PixelVixen707

If you just went by the brainy games blogosphere, you’d think Gears of War 2 had never come out. It’s already moved units and thrilled shooter die-hards worldwide this month, but outside of The New Yorker and now Mitch Krpata, noone has had much to say about it. I spent a chunk of the weekend wrapping up the campaign, and while I found it an almost end-to-end hoot, one part literally made me sick to my stomach, to the point where it haunts me today.

If you think I mean the part about the riftworm, maybe we played different games.

Gears of War 2 tells the story of men at war, and it works best when it focuses on its four main men. The camaraderie in Delta Squad is cozy and engrossing; you feel like you’re in the back of the Centaur tank with them, listening to them break each other’s balls apart or however you guys put it, rattling off the comradely black comedy that seems to come naturally to men who risk their lives together. (At least, that’s what I’ve seen in war films.)

The game’s light-hearted Six Flags action sequences are brilliant. Never mind the subtler mechanics of Gear’s design: you have to love whoever spent that much time on scenes that only last minutes, such as the high-speed gunboat chase in an underground river with undulating lizard-slugs propelling the boats and just enough ammo to hold you ’til the end.

Then there are scenes that are no fun at all.

Early in the game we learn that one of the key soldiers in Delta Squad, Dom, has a wife named Maria. She’s a civilian, and she got lost somewhere, and he’s looking for her. She comes up once or twice in the first two chapters, and each time, I resisted the story for its hoakiness - and its hopelessness. A flaw in the Gears of War series is the fact that we know little to nothing about the planet Sera, or its civilian society. From what we’ve seen, the whole globe’s wrecked and humanity is back on its heels. So who has a heart left for the bystanders? Yes, we know Dom cares about his wife, but how could he expect she’s alive in all this? He might as well look for good cell phone reception or a well-made double-shot espresso.

By chapter four, however (and obviously, spoilers follow), Maria’s back on Dom’s mind. The squad is deep underground when Dom gets a lead on where she might be, in one of the Locust work camps. Now, we all know this won’t end well. We saw the serene, mystical supersoldier Tai fall to the grubs, and just a few hours of torture later he was a broken man - unable to talk, quaking, and eager to kill himself the minute he got a gun. We know too that the weak get it worst of all: rookie Carmine got killed, because he was just a rookie. This is a tough world. We get it.

Then Dom finds Maria. She’s locked in one of the strange Iron Maiden-like coffins where the Locust keep human subjects. When they free her, she stumbles out to him - and she has been utterly destroyed.

Her skin is stretched over her frame. Patches of hair are missing, her eyes are sunken, something’s shining almost like visible bone on her face. She can’t talk, can’t cry, doesn’t recognize anything. She’s been here for weeks. Dom cries and apologizes, and then puts her to rest.

This scene horrified me, and it still horrifies me. It is utterly painful. We’re left wondering about the torture that brought her here, and then probing it in our imaginations - what did they do to her? How long did it last? Torture is already a fascination of our pop. You see it used graphically and horribly by everything from the right-wing 24 to lefty Joss Whedon, and no matter how often we probe it, we don’t overcome our fear. It is the last deep dark. And worse than seeing it happen to our own character, we see it happen to Maria, who Dom couldn’t protect - and what if it happened to our loved ones? I thought about Zach, and the imagined hurt was overwhelming.

Obviously, this is manipulative. Epic poured all of the vulnerability of this world, all of the suffering of its populace and all of the homelives of all the men we’re following, right into this one woman. And then she dies, and we move right along.

So you can see it two ways. Either:

1. They’re toying with us. They stuck in one hypermanipulative moment to disturb the player and even eek out a few tears, as well as lending a little gravity to a game that’s really about how much fun war can be, when you’re the guy with a chainsaw on your assault rifle.

2. Or - and bear with me - CliffyB has something to say about war.

I didn’t make it to the Game Developers Conference in ‘06, but I combed through the coverage. And at the game design challenge, CliffyB submitted a game about surviving in a wartorn country - not as a resistor, or an underdog hero, but as a powerless, unarmed civilian. Think of the people you read about in any war zone, whose neighborhoods are razed and who could get shot any day for any reason, and who just want to keep their children alive and fed: that was CliffyB’s game idea, to create the head of that family and make you understand what they went through.

It’s a good idea. And now he’s done it. For a few minutes, he pummels you with how war treats the meek. As gameplay, it’s a failure: he’s just stopping the log flume ride for five minutes and throwing us right back on when he’s done. But the point has been made.