Game Journal 05/03/20: A New Hope.....Research Facility Plot Thread.
*Spoilers for Act 3 of Gears Tactics And Gears V*
The Coalition sure does love New Hope Research Facility and the truth about the Locust! Fresh off Gears V, where they finally elucidated on the bombshell that Epic sort of ....just left lying around unfinished in Gears of War 2 (That being the Locust and queen Myrrah are both the result of failed research experiments on Rustlung and therefore created by the COG), They’ve dipped their toes in the same bombshell reveal again for the main conflict of Gears Tactics. While there isn’t a whole ton of new information to impart (except that someone other than Chairman Prescott and Delta Squad knew about the facility) I do love the implications it brings to the table for the long tail future of the Gears universe, and the desperation it shows on the part of Prescott and the barely functional government to keep the truth about the war hidden. Naturally, finding out the COG created the very monsters that have resulted in, by the end of Gears of War 3, 99% of the human population of Sera being wiped out makes Gabe Diaz furious. It puts why he’d form the outsiders so many years later, even after the end of the locust war, into stark perspective. Even the new COG wasn’t keen to inform it’s citizenry of the fact the worlds near extinction (and even current threat in their mutated “Swarm” identity) was the fault of their predecessors. The same goes for Prescott, shown here in Gears Tactics to be even more quietly desperate to suppress than information than before. The moment Gabe gives him the false coordinates for where their camp is, he immediately Hammer of Dawn strikes the mountain he thinks they’re on and obliterates any trace any human being may have left there. It sells the level of desperation Prescott hits in the middle of Gears of War 2 that he would send anybody at all to New Hope, when here he immediately tries to vaporize a squad he personally sent on a similar mission the moment one of them mentions “New Hope” without even a shred of context. I’ve thought a lot about Prescott, especially after reading the books and his sad desperation to hold the COG together under his web of lies. It’s even harder now to believe that dude managed to hold anything together at all. Said web of lies was unraveling all the way up to the end of his life, and we only learn more about it the further into the fiction we go.
Random Screenshot Of The Day:
Not a game screenshot sure, but I’ve been reading the Mark Waid run of Daredevil again, this is one of my all time favorite runs of comics, and without a doubt my favorite version of Daredevil. It finally looks at the character of Matt Murdock in a way not defined by constant tragedy and trauma. It’s still one of the few times post Frank Miller that this character has had anything interesting to say to me as a reader, and it says a lot in it’s roughly 50 issue run.
Stray Game Notes:
- Aside from the story stuff, Gears Tactics continues to be a ton of fun! I’m shocked I love a tactics game this much!
- Played a bit more Yakuza Kiwami 2, beat up a guy who claims he runs “The 16 Bit Gang”, Yakuza is weird.
