Part of it is standard cultural warfare. The quasi-intellectual subset of game critics is aware that Gears' Xbox LIVE contingent takes itself terribly seriously and - as anyone who's played online knows - has a tendency toward blatant homophobia. Whether you take someone out or get taken out yourself, you're almost certainly going to be called a fag. Accusing Gears of War of a more homoerotic undercurrent than Top Gun's volleyball scene is an expedient way to provoke a response from these diehards while simultaneously dismissing them
But this rhetoric seems to have hardened into something more than retaliation for hours of one-sided deathmatches. It's become an actual failing of the game, a reason not to play. I suddenly realized that a good chunk of people laughing at Gears of War for being stupid weren't thinking, "This is awesomely stupid," but rather, "How stupid would you have to be to like this?"
Here I separate, and it comes down to priorities.
In that Eurogamer round-up, I described Gears of War as something of a dinosaur - it lies at the far end of the evolutionary tree that began with Wolfenstein 3D. While not a first-person shooter, it belongs to the same militaristic, pop-horror pedigree that inspired id and their followers. It's on an express elevator to hell. It ain't got time to bleed. It's groovy. In other words, its core values are firmly, resolutely, undeniably Western, with barely a nod to anything outside the '80s-movie canon. And depending on the audience, this can be a little alienating. Chatting with designers trying to make pan-territory games, they describe a Korean gamer's bemusement when presented with a game like Gears of War: "Why am I controlling the bad guy?" The blob of protein and steel that Epic upheld as the ideal male specimen was something alien. Foreign. The product of a culture he didn't understand.
Western commentators, however, do understand it, and think it's the worst kind of stupid - a stupid that takes itself seriously. But they'd never cry foul as often, as vehemently or as oppressively at the equally adolescent (and equally irony-deficient) Devil May Cry 4. No arguments here: God Hand is ironic. Devil May Cry isn't. Devil May Cry is gloriously, phenomenally stupid - and that's the point.
Within its own lineage, Gears of War is just as dumb. Gears takes from the two sorts of marines that loom in the collective imagination of a certain school of concept artists - the colonial marines of Aliens and the space marines of Warhammer 40k. And while Gears' COG troops aren't as utterly ludicrous as those of the latter - where the average soldier looks like the offspring of a Panzer tank and a Gothic cathedral - it has something of the "'80s-metal album cover come to life" in it. Gears of War's success has an interesting parallel in the hair-metal fantasies of Guitar Hero; bedroom-bound and messy, their aesthetic sins seem as urgent and necessary as the first time you masturbated.
