Monday, February 1, 2010

Rogue Warrior and the new Genre of Games

I've never actually played a game that succeeds at being a B movie experience. It's always a catch-22 because you can't intentionally be campy. There is a certain degree of honesty that must be present in the work, a degree of sincerity from the person that holds the otherwise awful experience together.

Someone on reddit commented that Rogue Warrior might be the Plan 9 of video games and I think that's accurate. It is so incredibly bad and cliched at every level yet somehow because of how serious it takes itself the game had me dying laughing the whole time. A lot of this is because Mickey Rourke is the entire game. Literally, as in he's the only person who ever talks. Four hours of him rambling about video game logic and swearing at everything while you play this awful game makes the whole thing incredibly meta. You can catch a video of the opening level here.

As different bloggers start to recognize that No More Heroes 2 kinda sucks, I think Rogue Warrior offers a strong alternative. If having clunky game design but insane content is to become a new genre, I think the defining trait will always have to be that the game is genuinely trying.

It just keeps failing so hilariously.

3 comments:

Chris Hajny said...

Your review actually makes the game slightly appealing. I'm into the feel already, the Rogue Warrior rap was priceless.

It might be worth giving 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand a look. I picked it up for a laugh, and ended up playing it to completion in a weekend.

It's equally bizarre and hilarious. It seems joyfully earnest in it's portrayal of Fifty as an action star. And the game looks and plays a whole lot better than it should.

It's a campy, stupid, mildly offensive b-movie level action game. And it's a blast.

Kirk Battle said...

I picked it up hoping for split-screen co-op and after realizing my mistake took it back for Borderlands. So it nails the B-movie thing? I might have to snap it up then, it played well enough.

RodeoClown said...

You might want to try House of the Dead: Overkill on the Wii.

It does a pretty good job of being a game in the vein of a terrible movie, but is still fun.