i have a fondness for games where you get what you paid for. within two minutes of opting for a 'new game' in rogue warrior, your squadmates - thinly-veiled samuel l jackson and thinly-veiled robert de niro - are blown to bits by grenade shrapnel. dick marcinko, voiced by mickey rourke, both of whom are somehow channeling the greatest, paunchiest, and most inebriated of steven seagal, is the only man left alive. your commanding officer tells you you've gotta pack it in and come home, the operation's a bust. dick sweatily rejects this proposition and offers a sound rebuttal; fuck no, he's got commies to kill. not ten seconds later dick 'stealth' kills someone and, verbatim, says 'lights out, motherfucker.'

so at the low cost of 0 dollars, i pretty much immediately got what i wanted. quintessential self-aggrandizing, vulgar, lunatic digital autofiction for SICKOS. you clear a cramped room full of baddies and mickey rourke gravelly mutters 'the soviet fuckin union can fondle my hairy nuts'. you prepare to rappel and he claims 'like my ex-wife used to say, you go down before you can get in.' you snap some poor DRPK dudes neck and he practically yells 'suck my balls, my hairy fuckin big balls, wrap em around your fuckin mouth, im gonna shove it up your ass.'

on top of this - and im not sure if this is just rpcs3 or not - the game has easily the fastest boot-up-to-gameplay time ive seen in the seventh generation, perhaps not surpassed until the current gen. skip past everything and you clock in at 10 seconds. what the fuck, how is dick marcinko utterly trouncing fighting games at what they should already be doing and never accomplish, this is insane.

it goes without saying i only discovered that after the game crashed like, easily over ten times. it crashes more than i do after a night on the town. i thought it was just rpcs3 acting up but no, it's rogue warrior, mickey rourkes alcoholic rage is too fuckin much for the console to bear with. so my 3/5 here is a bit tenuous, i really wish it didnt freeze up so often - it forced me to restart a few levels. i also think it could have been a better game if dick had emphatically refused to use ak-47s because they were too marxist. even so, it ends with a mickey rourke rap, guys. certified western kusoge, more of a searing indictment on america than anything wolfenstein has to offer.

gameplay? it's quick and dirty. mastery of stealth? get the fuck out of here, what the fuck are you talking about. dick marcinko might have borrowed venom snakes trademark greasy ponytail, but that's not the only thing he borrowed from one of the snakes; your supressor-equipped pistol has infinite ammo. you actually die surprisingly easily, but so do your foes, and you heal every bit as quickly too - mix that with breakneck pacing and you have a rhythm and tempo seldom seen in these first-person shooters. it was also vaguely refreshing to play - as ardwyw pointed out in his duke nukem: forever review, we've largely moved away from this understanding of first person shooters into a more arena-centric take on the formula. extrapolating from this trend, i think it reflects a broader movement in games to center their cores around their systems and mechanics. i cant exactly fault this - to design a game and design it well is a noble endeavour and remains one of the best ways to ensure a title has lasting legacy. but there's less of an inclincation to preserve a spark of adventure in games these days, and i think if doom eternal's anything to go by, there's such a thing as reducing expressiveness by tightening design so much it it may as well act as a vice crushing your ribcage. rogue warrior isnt exactly the kind of thought-provoking game that should prompt these ideas, but maybe that's part of the point as well. as rourke hurls yet more insane obscenities, i cant help but feel entranced over its appropriate two-hour runtime. we didn't know how good we had it back then.

also, the 'i want games that are shorter with worse graphics that are developed by people who are paid more to work less' crowd is being awfully silent on this game 🙄 makes you think