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.
The 7th gen was all about being raw, bleak and gritty, and there isn’t anything bleaker than playing Kane and Lynch.
Kane and Lynch is a third person cover-based shooter. You play as Kane and/or Lynch, two freelance criminals who screw up multiple times and end up in a spiral of disaster. Kane gets busted out of jail by The Seven, a group of criminals he worked with, and then betrayed. His wife and daughter are taken hostage, and he must complete one last job for the seven, if he ever wants to see his family again. To make sure he does as he’s told, he gets saddled with Lynch, a schizophrenic mass-murderer who’s somehow less stable than Kane. The two fumble their way through dozens of long, tedious shooting galleries to rescue Kane’s family from the consequences of his many avoidable mistakes.
I’ll be saying this a lot for all these games, but this really is one of the most seventh-generation games of all time. There’s cover-based shooting, a two-weapon limit, regenerating health, turret sections and even a helicopter boss fight. Now, this isn’t an ordinary shooter. It’s a tactical, squad-based shooter. That just means you have some guys that follow you, and you can boss them around. They don’t do much. They can’t even kill most of the targets you tell them to shoot. If you’re wondering why a crime game has squad tactics, it’s because Kane forms a small army and goes on a paramilitary operation in Cuba. If you can’t see the logical progression from petty crook to overthrowing Cuba’s government, then I don’t blame you. Neither can I. I just know the developers were itching to have that section take place in the middle east, as was the style at the time.
Kane and Lynch, unlike the other games in this tournament, got a sequel, but I still want to see a third entry. These two games were infamous for being grimy and unpleasant. The gameplay is generic, not even very interesting, and the characters are scummier than an abandoned pool, but I want to see what insane lengths they go to to justify a sequel. The first game had Kane and Lynch get in the worst situations possible, all because Lynch kept killing everyone. They start off with a bank heist, but Lynch screws up by killing all the hostages. Then, to make up for that, they go to Japan and kidnap someone else. Kane leaves the hostage with Lynch again. Guess what happens. Instead of doing his patented betrayal-no-jutsu and leaving Lynch to die alone, Kane sticks with him. He even comes back for round 2 in the sequel, after he managed to save his daughter and evade the law somehow.
The third game would be another generic third person shooter, but they would have to really up the ante in some disastrous way. First, they’d have to justify why Kane would want to work with Lynch again. That’d be like explaining how someone would accidentally drink an entire gallon of anti-freeze three times in a row. As for the gameplay, there are three options: keep the same third person shooter, which would be boring. Go open world, which would be a huge mess, or go for a more “mature” story and have a hairy dad game where Kane spends time with his daughter. Probably not in an active war zone like in the first one.
This game deserved a third chance. I want to see Kane and Lynch team up again for some stupid, tasteless adventure. I want them to get the flimsiest excuse to have them team up again. I want Lynch to get asked to smuggle some drugs, and he ends up kidnapping the President of Guatemala or something. The devs said they made Kane and Lynch 2 to be transgressive and uncomfortable. The third game could be the bleakest shit ever, and have it be about how Kane’s daughter is hunting him down for revenge. I want them to bring this series back in the weirdest way possible, so everyone can witness the slimiest and most infamous shooter of the 7th generation be reborn, only to crash and burn a third time, and I know you want that, too.
“Didn’t know you like to get WET tho...”
If you were to ask video game historians (adults who were teens in the early 2000’s), what the seventh generation of gaming represented, you’d probably hear a lot about Doritos Loco Tacos, double XP weekends, Mountain Dew Voltage sweepstakes, and a cacophony of slurs pouring out of duct taped Xbox Live mics. This was the generation where publishers erupted into studios in a sprint to build a winning original franchise. Something so enticing it could spit in the face of the greats and rake in more money than Shiggy Miyamoto and those Wii-mote waggling boys from across the Pacific. Which translated into, throw everything at the wall and whatever gets Gamestop preorder numbers jumpin’ means we’ve got a hit on our hands. Success was determined by two rules, it’s GOTTA BE PROVOCATIVE and it’s GOTTA GET THE PEOPLE GOING! Some of those swings connected. Most became Gamestop bargain bins. Six of them ended up in this tournament. Enter BPM++’s first chosen fighter, Behaviour Interactive Inc and Bethesda Softworks 2009’s ‘WET.’ Released on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
Following the previous design laws of Seventh Generation games, WET’s gameplay is built off a very simple premise: “If it looks cool in slo-mo, then it’ll probably look even cooler if a hot lady with swoop bangs and double exploding crossbows is doing it.” While every other title of 2009 poured on the GRITTY BROWN color grading, WET threw red into the mixture and layered on grindhouse film effects, scratched film reels, and fake cigarette burns in the corner of the screen to spark your neurons into remembering that time you watched Kill Bill and made it your whole personality for a few weeks. Modern peanut brained gamers would call it ‘Woke Max Payne’ but while Max was too busy monologuing about his dead wife and cemented oxy habit, Rubi was shouting action movie one-liners, guzzling whiskey, and backflipping off walls pistols akimbo goin’ Rubi-Rage-Mode for the low-low price of REVENGE.
The story isn’t important, but out of respect to this masterpiece here’s a rundown; Rubi Malone is a freelance acrobatic assassin with the slo-mo time disease, but OH NO, she’s been double crossed by one of her clients, so she’s off to get revenge until OH SHIT, she’s double crossed again, so she’s gotta find out who quadruple crossed her by performing a triple double backflip off walls while shooting enemies in the dick. Fortunately, all this double-crossing comes to an end when she finds the real guy behind all of this trouble and slices his fucking head off with a samurai sword before hitting a perfect 1980’s one liner. Also she kills Mei-Ling from Metal Gear Solid. I mean, a villain voiced by Mei-Ling’s actress. Same thing. BUT OH FUCK she might not even be dead and she just SEXTUPLE CROSSED HER FROM THE GRAVE. And That’s All Folks!
Now you’re probably saying to yourself, BPM++ this sounds fucking stupid! Where is my gritty realism? Where is my sad dad story? How is this game going to teach me to love again? Well bucko, it ain’t. The 8th Generation of gaming is where goofiness was forced into the little backseat goblin role while despondent daddy took the wheel. WET deserves another chance because games were too worried about seriousness instead of funmaxxing or being sillypilled in the 8th Generation, and WET could have been that breath of fresh air. Would it have survived as a strong franchise? FUCK NO! WET 2 would have broken up the monotony for about fifteen minutes before dying a quick and dignified death to a Ninja Gaiden sequel. Because Ninjas are cooler than hot girls with swoop bangs and crybaby drug addicts with dead wives. That’s just science.
But WET never even got that chance. A sequel was even teased because the game ends on a cliffhanger with Fake Mei-Ling coming back to life. However, that sequel was cancelled, and you want to know what they made instead? Naughty Bear. They cancelled Rubi Malone’s revenge arc for a fuckin’ FNAF Manhunt Mod. Unforgivable.
So given these points, WET deserves your vote just to spite Naughty Bear, and because absurdity will always be cool. In this tournament, I know there’s a lot riding on your vote, so don’t do it for me, and don’t do it for WET. DO IT FOR FAKE MEI-LING!
Do you think the balding bastards Kane and Lynch deserve a third chance at turning their life around, or should they rot in 7th-gen jail?
Or maybe you think Ruby’s quest for revenge isn’t done, and she should live to get septuple crossed. Should Fake Mei-Lin live, or die like the grindhouse theaters that inspired her?
We reach deep into the bottom of the 7th gen barrel to bring you two incredible games that are so unknown, you’d swear we made them up.
First, is a game that critics describe as “Oh fuck, they remade Geist!?” A truly terrible third person shooter where you can possess others. Should it be summoned back to posses a sequel, or should this ghost get busted?
Up against that is an unabashed clone of Gears of War, that’s worse in every way imaginable. A game so ugly, that publishing screenshots of it is a bannable offense on Substack. Why would anyone want it back?
Find out next time on Clash of Clowns, ROUND 2.
Penned by: Roger Renfro & The Homie Big Picture Mode
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