I’ve often considered myself a bit of a pretentious prick, at least in terms of games. I can be very dismissive of a title for the smallest reasons, and I feel like I want nothing but the best. My love of Earth Defense Force 2017 could be viewed as a fluke, or a cheap excuse to cry “see, I like stupid games, too!” Yet maybe I’m not as stuffed a shirt as I sometimes feel.

It seems at some point Destructoid started their own video series, and recently they had an episode detailing the first “skillisode” for upcoming shoot-fest Bulletstorm. I often feel the same tired sigh withdraw from my lips (or perhaps nostrils) as the host Max Scoville at the prospect of yet another shooter (though he seems willing to play Duke Nukem Forever, oddly enough). Every time I see a video of this game the developer is speaking with the journalist as if the very existence of Bulletstorm should send a tingling down my spine and to the very hairs of my scrotum. I mean, in this game you get to shoot stuff! And you get points for it! Like shooting people in the nuts!

Any attempt to vary the experience of gunning foes down just garners a yawn from me. At the end of the day you just shoot people, and that’s all there is to it. Sure, you can swing them around a bit, but I could do that in Bionic Commando and look at the reception that game had gotten.

So I can understand and even empathize with Max’s apathy. It sometimes feels that the gaming industry revels in its more juvenile habits and refuses to grow up. The very existence of “Your Mother Hates Dead Space 2” annoys the Hell out of me for further alienating gamers to the greater mainstream crowd. Were it just my friends and I playing a fun joke on one of our own mothers, sure. But then it’s not about the violence, it’s about seeing the reaction of someone I know and care about and who also knows me. Someone that knows I love games for reasons other than “shooty-shoot-shoot-shoot”.

Yet selling the game on nothing but carnage and dismemberment, officially marketing the game in such a manner, is perpetuating the myth that gamers glorify violence. In a time where the games industry is facing the reality that your latest title either sells or the studio goes under, a time where the Supreme Court is trying to decide whether it’s an art form or a dangerous substance whose sale should be restricted. By trying to market a game by making light of the type of women that may likely endorse the prohibited sale of games, well, you’re not exactly helping.

I digress.

To say that I disagree with our friend Max on that point would be a blatant lie. Yet he seems to take out his frustrations on one CliffyB. Or, as is written on his birth certificate (I hope), Cliff Bleszinski (well, more likely Clifford, but let’s ignore that for all our sake).

If you are not “in the know”, CliffyB is the esteemed creator and designer of the popular Gears of War franchise. Or, as others may put it, he is the one to blame. If the concept of big burly men wielding machine guns that are also chainsaws keeps you awake at night seething in rage and anger, then Gears of War is likely not your kind of game.

If the fact that Cliff is the creator of such a series weren’t enough, he also has the posture and attitude of a sort of gaming rock star. He’s always smiling, he likes to sport a faux-hawk, and he dare make a presentation dressed in jeans and a t-shirt rather than a proper white-collar suit. How barbaric!

In truth, I don’t quite get all the hate of CliffyB. Maybe it’s the fact that people call him CliffyB. Maybe it’s the fact that most game journalists love him in the way moms platonically loved that one nice boy in the neighborhood that’s always helping them carry their groceries. Or maybe it’s the fact that he has only made games with big guns that create big explosions. Either way, there seems to be a group of people that hate him for being as popular as Will Wright, Warren Spector, Sid Meier and Shigeru Miyamoto. Max is one of those people, or so it seems to me.

Max may be a good guy, I don’t know. However, I do know he comes off as being the same sort of pretentious as that 9th-grader who gets straight A’s and makes a big deal out of it. When put next to his poorly-educated peers that also lack wisdom and worldly knowledge he seems like a big deal. Yet anyone who has actually left their comfort zone and explored adulthood knows that such a kid is merely an ass that knows nothing in the grand scheme of things. That is the sort of pretentious attitude I get from Max.

I will agree that Gears of War lacks a certain sort of sophistication, though this is only a problem in that Epic Games seems to be striving for that. On one hand you have these trailers that portray a melancholy world where everyone is about to die, or you have the masterfully done scene where Dom Santiago “reunites” with his wife. Yet then you have Cole Train spewing frat boy filth into a microphone and chainsaw bayonets on machine guns. Gears of War doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be, serious or ridiculous. Or perhaps it is actually a satire of the big burly men come to save the world and no one at Epic has the heart to tell the rest of the world they “don’t get it”.

Yet this is no reason to hate Cliff Bleszinski. The guy has proven himself to be a rather intelligent and skilled designer through his history at Epic. This is the creator of Jazz Jackrabbit, the sort of title that looks to defy what Gears of War and its archetypal fan base stand for. To also say that the Unreal Tournament and Gears of War franchises aren’t incredibly designed (though not always polished) is to simply be in denial. At that point you want to hate something so badly you’ll justify any reason for it.

Anyone who has read old entries of CliffyB’s blog (that is, before it became a Twitter feed and finding even one old entry was a chore) also knows that the man has simple pleasures. He enjoys action films and he enjoys cheap pop stars who can’t even write their own Music 101 base and percussion lines (and that’s it, as modern pop has forgotten about rhythm and thrown the concept of harmony out the window). You know what? That’s not a bad thing. If you go through life holding everything up to a high standard, well, you turn into someone like me. You forget how to have fun every once in a while.

So Bulletstorm doesn’t interest me. Is that so big of a deal? Of course not. There are plenty of good games and films and books and music albums released each year that I could care less for. Doesn’t mean they are worthless, and it doesn’t mean I won’t change my mind after the game has actually come out and I’ve had a chance to play it. I may hate the Dead Space 2 marketing campaign, but the driving force of that hatred is a desire to see variety in video games and its audience. We shouldn’t be nothing but violent games with guns, but simultaneously we shouldn’t reject them either.

I’m good with CliffyB, and I feel insulting the guy to such an extent was out of line. The important thing to remember here, no matter who you are, is we need everyone and everything we can get. Our industry should never be dominated by just one type of designer or just one type of genre. To hate CliffyB because he seems more “normal” than a classic nerdy fellow like Will Wright, or a geeky looking Tim Schaffer (I’d like to think of him as the Kevin Smith of gaming) is childish and pretentious.

I am aware Max wrote a final statement trying to say “Hey man, it’s all cool”. I’m just not feeling it though. However, I can relate to spewing forth something that creates a shit storm you regret later. Hopefully he learns from it as I’ve had to.

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