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'Gears of War: Ultimate Edition', Mad World launch trailerBut the story remains the same, the game unchanged at its core. And back then, Gears really spoke to me. Mike, it said; Mike, I'm brilliant, definitely better than Too Human will ever be, and you should play the shit out of me. So I did, eventually, and it was. I hadn't had an Xbox 360 for long, and was just feeling my way into what this new generation of video games had to offer. Third-person cover shooters weren't exactly a new thing in 2006, nor games starring burly dudes with guns battling against crusty alien sorts (well, they're not in this instance, really, but you know what I mean), but Gears both perfected and solidified, laying down blueprints for a number of now-common gameplay features.The epic, Hollywood-riffing entirely-linear-but-that's-OK campaign of incredible odds being overcome by a tiny team of thick-skulled action figures with impossible jawlines: tick. The sticking-to-cover mechanic where characters cling to waist-high walls, moving only to pop their rifle sights over the concrete block separating blessed life from bloody death and stick one between enemy eyes: crystallized it. A surprising emotional element that emerges when the gunfire's cooled and fallen opposition troops have disappeared from the battlefield, leaving only kill-marker bloodstains behind like an imprint of their shattered soul: gamers' sensitive bits, successfully tickled. Gears of War nailed these things and more, elevating them to something like terrifically violent poetry in motion.
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