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February 2, 2010 - Contrarian Corner takes a critical look at recently-released games. The average videogame review tends to treat a game as an objective product, evaluating its merits based on a series of frequently technical categories, like sound, framerate, gameplay interface, value, variety of modes, and overall fun factor. This typically doesn't leave much room to look at a game's thematic elements or how well they are integrated with the game's technical components.
To that end, Contrarian Corner is intended to be a place for a more holistic discussion of games which have been the recipient of either an abundance of single-minded praise, or an undue amount of criticism. Our intent is not to contradict or undercut our own reviews, but rather to expand the spectrum of discussion on some of the most important games of each year. If you're interested in joining that discussion, keep reading.
Read the official IGN review of Army of Two: The 40th Day for editor Jeff Haynes' extensive thoughts. Be forewarned. If you haven't finished the game, story spoilers will be discussed below.
At some point in the late 1960s the Rolling Stones began calling themselves the greatest rock & roll band in the world. Before Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street, Let It Bleed, and Some Girls had even been pressed, they decided there was no better face for rock than theirs. Critics, journalists, and fans accepted the declaration in large part, and soon a baseless claim became a colloquial truth. In this way we start communicating with one another in hollow idioms that we've accepted as true without ever having thought about why.
The original Army of Two was marked as a tactless bromance that exemplified the worst stereotypes about videogame culture. Rios and Salem were ludicrous characters. In between levels of serious-seeming combat, they air-guitared and threw out one-liners like "Ladies, lift up your shirts!" The opening three chapters took place in Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, cribbing directly from America's recent military history. Coming on the heels of horror stories about military contractors in Iraq, a jocular yarn about two juiceheads high-fiving each other between kills seemed in bad taste. Which points to an extraordinary moral distinction amongst many game reviewers: killing hundreds of nameless enemies for the sake of gameplay is de rigueur, but doing it glibly is a crime against decency.
Army of Two: The 40th Day marks a dramatic change in tone from the first game. EA Montreal has stripped away the most recognizable parts of Rios and Salem's personalities for the sake of emphasizing the doomsday scenario semantics. Gone are the crackpot belief in conspiracy theories, talk of reckless gambling, credit card debt, and the disgruntled resignation to being trapped in an ugly job for money.
This change has been written about as a creative step forward for the game. We seem to have decided in advance that the humanized characterizations were distasteful, not the absurd gameplay in which they were placed. For me, the exact opposite is true. Sacrificing the lowbrow personality quirks of Rios and Salem cripples Army of Two: The 40th Day at the core. What was an experience about vulnerability, trust, and making the best of a hellish scenario with a vulgar partner has now become a scripted roller coaster ride.
Like the first game, the central mechanic is about drawing enemy focus to one area to enable free movement in another. Shooting is used first as a weapon of distraction, the effectiveness of which is shown in the agro meter. If Rios is spraying blindfire from a corner, more enemies are directed to look in his direction, leaving Salem free to stealthily flank and attack. Then the enemy realizes they are being attacked and they retreat to new cover and players regroup for their next advance.
Shooters like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 require accuracy and reflex more than tactics. You can hero your way out of the most overwhelming circumstances with a quick trigger finger and steady aim. That formula is flipped in Army of Two. You'll regularly fight enemies who can only be wounded from the side and back, making your quick aim irrelevant without a larger tactical plan. Those requisite tactics must always be made in relation to that irritating other human with whom you're stuck in middle of a besieged Shanghai.
Likewise, fail states are based on dependence. Moving too thoughtlessly into an open environment doesn't immediately send you to a game over screen. You can crawl to cover while calling for your partner to come heal you. To save you from your thoughtlessness, your partner must now move into the open, abandon his ability to fire, and revive you with a shot of adrenaline. Here you're allowed to shoot your pistol in a limited range to stave off enemies and protect your partner. Call me sentimental, but I find these systems genuinely touching. After so many years of shooters whose primary difference was in setting, gun variety, and a gradual sophistication of AI, Army of Two's mechanics are refreshingly expressive of the game's overarching theme of dependence. Even in team oriented shooters like Team Fortress and the Enemy Territory variants I haven't encountered a system so insistent on human connection for advancement.
When I'd rush out impatiently into a clearing and get hit, it wasn't just an archetype whose life I was putting in danger. It was dopey Salem with his credit card debt, short temper, and varsity arrogance. He wasn't an idealized hero, but he was drawn in human details that I recognized. We may have a knee-jerk reaction to judge him for his tactlessness, but for me, it's the filament through which the abstract mechanics become personal. Salem might not have been the partner I'd have chosen for myself, but he's the one I had. And I cared about him, because the alternative is to be alone in these terrible warzones. And though he calls me old, fat, incompetent, and gullible, he still puts his life on the line to haul me back into cover when I make a stupid move.
And that's exactly what has been taken away from the second game. The mechanics and themes remain the same, but the emotional connection between them has vanished. Rios and Salem's personalities have been pruned to the branch. They speak to each other as if reading from an instruction manual. Go here, do that. Nice work. Great job. End scene. There are a few flickers of the old odd couple routine. In the early going Rios tries to tell Salem a joke. "What's big, gray, and walks in circles?" he asks.
"I don't know. You?" Salem jabs.
There's also a story about raping a panda in a zoo. Which reminds me of the morality system. There are a handful of moments where players will be faced with a moral choice and then shown the consequence in a hand drawn cutscene. The options seem fairly split between good and bad, such as choosing to kill an endangered snow tiger for money or setting it free. The trick, a wonderful one, is that both options have rotten outcomes. Making a righteous choice postpones the negative consequences sometimes, but it never avoids them. The freed tiger will eventually track its way into a suburb where it kills an innocent civilian trying to flee the city. In an earlier scene, you can either shoot a work-a-day security guard in an Embassy to steal the weapons there. Or you can let him live and leave the guns behind. Choosing the latter you'll discover that he chooses to greedily sell those weapons to the enemy. It doesn't take long to catch on to the formula, but I was always interested in discovering just how the moral option would lead to something terrible. How my preventing a woman from being raped in a battlefield would actually lead to something even more ruthless.
These may be great ideas, but they don't exist in the gameplay. It would have been great to have that released snow tiger stalking Rios and Salem through a subsequent area. It could have seemed like it was helping them by mauling a few enemies, but then it would become a threat when they encounter a few captured civilians. In that way the moral dilemma would actually be in the gameplay. Do you kill the tiger first to save the civilians (giving away your position to the guards)? Or do you let the tiger hunt the guards and leave the civilians to fend for themselves. Do you defend the tiger from the guards if they open fire on it and let the civilians dangle?
At least reality TV seems real.
In either case, I think EA Montreal deserves a lot of credit for building a world in which every choice has a negative moral outcome. It reminds me of one of my own hypocrisies as a player. I resent the idea that I have to kill waves of faceless enemies in games like Modern Warfare 2 and Uncharted 2, but in games like Army of Two and Haze it doesn't bother me. The morality system in Army of Two helps to put this distinction into place. I don't like being forced to behave like a sociopath while being told that I'm a hero. But I don't mind behaving like a sociopath if the game lets me hang in the awful gray zone of my actions.
I was out at a bar with some friends the other day and I got into an argument about reality television with a woman there. I confess to you, reader, the only things I can watch on television are news shows, interviews, and reality television.
"How can you stand to watch all those people humiliate themselves?" she asked me. It's become an unquestioned truth that the people on The Real World, Jersey Shore, Survivor and America's Next Top Model are to be scorned. It's trash television, and the people who would supplicate themselves to the format are, likewise, trashy. We judge and convict them before we've even thought about how they might be not so unlike ourselves.
I've done everything the various characters on Jersey Shore have done at some point in my life (except for the tanning salon—there's always a loophole). For me it's not a show that panders to my loathing of my fellow human; it's a reminder of how dopey we can all be. I sometimes think that's the greatest gift of the era of new media, where YouTube can ensnare for posterity a drunken moment or a thoughtless phrase. We've had a president who stuck a cigar in an intern's vagina, one who was a cocaine abuser, and one who was in a movie with a chimpanzee. I've got lots of friends who've written a small encyclopedia of stupid behavior. And still I love them. The specificities of their stupidity might be different from my own, but we all share an inescapable commitment to the act itself.
Rios and Salem said and did stupid things in the first Army of Two. You weren't asked to validate their stupidity, but I felt encouraged to view them as real human characters because of it. I've known more Rios's in my life than I have Solid Snake's. It might be irritating to listen to someone like that hold court in a bar, but on a battlefield, under enemy fire and betrayed by superiors, I felt more sympathy for Rios and Salem precisely because their personas were so recognizable. That defining humanity has been taken from The 40th Day. It's undergone an aphaeresis of the stupid. It's more solemn and streamlined, but so much harder to care about.
In the game's climactic moral choice I had to choose between killing Rios or letting a madman detonate a nuclear warhead. I killed Rios. As I watched Salem hold his head in his hands telling me he'd never forgive himself, I felt a frustrating distance between my feelings and his remorse. I remember Rios from the first game, but I hardly knew him in the second. Then I did start to feel sad because I realized I had been missing him the whole time.
Source: IGN
To that end, Contrarian Corner is intended to be a place for a more holistic discussion of games which have been the recipient of either an abundance of single-minded praise, or an undue amount of criticism. Our intent is not to contradict or undercut our own reviews, but rather to expand the spectrum of discussion on some of the most important games of each year. If you're interested in joining that discussion, keep reading.
Read the official IGN review of Army of Two: The 40th Day for editor Jeff Haynes' extensive thoughts. Be forewarned. If you haven't finished the game, story spoilers will be discussed below.
At some point in the late 1960s the Rolling Stones began calling themselves the greatest rock & roll band in the world. Before Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street, Let It Bleed, and Some Girls had even been pressed, they decided there was no better face for rock than theirs. Critics, journalists, and fans accepted the declaration in large part, and soon a baseless claim became a colloquial truth. In this way we start communicating with one another in hollow idioms that we've accepted as true without ever having thought about why.
The original Army of Two was marked as a tactless bromance that exemplified the worst stereotypes about videogame culture. Rios and Salem were ludicrous characters. In between levels of serious-seeming combat, they air-guitared and threw out one-liners like "Ladies, lift up your shirts!" The opening three chapters took place in Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, cribbing directly from America's recent military history. Coming on the heels of horror stories about military contractors in Iraq, a jocular yarn about two juiceheads high-fiving each other between kills seemed in bad taste. Which points to an extraordinary moral distinction amongst many game reviewers: killing hundreds of nameless enemies for the sake of gameplay is de rigueur, but doing it glibly is a crime against decency.
Army of Two: The 40th Day marks a dramatic change in tone from the first game. EA Montreal has stripped away the most recognizable parts of Rios and Salem's personalities for the sake of emphasizing the doomsday scenario semantics. Gone are the crackpot belief in conspiracy theories, talk of reckless gambling, credit card debt, and the disgruntled resignation to being trapped in an ugly job for money.
This change has been written about as a creative step forward for the game. We seem to have decided in advance that the humanized characterizations were distasteful, not the absurd gameplay in which they were placed. For me, the exact opposite is true. Sacrificing the lowbrow personality quirks of Rios and Salem cripples Army of Two: The 40th Day at the core. What was an experience about vulnerability, trust, and making the best of a hellish scenario with a vulgar partner has now become a scripted roller coaster ride.
Like the first game, the central mechanic is about drawing enemy focus to one area to enable free movement in another. Shooting is used first as a weapon of distraction, the effectiveness of which is shown in the agro meter. If Rios is spraying blindfire from a corner, more enemies are directed to look in his direction, leaving Salem free to stealthily flank and attack. Then the enemy realizes they are being attacked and they retreat to new cover and players regroup for their next advance.
Shooters like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 require accuracy and reflex more than tactics. You can hero your way out of the most overwhelming circumstances with a quick trigger finger and steady aim. That formula is flipped in Army of Two. You'll regularly fight enemies who can only be wounded from the side and back, making your quick aim irrelevant without a larger tactical plan. Those requisite tactics must always be made in relation to that irritating other human with whom you're stuck in middle of a besieged Shanghai.
Likewise, fail states are based on dependence. Moving too thoughtlessly into an open environment doesn't immediately send you to a game over screen. You can crawl to cover while calling for your partner to come heal you. To save you from your thoughtlessness, your partner must now move into the open, abandon his ability to fire, and revive you with a shot of adrenaline. Here you're allowed to shoot your pistol in a limited range to stave off enemies and protect your partner. Call me sentimental, but I find these systems genuinely touching. After so many years of shooters whose primary difference was in setting, gun variety, and a gradual sophistication of AI, Army of Two's mechanics are refreshingly expressive of the game's overarching theme of dependence. Even in team oriented shooters like Team Fortress and the Enemy Territory variants I haven't encountered a system so insistent on human connection for advancement.
When I'd rush out impatiently into a clearing and get hit, it wasn't just an archetype whose life I was putting in danger. It was dopey Salem with his credit card debt, short temper, and varsity arrogance. He wasn't an idealized hero, but he was drawn in human details that I recognized. We may have a knee-jerk reaction to judge him for his tactlessness, but for me, it's the filament through which the abstract mechanics become personal. Salem might not have been the partner I'd have chosen for myself, but he's the one I had. And I cared about him, because the alternative is to be alone in these terrible warzones. And though he calls me old, fat, incompetent, and gullible, he still puts his life on the line to haul me back into cover when I make a stupid move.
And that's exactly what has been taken away from the second game. The mechanics and themes remain the same, but the emotional connection between them has vanished. Rios and Salem's personalities have been pruned to the branch. They speak to each other as if reading from an instruction manual. Go here, do that. Nice work. Great job. End scene. There are a few flickers of the old odd couple routine. In the early going Rios tries to tell Salem a joke. "What's big, gray, and walks in circles?" he asks.
"I don't know. You?" Salem jabs.
There's also a story about raping a panda in a zoo. Which reminds me of the morality system. There are a handful of moments where players will be faced with a moral choice and then shown the consequence in a hand drawn cutscene. The options seem fairly split between good and bad, such as choosing to kill an endangered snow tiger for money or setting it free. The trick, a wonderful one, is that both options have rotten outcomes. Making a righteous choice postpones the negative consequences sometimes, but it never avoids them. The freed tiger will eventually track its way into a suburb where it kills an innocent civilian trying to flee the city. In an earlier scene, you can either shoot a work-a-day security guard in an Embassy to steal the weapons there. Or you can let him live and leave the guns behind. Choosing the latter you'll discover that he chooses to greedily sell those weapons to the enemy. It doesn't take long to catch on to the formula, but I was always interested in discovering just how the moral option would lead to something terrible. How my preventing a woman from being raped in a battlefield would actually lead to something even more ruthless.
These may be great ideas, but they don't exist in the gameplay. It would have been great to have that released snow tiger stalking Rios and Salem through a subsequent area. It could have seemed like it was helping them by mauling a few enemies, but then it would become a threat when they encounter a few captured civilians. In that way the moral dilemma would actually be in the gameplay. Do you kill the tiger first to save the civilians (giving away your position to the guards)? Or do you let the tiger hunt the guards and leave the civilians to fend for themselves. Do you defend the tiger from the guards if they open fire on it and let the civilians dangle?
At least reality TV seems real.
In either case, I think EA Montreal deserves a lot of credit for building a world in which every choice has a negative moral outcome. It reminds me of one of my own hypocrisies as a player. I resent the idea that I have to kill waves of faceless enemies in games like Modern Warfare 2 and Uncharted 2, but in games like Army of Two and Haze it doesn't bother me. The morality system in Army of Two helps to put this distinction into place. I don't like being forced to behave like a sociopath while being told that I'm a hero. But I don't mind behaving like a sociopath if the game lets me hang in the awful gray zone of my actions.
I was out at a bar with some friends the other day and I got into an argument about reality television with a woman there. I confess to you, reader, the only things I can watch on television are news shows, interviews, and reality television.
"How can you stand to watch all those people humiliate themselves?" she asked me. It's become an unquestioned truth that the people on The Real World, Jersey Shore, Survivor and America's Next Top Model are to be scorned. It's trash television, and the people who would supplicate themselves to the format are, likewise, trashy. We judge and convict them before we've even thought about how they might be not so unlike ourselves.
I've done everything the various characters on Jersey Shore have done at some point in my life (except for the tanning salon—there's always a loophole). For me it's not a show that panders to my loathing of my fellow human; it's a reminder of how dopey we can all be. I sometimes think that's the greatest gift of the era of new media, where YouTube can ensnare for posterity a drunken moment or a thoughtless phrase. We've had a president who stuck a cigar in an intern's vagina, one who was a cocaine abuser, and one who was in a movie with a chimpanzee. I've got lots of friends who've written a small encyclopedia of stupid behavior. And still I love them. The specificities of their stupidity might be different from my own, but we all share an inescapable commitment to the act itself.
Rios and Salem said and did stupid things in the first Army of Two. You weren't asked to validate their stupidity, but I felt encouraged to view them as real human characters because of it. I've known more Rios's in my life than I have Solid Snake's. It might be irritating to listen to someone like that hold court in a bar, but on a battlefield, under enemy fire and betrayed by superiors, I felt more sympathy for Rios and Salem precisely because their personas were so recognizable. That defining humanity has been taken from The 40th Day. It's undergone an aphaeresis of the stupid. It's more solemn and streamlined, but so much harder to care about.
In the game's climactic moral choice I had to choose between killing Rios or letting a madman detonate a nuclear warhead. I killed Rios. As I watched Salem hold his head in his hands telling me he'd never forgive himself, I felt a frustrating distance between my feelings and his remorse. I remember Rios from the first game, but I hardly knew him in the second. Then I did start to feel sad because I realized I had been missing him the whole time.
Source: IGN
