![]() ![]() ![]() Gears 4 is about a man in a bandanna who shoots aliens and works on his lats, endlessly, and for whom PTSD is a qualification, not an illness. Quantum Break is a game where you play as a man caught out of time, with that time being a mid-00s Jacamo catalogue. A sense of what makes that song work? No fucking way.Ĭrysis 2 is a game where you shoot aliens while your suit endlessly nags you about being low on battery like a needy, sentient iPhone, where the words ‘Maximum Armour’ are heard more than actual dialogue. Arrangement which wouldn’t seem out of place at the funeral for your Facebook acquaintance who is always posting inspirational quotes on pictures of Minions? Of course. Perhaps the all-time worst is Crysis 2’s The Wall ‘trailer’, which stoked post-9/11 concerns by mimicking the thousands of missing persons posters which sprung up following the attack on the towers, and then laid an abysmal cover of New York, New York over it. There are others, and while all are bad, there are some which are almost colossal in their stupidity. Dark Souls 3 had a frankly apocalyptic version of True Colors, which again was sung by a woman so breathy it seems like she’s trying to sing the song and blow up a fucking paddling pool at the same time. The current marketing push for Quantum Break features a cover of Come As You Are which isn’t so much melancholic as it is catatonic: the singer sounds like she’s being roused by a doctor in a foreign hospital after a jet ski crash and the only thing she knows how to communicate in is famous Nirvana songs. The most recent offender is the latest Gears of War 4 promo*, which features Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence as crooned by a man who sounds like he’s lamenting the time his local cereal cafe ran out of fucking Lucky Charms. Now, this is not a new phenomenon, but in the last few years it has mutated from an interesting (for marketing, at least) juxtaposition of audio and visuals – as in the original Gears’s ‘Mad World’ trailer – into something that is almost a parody of itself. I’m talking, of course, about Putting Melancholy Covers of Famous Songs Over Your Game Trailer. But its latest trend – and make no mistake, video games love trends, are built, primarily, on trends, the blind following the blind following the spectacularly stupid – is if not its worst, then perhaps its most aggravating. Whether it’s internet hate mobs or large-scale harassment or executives wearing t-shirts under suit jackets (not even blazers), the world of interactive entertainment has lurched from one nonsensical disaster to another in the half century or so it has been a thing. Video games were a mistake, we know that much. ![]()
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