Gears of War casual by definition

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Casual by definition is as such 1. Simple story or none i.e. Mario Karts race for the sake of it or brain training you get the idea. 2. Little or no evolution or depth, this one hard to explain as nearly every game has some form of this from Mario karts unlocking of other vehicles to boom blox opening and introducing new levels and conditions to win. 3. Chartacter development and involvement, Mass effect the impact **Spoiler** of leaving a team mate behind to die. MGS4 the emotional scene at the end of the game it were all comes full circle etc. Then like above games without this Mario Kart, DOGZ etc.

Now this we all understand so let’s look to Gears of War, 1. Did anyone really get effected by the **Spoiler** Death of Kai or the whole wife bullshit. These things don’t affect us because of the lack of character development. 2. The story let’s face it is way to underdeveloped and plays no part in the actually game its self. 3.The evolution of game play is not there I hate that term game play in never does anything justice, ok so shooting locust in the face is fun even without understanding why or what. Ok now let’s try to make this bit more simple casual games for most are fun gimmicks but don’t last. So Casual=light fun for a short period. Gears of war is light fun for short periods and when it’s made hardcore i.e. jacking the dial up to 11 (the difficulty) it is now no longer fun but just work. That’s the point when the casual walk away.

On that point I’d like to raise a point I heard on Rebel FM. We the real hardcore audience will play these kinds of games but all so play peggel and the like, but then the other hardcore crowed you know the 12 year olds that scream noob and the madden crowed as they’re called would never play these games. The real hardcore plays games for the enjoyment and involvement like a good novel or movie.

All in all when examining the evidence we find that what’s considered one of the hardcorest of hardcore games is not that at all. My point is what’s being perceived as hardcore and casual are not as such. For most of us out there we understand this but PR and Developers need to understand this as well. There are few games that need this treatment as hardcore. MGS, Final Fantasy, Star craft are so strongly story based that they are hardcore only fans can get in to the depth and understand. Then look to what’s considered WOW, Gears of War, etc. With their super hi-res trailers that lead to nothing but speculation and miss understandings.

We need to remove hardcore and casual, we need to accept good, bad, fun for some and for others none. All there is are video games plain and simple.

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Stephen Barnard

May 25, 2009

This is a terribly written article and makes almost no sense at all.

Keith Hickey

wait... what?

Christos Reid

I think the main failing of this article is your lack of recognition for the fact that "casual" in terms of videogames enthusiasm doesn't actually have a formal definition. To define it as the lack of a storyline in a game is horrendously ignorant. What storyline was there in Counter Strike? As far as I'm aware, none, and yet it remains a staple-mark of the hardcore crowd's prediliction for realism in shooters and a difficulty curve that's more of a wall than a curve.

I also think you need to consider that Gears of War, as a franchise, is written by someone who writes comics for a living, and as such will contain a vast amount of what people usually refer to as "Hollywood narrative". Easy, simple characters who care about simple things, like knowing where their spouse is, or simply not getting shot.

Gears of War and its sequel actually benefits from this inherent melodramatic stereotype in Epic's favourite child of the moment. As for depth, I'm going to disagree with you again. Although the first title in the trilogy was largely without explanation for a lot of issues with the plot, and did in fact have Marcus Fenix's origin story removed post-E3 because people felt it was pointless, the sequel does it so much better. There's a subtext present: civil war. Both sides believe the other one is wrong, and yet when presented with a common foe, for once, don't team up in fight, and continue to shoot eachother in the face just as readily as before. This is originality, something people moaning about how pointless Kai's death was seem to have been largely ignorant of. Kai's death, and for that matter the death of another significant two characters, were important because they broke out of the stereotypes imposed on the franchise by people overly critical of the simplistic narrative of the first title.

I think you need to also consider the fact that your writing needs a little editing, as the list of things that help you define a game as casual is stuck into the middle of a paragraph, thus rendering itself hopelessly lost in a wall of text. Oh, and the phrase "hardcorest of the hardcore", which, as an English graduate, made me shudder. I think a lack of consideration of the narrative's evolution is obvious here, more than anything.