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.
FINAL ROUND - FIGHT!
Load Last Save - ‘Red Faction: Armageddon’
Armageddon sick of all these shooters.
Armageddon is the disappointing follow up to Red Faction: Guerilla. Instead of being an open-world destruction sandbox, it’s a linear third person shooter. Play as Mason- no, not Alec Mason, Darius Mason- as he goes on a cave expedition to rid Mars of its cricket infestation. If someone promised you more Red Faction, but instead gave you a pest control simulator, you’d be pissed, and rightfully so.
WTF is Red Faction: Armageddon?
Even the game’s plot is disappointing. The Red Faction series has always been about power struggles between the underclass and powerful corporations. Armageddon artfully sidesteps this tradition and gives players a story about ancient monsters and planetary takeovers. There’s an evil cultist who looks like Quan Chi from Mortal Kombat, who wants to take over Mars. To do this, he’ll use a giant drill, bore straight into the planet, releasing ancient demons from their sleep forever spell, so they can walk upon Mars and get resituated, and undo all the progress that the humans have created. It’s DOOM again. Our hero, Darius Mason, must use his wits, guns and millennial writing quips to stop this dastardly plan.
The game itself is a bog-standard 3rd person shooter. Enter a level, shoot some aliens, listen to audiologs and radio chatter, follow the waypoint down the hall. NPCs that yap about ranks, sitreps and all that military jargon. It has regenerating health- but no cover system, cooldown-based abilities, a crappy progression system and of course plenty of turret sections. All wrapped up in brown and grey graphics. It’s as seventh gen as it gets.
There’s also a gun that makes black holes.
Why Vote Red Faction: Armageddon?
This game might be just like the others we’ve talked about in this Clash of Clowns, but it has one key difference: It’s good. Okay, maybe good is stretching it. It’s decent. Pretty alright. Not just when compared to the atrocities we’ve played here, either. It’s hard to find a game that doesn’t look good when put next to Kane & Lynch, or God forbid Quantum Theory, but Red Faction: Armageddon is a solid game. It’s just that it was horrifically disappointing.
I think this game could have used a second shot. It was billed as the next Red Faction game, just after Guerilla. That game was a huge hit. It was a technical marvel of a physics engine with a mediocre third person shooter stapled on. No one cared that the shooting mechanics were basic, the vehicles handled like crap, the enemy AI was awful, that the missions were tedious or that the world was 98% rock. It let you destroy a massive building with explosives, and it simulated all of its bits and pieces falling in real time. That alone was worth $60.
Armageddon doesn’t do that. It still has an impressive physics engine, and it uses it well, but it’s not free. You can’t drive a car into an apartment building and watch it collapse. You’re trapped in a tiny stone hallway surrounded by aliens. There are vehicles, but you can only use them in certain levels. It’s a third person shooter, and that was the worst part of Guerilla.
Thing is, this game does the shooting bit well. The guns are varied and fun. You can shoot lasers and melt your enemies or shoot a black hole at them. There’s a magnet gun, which lets you slam enemies into the environment. The destruction engine isn’t always used to destroy huge buildings, but it makes every explosion look incredible. Hitting something with a rocket blasts it into hundreds of tiny pieces, like you just roundhouse kicked a jigsaw puzzle. Gunplay is a two part equation: how a gun feels to shoot, and what happens when you shoot it. Most games focus on part one, but Armageddon excels at the latter by making every shot feel fantastic, as every bullet rips apart bits of the background and, oftentimes, the floor you’re standing on.
If this game is as good as I say it is, then why was it such a disappointment? It sold poorly enough to kill the entire franchise. That must mean no one wanted it. That much is true, no one wanted it at the time. The simple fact that it wasn’t more of what people wanted from Guerilla was enough to kill this game’s momentum. It doesn’t matter if the game is fine, if no one cares enough to even try it out. The game’s horrific marketing didn’t help, either. It made a big deal of Mr. Toots, a hidden weapon that was a unicorn that shot rainbow lasers from its ass. OMG, rainbow laser unicorn? WTF, that is so freaking random. What will they think of next? Mayhaps a waffle cannon?
The fact that it was yet another 7th gen third person shooter, combined with the millennial cringe marketing made a lot of people, myself included, think this game was a massive pile of shit. A quick cash-in on Guerrilla’s previous success.
A straight sequel to this game would be great. They could iron out some of the wrinkles in Armageddon, like some of the weird physics interactions. Make the levels a bit more open, add more than three enemy types. Make some sections that take place on the surface, so that you don’t spend every waking second in that game staring at rocks. Make it so that the last fourth of the game doesn’t suddenly turn into Dynasty Warriors with 300 enemies coming at you at once. Armageddon’s last two hours deserve every ounce of hate the rest of the game gets. That one’s justified.
They could even combine Armageddon and Guerrila. Have each stage be a large map with open-ended objectives. Let the player tackle them however they want. A mission-driven sandbox without the need to drive across a barren wasteland for minutes between every task. Plop the player in a giant EDF base with a few vehicles begging to be hot-wired and rammed into an office. Have some side objectives, hide explosives and weapons around to encourage exploration, let the player think outside the box and blow shit up like they want.
Donkey Kong Bananza already proved that you can have big, destructible levels and structured challenges. The next Red Faction game should look to that for inspiration and turn Mason into a giant ape. Or make more interesting levels.
Either way, vote Red Faction: Armageddon. Worst case scenario, we get more Red Faction.
VOTE Red Faction: Armageddon!
BPM++ - ‘Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2013 ’
All Rise for the new Baboon King!
Let me give you a little lesson about the writing biz. If you tell writers they can pen, they’ll deliberately write the fun outta EVERYTHING in favor of producing fancy prose. Fortunately, I’m more of a children’s birthday magician than a writer; I know my audience, and I know they love misdirection and gimmicks, and the rabbits in my hat are continuity and trash-taste. A while back, told y’all that “BPM++ can easily spend hours on end telling you why some game you’ve never heard of is actually a misunderstood masterpiece,” and god, do I have a heater for you. Since the beginning, I emphasized that to win in this generation, games needed to BE PROVOCATIVE and GET THE PEOPLE GOING! As the 7th generation wound down, the hits were still stacking up, the gears of war had finally ground to a halt, and every player was accepting the Call… of Duty.
In the same year that Mike Vick famously tweeted “only the survive.” Cabelas, a hunting brand known for lightgun cabinet games that filled interstate truck stops and the breakroom of Amish markets, asked a question that would put their entire series into the grave: “What if hunting endangered animals was as EXTREME as killing terrorists?” Well, I have returned from this game’s brink of insanity as the new baboon king, as I introduce to you, BPM++’s Final Round Champion, Cauldron and Activision 2012’s ‘Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2013.’ Released on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Windows, and Wii.
WTF is Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2013?
Cabela's Dangerous Hunts 2013, aka Call of Duty: Fauna Warfare, traded in their “prestigious” reputation with southern grandfathers for the chance to ingratiate themselves with COD players in hopes they’d use whatever leftover pocket change they had to purchase the opportunity to shoot digital Big Game species with a lightgun. On paper, Activision saw this as a lay-up; a demographic of men who enjoyed shooting terrorists would probably like the opportunity to roleplay as 19th-century ecotourists. However, a larger issue loomed on the horizon. Cabelas had previously existed in two forms: one, an arcade lightgun game where a white-tailed doe would jumpscare you, resulting in players performing their best Dick Cheney impression to player 2; and two, a slow and methodical hunting simulator. If Cabela’s wanted to pivot to the modern age, they’d need something to GET THE PEOPLE GOING, which they had covered with a heart-monitor lightgun! So mission accomplished! But PROVOCATIVE? That would be a harder mountain to climb, especially now, since every game felt it necessary to have one of those big piles of papers with words on them called stories. But as stated earlier, writers are losers who’ll deliberately write the fun outta EVERYTHING in favor of producing fancy prose. Thus, along with Cabela’s iconic shooting gallery mode, they scraped together a few letters and shipped Dangerous Hunts 2013 with a STORY MODE!
Dangerous Hunts 2013 follows the Egomaniac Hunter trope of Jacob Marshall, who, as a teen, watches a scar-faced grizzly bear and his father die in each other’s arms/paws while trying to protect him and his brother Luke. This sparks REVENGE in Luke, and he grows up to be a Big Game hunter, killing every animal that moves. At the same time, Jacob becomes a conservationist who also kills every animal that moves. However, the brothers have decided to reunite for a big game hunt on the eve of their dead daddy’s birthday in Uganda. But who would have guessed that all the animals in Uganda have heard about their trauma and decided to reignite their daddy issues for funsies? I believe this to be canon because, when it isn’t doing Family Guy-style flashbacks, the story writes the animals as having developed some sort of inter-species communication device that informs them when Jacob will be rolling through their side of the jungle.
Luke immediately abandons the hunt because our African guide over the radio tells us that a mythical BLACK LION killed somebody else’s dad, and now it’s PAYBACK TIME! Jacob, who also does not want to see another daddy die, decides to kill Lions and leopards and baboons, OH MY, as we wage war against the entire animal kingdom in an attempt to not lose another human to these GODLESS four-legged creatures. Jacob even fights a Baboon king! A monkey that traps YOU, a higher brain functioning human, into a ‘kill box’ centered in a jungle ruin while he sends lesser baboon gladiators to duel you to the death, preparing to relinquish the throne ONLY in exchange for shotgun shells into the chest… which left me shouting my own corny movie line upon finishing the boss fight: "The Monkeying Around Ends Now!"
Eventually, after three hours of personally depopulating the African continent, Jacob finds Luke about to be ravaged by the mythical BLACK LION! Summoning the strength of his dead father, Jacob resists the urge to kill and instead saves his brother. They share a tender brotherly moment, before teaming up to fuckin’ murder that BLACK LION. With their newfound respect, they stare longingly into each others eyes and mouth the words they both been waiting years to say to each other: “Now we can begin our hunt.”
NOW?! You can start hunting. I’VE BEEN KILLING ANIMALS FOR THREE HOURS. WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE CAN START?!
Why Vote Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2013?
Since 2013, every hunting game has returned to its roots. Real tracking. Real patience. Real simulation. Games made for people who want to feel like they’re actually hunting. Love that for them. But nobody asked the important question: Who else is gonna give you this unhinged, low-brain battery light gun shooter? Who else is gonna deliver you a Theodore Roosevelt power fantasy of killing every animal on a continent to process daddy issues when simulation reigns king?
There are games in this world that screenshots and reviews cannot convey their absurdity; most of those games existed in the 7th generation. Games like these are meant to be experienced, archived, and laughed at later by someone like me. Cabela’s feels like a game that was expected to fail, and so they doubled down with nobody there to see them act a fool. You can look at these screenshots and laugh at my prose. Still, you will NEVER be able to fully comprehend how ‘bananas fosters fuckin bonkers’ playing an hour of this will make you feel. Throw everything you know about a mid-generation shooter out the window because you won’t need it once you double-tap the circle button and realize that they also put a Dark Souls dodge roll in the moveset for Big Cat boss fights.
Cabela's Dangerous Hunts 2013 didn't need to shoot every animal in the world; we can agree on that. It's a bad look for the brand AND the animals. But for every king, a clown, and Cabela's Dangerous Hunts 2016: Deadly Tides could be that clown. Bring the insanity of 2013 to the 8th gen and take it to the ocean. Let me hunt a BIG SHARK. Descend into the Mariana Trench and fight strange alien sea creatures that killed my mommy, maybe battle it out with a certain billionaire giving Titanic tours with a Logitech controller... These are just ideas, but the technology exists to get completely stupid with this, and nobody is doing it because nobody is willing to double down on their foolishness. So I plead with you, vote for Cabela's Dangerous Hunts 2013 not because it was good, but because the void it left behind is real, it is vast, and it is shaped exactly like the illuminated weak spot of the OLD Baboon King. LONG LIVE ME, THE NEW BABOON KING!
VOTE Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2013!
It’s all up to you! Vote for your favorite title of this round!
The ultimate clash between two of the 7th gen’s mightiest titans! At least, that’s what BPM++ and Roger Renfro seem to think. No one else knows what they’re on about, but they seem to be having fun.
Will the winner be franchise killer, the cave connoisseur, the otherworld Orkin exterminator, Red Faction: Guerrilla?
Or will it be the walking extinction event, the anti-Noah’s ark, the one who crowned then dethroned the Baboon King via a 12-gauge… Cabela’s Dangerous Hunt 2013?
Either one can take the crown! Vote for now!
Penned by: Roger Renfro & The Homie Big Picture Mode
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