin pulp.

guitar hero is dance dance revolution for fingers.

i dont think the analogy works at all, for a million different reasons

re: 80s comics i mean, not ddr for fingers

As long as video games are enormously expensive to create, the power is always going to rest with those with technical ability, and they will always have more sway than those with creative ideas or grand storytelling abilities. Gears of War isn't The Dark Knight because Frank Miller was one of the best writers among a group of people who all had the opportunity of self-expression without limitation, and hugely expensive enterprises are never going to be open to that sort of creative competition as long as the mainstream user continues to pay a shitload of money to play uncreative games (like Madden updates, or whatever the next snowboarding sim is, or the new Kung Fu Panda game...), especially considering the degree to which manufacturers are beholden to their shareholders.

Also, the level inside the worm in GOW II is awesome.

Just wanted to pop in (though this probably isn't the right place) and note that if Spiegelman really said that in the debate over the potential of comics, he's dead wrong. There are already plenty of comics as uneven and boring as Moby Dick! Seriously though, why would combining pictures and words mean something couldn't have the same "imperial presence/respect/meaning " as something that used only words? One should also note, wasn't Moby Dick basically ignored upon release? Maybe the Moby Dick of comics is already out there, maybe the Moby Dick of games is already out there.

Tom, as I say, I wouldn't argue too hard the GOW/DK or Fallout/Watchmen analogies (and the latter is probably really not worth standing up for), but if your mileage varies rather than not moving at all, we're likely on or near the same page.

Canks, I'd be curious on some of those million different reasons.

Poly, no doubt! But as long as creative upstarts like Keita Takahashi and Jonathan Blow and Kim Swift show the potential to make money franchises like Miyamoto and Igarashi and even fuckin' Cliffy B do, there's the potential for plenty of people to take a chance that great art=great commerce. Lord knows it ain't always the case (c.f. Psychonauts), but all it takes are a few breakouts. Two or three million sellers from a boutique company with lofty aspirations might set up a market where art games woudl have the clout to warrant the same kind of niche shelf space, critical focus, marketing impression and artistic breadth that, say, a Fantagraphics or a First Second get today.
It ain't a lot, but it's a start.

Jeff, I'm pretty sure Spiegelman said that during his massive post-Pulitzer interview cycle; I'd have to google to make sure I'm not drastically misquoting. I think his point was less that there wasn't going to be a moby dick of comix cause they weren't good enough and moreso that they simply couldn't do the same things due to the necessary restrictions of the form. Dancing about architecture, etc.
Then again, Cerebus looks a bit more like the moby dick of comics every day...

It ain't a lot, but it's a start.

Is it a start, or is it a vestigial limb? I mean, I like Psychonauts fine, but if stuff like that is the great hope of the games industry, I weep. It's a mediocre Adult Swim show with B-grade gameplay, and it was quirky enough to make like $5 and buy Tim Schaefer a personalized license plate. Now he's pallin' around with terrorists like Jack Black. Keita Takahashi is making a boring worm game, and probably would rather be outside than making video games. Cliffy B should be working on gameplay, not larger creative decisions. And these are the shining stars of the industry! Will Wright has all the time in the world, and spends five years making a game no one actually wants to play. It doesn't give me a lot of hope.

Then again, I'm not exactly sitting around waiting for video games to become great art or even good narrative entertainment. I'm fine with the present state of dumb, occasionally-interesting fun.

yup.

Poly, you lost me when you said Psychonauts had "B-grade gameplay"; I'm a lucasarts/doublefine fanboy ne plus ultra.
Can't argue with you about Wright though.

There should (and I think, will if there's not already) be a large enough audience to financially justify both a solid flow of "Braid"-ish releases and a few AA video games that push the intellectual and mechanical boundaries of what a game can do.I don't wanna be a <a href="http://negatendo.net/blog/2008/09/28/stop-calling-video-games-art/";>GAMES AS ART</a> champion, I'd just like to see more diversity in games. Dumb, occasionally-interesting fun works for me in any media, but I don't see why this one branch has to stop there when there's so much potential.

well, first off, watchmen and TKR weren't making strides for the medium, they were making strides for the genre (superheroes), and they were sort of bitter, self-hating rebukes of the genre at that. the legacy of these comics is that they became vessels thru which comics were legitimized, they served to get a portion of the non-comic-readin public to start takin comix seriously. in that sense, stuff like (as tom noted) guitar hero and wiifit are closer to what you're talkin about. there's just... too many ways in which the two situations don't parallel, mostly because the two mediums are so different. i mean, GH isn't causing anyone to take games 'more seriously' and it shouldnt - games SHOULDNT be taken seriously, that's why they're games. it's just that more games are being made for wider audiences, as opposed to the 14-year-old-male ghetto that gaming has spent most of its lifetime in; the audience is there, it's a multibillion dollar industry, but the game makers haven't shown much adventurousness in exploring what they can do to satisfy other demographics. the struggle with comics is that they were/are completely ghettoized as a medium - the diversity in the product is out there (made easier by it being such a DIY form, whereas producing a game has wayyyyyyyyyy more in common with moviemaking than anything else) (which made me think about comparing games today to, like, movies circa 1927, but i'm not sure if that holds up either), the trick is getting the audience's attention

TDKR

Poly, you lost me when you said Psychonauts had "B-grade gameplay"; I'm a lucasarts/doublefine fanboy ne plus ultra.

I really thought the level design / art was the star of that game. The gameplay didn't really seem all that different than your average Ratchet and Clank game to me.

Canks, I think you're conflating two different comparisons: the ramping mainstream/financial popularity of comics in the 80's mirroring the ramping mainstream/financial popularity of games (which I wouldn't necessarily argue) and the sudden awakening/appreciation of comics in the 80's by old guard press with attendant fumbling POW! ZAP! bullshit and the same press assessment of games today (which I would).

I dig what you're saying RE: expansion of genre vs. media, but that's an insider's view and tangential to my point. I'm suggesting that the same critical errors, hyperbole and rigmarole that signaled the comics aren't just for kids wave of the 80's seems worth referencing when you get dipshit writeups like that New Yorker piece or when everyone claims to be hunting for the "Lester Bangs of Video Games", bleh.

Notably, Scheisel over at the grey lady seems to do a really good job of neither over-hyping nor fanboy swanning eukyarotism, but he's absolutely in the minority.

I'd also argue that "games shouldn't be taken seriously cuz they're games" is more tautological than true; it's just an interactive medium! It can be dramatic and serious and thought provoking too, even if it generally isn't... though it's possible that maybe we just need a different set of nomenclature, along the line of Douglas' talk in "Reading Comics" that we need to delineate 'ART COMICS' as a separate breed. Again, some parallels.

Otherwise, I agree with you.

Poly, I thought all the elements in Psychonauts worked ridiculously well, especially when the game would drastically left turn into totally new mechanics; stomping lungfish town, that weird chessboard strategy level and so on.
PLEASE NOTE IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER TO THIS POINT: Fuck one (1) Meat Circus.

well you said "Though I do think that there's an argument to be made (and what a seriously geeky argument it would be) that video games in the first decade of 2000 are actually very analogous both critically and artistically to what comic books were in the 1980s" which was v ambiguous, so u kinda invited that conflation

ps. owned

I owned two PS, but only one PS2.

forks, are board games an 'interactive medium'? collectable card games?

Ummm... not exactly? I'd put those things closer to chess. I think it's more a matter of the amalgam of art/design, sound/music, story/scripting and the more complex interactive element ('gameplay', i guess, but also twiddling fingers or shaking your wiistick or whatever) that delineates Magic the Gathering from FFVIII. Where are you going with that line of thinking?

LoLZ at me getting more longwinded than usual on this topic, but I had dinner last night with this chick and we did a lotta talking about this stuff so it's on my mind.

just curious how they fit in that continuum - there's not really a lot of distance between, like, Operation and that game on the ds where u cut fools open

lol did u smash

Yeah, I diggit but the Trauma Center games differ from Operation in exactly the ways I just said: sound/music (not just a BZZZT, but intensifying soundtrack and vocal cues), story/scripting ("make a pentagram to FREEZE TIME"), art/design (a complete and constant world and array of characters to play with) and much more complex gameplay.

And no, no smashing. I'm spoken for.

Oooooooh, check Forks hanging out with the gamesblogeratti.

no smashing tho, u lose

http://mosh.nokia.com/content/4D4BA47DC0A8C64AE040050A45300B35
She's good people.

ja, I am familiar w/her work; she is comes across as v.chatty

Yeah, I diggit but the Trauma Center games differ from Operation in exactly the ways I just said: sound/music (not just a BZZZT, but intensifying soundtrack and vocal cues), story/scripting ("make a pentagram to FREEZE TIME"), art/design (a complete and constant world and array of characters to play with) and much more complex gameplay.

most importantly, you can only play Trauma Center by yourself, but Operation is a game for a family or group of kids to play together. Hence, people know what the fuck Operation is and it remains part of the mainstream consciousness. A similar line delineates FF7 and M:TG, although in that case the barrier to entry for FF7 was much, much lower than it is for somebody to really enjoy M:TG.

Blinkenlights and laser sounds, most people really don't give a shit. The PS3 = Talking Battleship

So Halo is more likely to remain part of the mainstream consciousness cause it's multiplayer? Dunno if I follow exactly.

I do like the PS3 analogy though.

halo also has a pretty high barrier to entry, e.g. you must love getting abused by 14-yos

which brings us back to gow2 lol

That took a minute!

and i didn't even get to use my "Go is the Moby Dick of board games" line...

are you talking about now or last nite at dinner?

i'm about 3/4 through this game, surprised by how much fun the basic combat became once i finally got used to the controls and the cover system (i never played gow1). it's sort of hard to imagine it as a great multiplayer game (does anyone still play it?), although the co-op campaign would probably be fun.

also it is an encyclopedia of douchey facial hair.

The co-op campaign is very good. Flanking with a pal makes levels much easier and more satisfying.

finished it last night, i loved the over-the-top exploding dinosaur lolz.

then i tried a couple games of online multiplayer, not such a good idea. actually the first game was alright, but the second game consisted of taking cover somewhere, seeing no one on my side of the map, and then watching my head suddenly explode for no apparent reason.

People are still playing the sucko mp for this game, huh?

only the people who spent the time to get stupid good at it, apparently