Double-A man! With your shaven head, your determined jaw, your weird shoulders, your blandsome looks! How I have missed you! You may not have had Nolan North or a half-tuck (actually, he often did make an appearance somewhere in the cast list), you may not have travelled in Mass Effect’s elevators or had a backstory unveiled on an E3 stage, but you generally had something better. You generally had a gimmick.
Often it was a stupid gimmick. What if you had a grenade that could create hills? But stupid gimmicks are often the best kind of gimmick, right? What if you had a grenade. That could create hills. Years from now, when the history books are being written, I reckon double-A man will do alright for himself. Uncharted games? The best they can aspire to is the kind of movie that nobody really goes to see anymore. But double-A man? Those gimmicks kept him fresh, kept him honest. Hill-grenade man! Setting-people-on-fire man! HAMMER MAN.
Oh Hammer Man. I’ve been playing Red Faction Guerilla on the Switch this week, because of the new Re-Mars-tered edition. Guerilla is double-A at its best. It’s up there with the greatest works of Midway and the likes of Freedom Fighters. The gimmick is that you’re on Mars and you have a hammer. Your job is to stick it to the man by reducing the man’s stuff to rubble. The joy of the game is that the developers have poured all their love into that rubble, into the jagged, rebar-riddled, shrapnel-prone rubbleness of it. Swing the hammer, chuck a mine and watch it all come down.
Source: Eurogamer Red Faction Guerilla is a reminder that double-A is the best A