The Double-A Team is a new feature series honouring the unpretentious, mid-budget, gimmicky commercial action games that no-one seems to make any more.
Double-A man doesn’t reload. When he runs out of bullets, he throws his gun away and picks up a new one. Double-A man shoots with the A button, not the right trigger. Double-A man can’t jump, but he can dive in slow motion. When he discovers his father’s corpse, Double-A man doesn’t cry, he thinks about revenge in a growling noir voiceover. Double-A man hangs out in back alleys, construction sites, prisons and seedy nightclubs. Double-A man says to the scantily clad girl, “For God’s sake, put on some clothes.” Double-A man’s dog is a weapon.
As soon as Christian Donlan invoked Double-A man in his recent piece on Red Faction: Guerilla, we knew we wanted to return this forgotten, mostly extinct species of game: commercial games with simple hooks, middling budgets and modest ambitions, big enough to be mass market but small enough to be a bit trashy or weird. They’re a kind of gaming we just don’t get any more, and as dumb as they could be, we miss them. And what better place to start than with Namco’s 2002 action potboiler, Dead to Rights?
Source: Eurogamer The Double-A Team: guns, dogs and simpler times in Dead to Rights