CLASH OF CLOWNS ROUND 2: The Wannabes of War

Shifting the Gears of War.

BPM++ and Last Load Save have each selected three garbage gems from the seventh generation of gaming. Games that wanted to swing for the fences but fell on their faces trying to stand up. For Three weeks we’ll make our case for why our selected games deserve just one more chance before dying quietly in the eighth generation like they deserved.

As the audience, you hold all the power! Read both arguments, then vote for your favorite using the poll at the bottom of the page. The losing game gets eliminated from the bracket until only one busted, overlooked, abandoned survivor raises the trophy.

No do overs. No mercy. Just two writers going hand-to-hand over games the internet have largely agreed are ass, and you deciding who wins.

ROUND 2 FIGHT!

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Load Last Save - ‘Quantum Theory’

Mmm… ammo…

In the far-off year of 2030, the Earth has been destroyed. Giant, sentient towers known as Arks have sprouted across the globe, spawning hordes of mutated soldiers. There’s only one man edgy enough to stop them: Syd with a Y, the human tribal tattoo. He teams up with an anime woman, and together they take on the Locust and save the world. At least that’s what I think happens. I couldn’t focus during the cutscenes. Everything in this game looks like it’s made of scabs, and it made me too itchy to pay attention.

WTF is Quantum Theory?

Syd is a contender for one of the videogame protagonists of all time. He’s supposed to be some stoic badass, a man of few words. He has one-liners that are meant to sound creepy or edgy. When he kills enemies he goes “ha… splat”, or sometimes he just says “bye-bye”. His catchphrase is great. Whenever he picks up ammo, he goes “mmm… ammo”. He sounds like a psychopathic toddler. Maybe they can play into that in the sequel, and give him voicelines like “Naptime…” and “Me make boom boom”.

You can tell by the screenshots and trailers that Quantum Theory is trying to be Gears of War. It has a bulky main character, cover-based shooting, evil monsters, exploding heads and a color scheme that covers every shade of brown and gray. It even has the Boltok pistol. Even the name Quantum Theory sounds like it’s a placeholder they kept because they couldn’t call the game “Gears of Battle” or something equally as copyright-infringing.

It’s an undeniable clone, but that’s not its true form. That’s just a surface-level observation. If you play the game, you’ll see that the shooting is the least of your problems. The game is full of cheap instant death traps. You have to make precise jumps that look like they’re automated quicktime events, but they’re not. You have to find the right spot to do them. If you press the button when the game tells you to, there’s a good chance you won’t be in the exact right pixel, and you’ll jump to your death. Things explode and kill you, the floor turns into moving platforms that you need to escape. One time I was sitting behind cover and the floor opened up beneath me in a perfect silhouette of my body and I fell through the hole. It was some Looney Tunes shit. I could practically see Bugs Bunny sawing a hole underneath me. In reality, this game is a Kaizo Gears hack. It’s I Wanna Be The Guy, but uglier.

Why Vote Quantum Theory?

This game needed to be seen by more people. It shouldn’t have died as an unknown niche game in a sea of clones. It should have been given another shot, to go onto the next generation and shock a whole new crowd. I want people to get nostalgic for Gears, try Quantum Theory 2 in its absence, and get jumpscared by genuine seventh gen jank. They come in expecting a regular shooter, but end up having to deal with split-second instant kills, and a visual style that looks like what Limp Bizkit sounds like. I think the weird kids call it “Cyber Sigilism”.

Imagine a sequel to Quantum Theory, one where it lives up its potential as an anime Gears of War. This game was made by Tecmo, the guys who published all the Ninja Gaiden games and would then go on to make Nioh. What if they took their action game skills, and applied it to the cover based shooter formula? Vanquish came out a month after Quantum Theory. I like to think the devs saw Vanquish, then they spent the next year kicking themselves in the head wondering why they didn’t do that instead. With a second shot, they could have used their Sly Cooper stealing powers to copy Gears and Vanquish, and made some unholy synthesis of them, like making cheeseburger flavored Monster. Maybe it was too powerful to exist in our universe.

Even if they made a straight sequel, a boring Quantum Theory 2: More Quantum, it would be better than the first one. This game is so ass that, even if you tried to make something as bad, you wouldn’t be able to. Even the worst game dev would have learned one or two lessons from shitting this thing out, and their second go would have been at least crappy instead of actively offensive. If anything, it’s worth it to introduce Syd “Mmm… ammo” to more people.

Quantum Theory is like a shock image. It’s ugly, baffling and should be seen by everyone. Vote for Quantum Theory: It’s like getting goatse’d.

VOTE QUANTUM THEORY!

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BPM++ - ‘MINDJACK’

in the techno dystopia. straight up “jackin it”. and by “it”, haha, well. let’s just say. My brian.

In the previous round, I prefaced the two foundational rules of the 7th generation of gaming as: it’s GOTTA BE PROVOCATIVE and it’s GOTTA GET THE PEOPLE GOING! Nobody exemplified that design language better than Cliff Bleszinski and Microsoft Game Studios when they introduced the world to ‘Gears of War’ and put the testosterone pedal to the floor by grafting a fucking chainsaw onto a machine gun. While Cliff’s rock n’ roll frat boy persona oozed NOS Energy drink spittle, Gears of War gun play dismembered enemies so satisfactorily that it made my high school friend drop out in his junior year to lock in on his dream of going “MLG Pro” in the game. This desire to chase Gears opened up the gaming industry to a horrible affliction that still haunts us today, “the chest-high wall curse.” I once famously said, “Once you’ve played an action game after 2007, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Cliff Bleszinski to death with your bare hands,” and I meant that shit. Problem was that too many cover-based shooters came after Gears, trying to chase that success. Still, if you didn’t want to be a Gears clone, you would need a PROVOCATIVE mechanic, and what could be more provocative than a chainsaw machine gun? BPM++’s Round 2 Champion, Feelplus and Square Enix 2011’s ‘MindJack.’ Released on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

WTF is MINDJACK?

MindJack’s gameplay can be summed up as “shoot first, ask questions never.” The Seventh Generation of gaming had moved from flirting with escort missions and follow quests to talking about settling down with them and making a game where you only did that called ‘The Last of Us.’ Feelplus was also responsible for these issues. Having only shipped ONE game before, Ju-On: The Grudge (a haunted house simulator), a wiggly-wagglily-Wii game where you shine your flashlight in the ghost’s face and say AHHH, found themselves responsible for polishing up SquareEnix’s B team of RPGs, so getting called up to the plate to make their own title would be a feat! But like procrastinating students trying to submit their homework at the last minute, Feelplus hastily scribbled all the wrong lessons from Gears, big refrigerator man, cover shooter, multiplayer component, and the PROVOCATIVE mechanic? Umm… MIND CONTROL, no MIND HACKING! Feelplus checked every box, slapped MindJack on a shipping label, and sent it to the UK for British writers to pen a story that could appeal to westerners. Unfortunately, they shoulda shipped that shit right back to Japan, because the story is as unappealing as British cuisine.

Jim Corbijn, a Federal Intelligence Agency agent, with a dead wife and over 300 confirmed kills, trained in chest-high wall warfare and a top MIND-HACKER in every branch of the United States armed forces. Meets his match when he’s instructed to pick up another agent, Rebecca Weiss, from the airport. Jim, who is actively being double-crossed by his old war buddy and best friend, Lyle Fernandez, realizes after several hours of gameplay that maybe his mind isn’t his own and he’s actually being MIND-HACKED, but by who?!? Could it be Rebecca? His Dead Wife? Maybe the MIND-HACKED chimps we fought in the last room? However, in a shocking turn of events it turns out to be Lyle, who is only double-crossing Jim because the creator of MINDHACK built the technology to bring his dead daughter back, and Lyle knew that Jim’s sob-story ass would rather use it to bring his dead wife back, instead of collaborating with Lyle on a plan to shoot everybody in the world.

So now it’s up to Rebecca and Jim to kill Lyle, but the dead creator of MINDHACK has an ace up his sleeve. To protect his dead daughter’s digitized soul stored in a capsule, his lab’s security system MIND-HACKS every dead soldier’s brain and integrates them into a fucking Iron Man suit to kill you. Once Jim and Rebecca triumph over every soldier in the world’s brain capacity, Jim realizes his dead wife is dead and shoots the capsule holding onto the creator’s dead daughter’s soul. Overcome with joy, the creator of MINDHACK reveals he has actually been MIND-HACKING Jim and now must MIND-HACK Lyle for REVENGE, forcing Lyle to jump off the tallest building in the world. Roll Credits.

Why Vote MindJack?

Imma keep it a thousand with y’all. MindJack plays like a toddler trying to describe ‘Time Crisis’ to you. A game built on rail shooter techniques with a script as deep as a welcome center pamphlet. The difference is that developers had the decency to put those games in an arcade cabinet and charge you quarters. MindJack looked you dead in the eyes, handed you no light gun, and said, “$50.00, please” with no shame. Listen, I’d rather dump a down payment on a Hyundai Elantra into a Virtua Cop machine, than having to witness Jim Corbijn stumble through the global conspiracy he incited by fumbling an airport pickup. MindJack deserves another chance because MindJack owes everybody who bought it an apology, and that apology has a name: MindJack 2: CyberShot.

Imagine giving us MindJack 2 as an arcade light-gun cabinet! MindJack already built an experience that plays like an arcade game with its worthless point system, nonsensical story, and BIG CYBER GORILLA Boss fight. Now apologize to all us by becoming a light-gun rail shooter and let divorced dads douse your peripherals with Miller Highlife in exchange for Dave and Buster card swipes.

Ultimately, the 8th generation had enough cover-based shooters, but what it didn’t have was enough light-gun games. So I say, let Jim, Rebecca, and that BIG ASS CYBER GORILLA grovel for forgiveness as they beckon you to come over and break that twenty-dollar bill inside: MindJack 2: CyberShot!

VOTE MINDJACK!

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It’s all up to you! Vote for your favorite title of this round!

There’s no way either of these games are real. These guys must have gone scuba diving in an EB Games dumpster to find these gems.

Do you think Syd deserves a second chance to rip-off Gears of War, and do it right? Or should Quantum Theory go chug Monsters in the big Limp Bizkit concert in the sky?

Could Mindjack MINDHACK a new generation of barcade goers with its light gun reincarnation, or should Jim stop jackin’ his mind and go wash his hands? Disgusting.

Only YOU can decide the fate of these two baffling, forgotten turds.

Next Week:

These next games may stink, but at least they’re not MindJack or Quantum Theory.

First, is a game you’ve seen in every bargain bin, but never bothered to pick up. A heart-pounding shooter that puts you up against the deadliest killers.

Versus a game that was so disappointing, it killed its franchise dead on the spot. You’d have to be a real clown to run defense for this one.

It’s the battle of the Hear Me Outs, next time on Clash of Clowns, ROUND 3.

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Penned by: Roger Renfro & The Homie Big Picture Mode