Hyper-Bolic Game Chamber

At long last we finish our journey through the universe of Cliff Blezinski’s Gear of War series, and it ends, not with a bang, but with a half-hearted cash-in.

GoW: Judgement is a prequel about Damon Baird and his Kilo Squad blundering around and blowing stuff up for really no reason. They tell the story of their blundering while sitting in trial for war crimes, waiting to be judged by Colonel Ezra “The Dumbest Man In The World” Loomis. Will this declassified tale shed light on any of the setting’s remaining mysteries?

No, not really. But hey, we got Space Russians!

We’re back from our brief hiatus with the testosterone soaked conclusion to the Gears of War trilogy. Gears 3 mixes things up by introducing new characters, new baddies, and a post-apocalypse tone, which is odd because Gears World has always been a bit of a hell-scape.

After the previous game’s finale only served to make things worse, Marcus and the gang struggle to survive against the new threat of the Lambent, and the ever present Locust horde. To further complicate this three-way war, Marcus’s past is returning to haunt him. Also, Dom has a beard.

Gears 3 is really uneven tonally, and a bit of a mess in general. But it’s still a pretty good time. If nothing else, there is loads of explosions!

Gears Month continues with Gears of War 2, the ambitious sequel released in 2008 for the Xbox 360. We rejoin Marcus and the fellas one year after the events of the first game, and we find that all that Lightmass Bomb stuff? Didn’t do all that much. So, the Locust are back and nasty as ever, and humanity is really backed against a wall. With a massive last-ditch offensive on the Locust Hollow as our backdrop, Gears 2 attempts to tell a more personal story between our two heroes, focusing on loss and hope. Does it work?

Well, this is a game about chainsaw guns, so you decide.

Gears of War is a game that defined a genre. Cliff Bleszinski and his team at Epic Games took the burgeoning idea of cover-based third-person shooting and turned it into a solid and effective formula. Thus, the legacy of chest high walls was born.

As you might expect, Gears of War is a war story. The similar-to-but-distinct-from-Earth planet of Sera is locked in the midst of a brutal, drawn out conflict between giant meatmen and orcs with guns. Our heroes, Delta Squad (the meatmen), are tasked with a mission to obtain targeting data that will allow the superweapon of the day to potentially wipe out the invading hoard, called Locust (the orcs).

So, basically it’s just four dudes, pallin’ around and shooting monsters. Not a bad formula, to be honest.

MOOOOORTAL KOMBAAAAAT! Again! Last month saw the release of the tenth Mortal Kombat game, and guess what. It rules. MKX continues the series tradition of having an in-depth story mode, and following the insane events of the previous entry, there’s a lot of fallout to deal with.

After Raiden messed up everything, we are treated to Earthrealm’s newest threat, an invasion by the fallen Elder God Shinnok and his demonic legions. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a civil war going on in Crazy Monster World (aka Outworld), and everyone who died in the last game are now evil undead revenants generally looking to ruins everyone’s day. Since 20 years have passed, the burden of saving the world falls to a new generation, with a little help from some familiar faces along the way.

Add in bit of the ol’ ultraviolence, and we’ve got a Mortal Kombat game on our hands!

This weeks game is a robot shooting bonanza published by Sega in 2012. Set in a dystopian future ravaged by global warming, Binary Domain is a surprisingly dark look at the conflict between man and machine. The story revolves around Hollow Children, androids that look, act, and even think they are completely human, and the vague unspecified threat they pose. Our heroes (?) are members of a Rust Crew, a paramilitary squad dedicated to hunting down Hollow Children and wrecking up any mechanical foe that gets in their way.

The actual shooty bits of this shooting game are pretty solid all around, and the game’s voice command/squad loyalty gimmick, while totally ancillary, works fine. Where this game starts to get weird is in its themes, namely the central “robots=oppressed minority” allegory. It casts the protagonists actions into a severely different light, and drastically changes the entire premise from “basic sci-fi shoot-em-up” to “really heavy stuff”. Does it work? Well, that’s what we’re here to discuss.

We enter into the double digits with this weeks episode about what is technically a video game.Killer 7 was originally released on the Nintendo Gamecube back in 2005, and was many people’s first exposure to game director and noted crazy person Goichi Suda, aka Suda 51.

So, what is Killer 7 about? Well, it’s about a team of expert assassins who work for the government hunting terrorists. But it’s also about genetically modified monsters, mental illness, massive government conspiracies, comic books, corporate ethics and ghosts, and sometimes all of those things at once. That’s complicated enough without 18 tons of heavy surrealism piled on top of it.

Are we able to figure it all out? No

Hello darkness, our old friend. In today’s episode, we return to the uniquely demented mind of Taro Yoko with Drakengard 3! Following one woman’s quest to murder her entire family (and everything in between) Drakengard 3 is extremely Drakengard.

Taking place roughly 100 years before the original game, DG3 is about an Intoner (magical singing lady) named Zero and the ultraviolent conflict between her and her sisters, One, Two, Three, Four and Five. Yes, that is their names, and shockingly, it will make sense eventually. It feels weird to say this about a Drakengard game, but we really had a good time playing through this one! Sure, it plays like barely passable garbage, and the frame rate is abysmal, and the environments look like PS2 textures, and the weird sex stuff is really weird, but it’s wonderfully insane in that very Drakengard way.

Thanks for listening!

MORTAL KOMBAAAAAT!

Mortal Kombat had always been an insane fever dream of arterial spray and cheesy Kung Fu flick cliches, but the transition to 3D and the deaththrows of publisher Midway really did not agree with the series. Instead of just doing a reboot and wiping the slate clean, Netherrealm Studios instead decided to use the mangled viscera of the old continuity to create a time travel plot meant to fix past wrongs.

And you wanna know the really crazy part? It actually works. This ninth installment of the series not only reboots away all the too-dumb-to-be-fun stuff, but also manages to turn old school fan service into an entirely new workable story. It’s not high art, but it’s exactly as silly and cheesy and violent and fun as it tries to be. Plus, it features character of the year every year Johnny Cage.

On paper, Ready At Dawn Studio’s new big budget release seems like it should be right up our alley. It’s a plot-focused game with a (seemingly) insane premise, which is basically catnip for us. In practice, it’s actually a boring cliched mess wrapped up in a bundle of desaturated colors and lots of weak filler.

But what is The Order 1886? Well, we thought it was going to be a game about a elite order of nearly immortal knights battling monstrous werewolves in an alt-history Victorian London. But actually, it’s mostly about a bunch of dudes ignoring werewolves and instead shooting poor people (in an alt-history Victorian London).