The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/MgpW1h_XUqg
What makes a video game ugly? Is it the aesthetic qualities? If a game’s palette features too many clashing colours or is primarily grey and uninteresting, or the technical graphics are amateurish and the animation is awkward, maybe the music isn’t produced well or doesn’t keep to a single key, does that make a video game ugly? Perhaps a game’s technical implementation makes it ugly, or its mechanical components. Does it run just poorly enough to be noticeable without being too intrusive, or are the tools the player has to achieve their objectives unsatisfying to use? Could a game’s narrative be the source of ugliness? Are the things happening in the game distasteful or just cruel and evil? There are clearly a lot of variables at play, but I think we’d all be in agreement if there was a game that featured all of these possibilities. That game would rightfully be regarded as truly awful. Well, here it is. After the relative flop that was Shadow Ops: Red Mercury, Zombie Studios partnered with Bethesda Softworks who - after noticing Ubisoft’s successes with their Tom Clancy franchise - decided they wanted a piece of the military fiction money. Bethesda brought author Richard Marcinko on board, and in 2005 development of Rogue Warrior began. Over the next four years, the project would go through a variety of iterations, be stripped from Zombie Studios, and then sent to Rebellion Entertainment who would completely transform the final game. In December of 2009, Rogue Warrior was finally released, to critical savagery. The reception at the time was so bad that Rogue Warrior is often in the conversation as one of the worst games ever made, and I think it is no exaggeration to say that it absolutely belongs in that conversation. The game is short, it’s barely functional, the palette is bland, the enemies are vacuous, the dialogue tasteless, and this story of Marcinko’s murder spree throughout North Korea and North-East Russia is downright villainous. Rogue Warrior is terrible, and it is the ugliest game I’ve ever played.
If you’ve been watching my videos for a while, you’ll know that I like to play a stinky shooter every now and again. Sometimes they’re brilliant, but mostly they’re just fun lay-ups so I can use all the words I know that describe how bad something is. Rogue Warrior is special among these, though, and that’s down to its association with its main character: Richard “Dick” Marcinko. Marcinko was a member of the US Navy SEALs, an elite fighting force that focuses on coastal and riverine combat, similar to the Marine corps but usually more covert. In 1980, Marcinko was given the go ahead to establish his own SEAL Team, Six, who would go on to be known as the most effective fighting force throughout the USA’s armed forces. Despite all that he was afforded, however, Marcinko was jailed for defrauding $113,000 from the United States’ government in 1990, and was subsequently kicked out of the Navy. While in jail, Marcinko drafted his autobiography which was then rewritten by ghostwriter John Weisman and published by Pocket Books in 1992. The book sold well, and Marcinko and Weisman would go on to produce a series of self-help books and fictional sequels to the autobiography until Marcinko’s retirement in 2014. This summary of his life makes Marcinko sound like an intelligent, articulate man, but after reading the autobiography and playing the game, I can say that he was most certainly neither. Marcinko loves cursing, he even makes up his own new curses just so he has more to say. The expression “swears like a sailor” does not do his vocabulary justice. He sounds like a teenager once their parents are out of earshot, and it gets tiresome both in the game and in the book. Additionally, Marcinko’s motivations for the things he does are generally horrific and often unreasonable. Throughout the book, Marcinko makes it very clear that he just wants to kill people. He did three tours of Vietnam and relished the opportunity to kill as many Viet Cong as he was able to, though he wished he could have killed more. Marcinko regularly bemoans the administrative structure of the Navy; they didn’t see his murderous rampages through rural Vietnam as necessary which ultimately hurt Marcinko’s naval career in the long run. Those administrative types would still control where Marcinko would be working and who he’d be working for, afterall. He was moved away from SEAL Team Six in disgrace, hidden away in the Pentagon for a while, but he managed to start another organisation whose purpose was to deliberately annoy Navy base commanders before finally being indicted for fraud. Marcinko would then go on to have his authorial career while also hosting a politically conservative talk radio show - which seems counter-intuitive to me, like, the systems were the problem so advocating for them doesn’t follow, unless he just really hated gay people for some reason. After his final novel was published in 2014, Marcinko spent seven years in retirement before passing away in December of 2021, a period where many old conservatives seemed to all coincidentally die at the same time - wow, amazing. Marcinko led a full life, people threw themselves into frozen ocean water for him, opportunity for success came wherever he looked and he took those opportunities. When the concept of a video game based on his novels was pitched to him, there was likely no hesitation from Marcinko, and thus, we are here today.
Despite the shared title, Rogue Warrior the autobiography and Rogue Warrior the video game contain vastly different material. The events of the autobiography are probably true events, while the video game’s narrative is totally fictitious. The game is set in November of 1986, Marcinko and two nameless accomplices have been deployed to Unggi in North Korea where they are to meet with a CIA informant to receive information about a missile factory. The trio are dropped from a helicopter somewhere outside of town, before making the trek through the forest. They come across a patrol of North Korean soldiers, and while they were able to kill all of them, both of Marcinko’s buddies are killed in a grenade explosion. From here onward, Marcinko is alone, and despite orders to retreat, Marcinko chooses to press on. The rest of the game follows Marcinko’s murderous fantasies of killing as many North Korean and Russian soldiers as he desires, slightly justified by the thread of trailing the manufacture of intercontinental ballistic missiles throughout North East Russia. Each step of this story features Marcinko disobeying his commander’s orders, saying the dumbest one-liners ever written, enacting his own moronic plans that all magically succeed, and providing as many opportunities to kill as many non-combatants as possible. That might sound strange since these are clearly soldiers the player is fighting, but there was no formal declaration of war between the US and North Korea or the Soviet Union during the 80s. While there was political tension between all of these states, East Asia was the only region that didn’t earn any attention from Reagan’s military meddling. And without a formal declaration of war you can’t just roll up to a foreign military base and start gunning people down on a whim, that just makes you a murderer. The missile hunt eventually leads Marcinko to a large Russian dam and submarine base, which he promptly blows up as the game’s finale. The player does this by shooting people, placing explosive charges Marcinko pulls from his magic hat, and watching short movies along the way. Of course, this stuff never happened, but there is a book that features the same title and the same main character that is a record of true events.
Rogue Warrior 1992 is Richard Marcinko’s life story, his memoirs told from his perspective which detail his Navy recruitment in 1958, to his expulsion over thirty years later. It’s a fairly short book at around 370 pages, the language is simplistic when not referring to everything through Navy acronyms, and a hefty chunk of the content is useless descriptions of people who never speak or do anything as well as unnecessarily detailed explanations of whatever mundane activity Marcinko happened to be engaging in at the relevant point in time. The story opens in media res, as SEAL Team Six has been summoned to a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico. Apparently a Puerto Rican separatist group called the Macheteros had gotten their hands on a nuclear weapon and the SEALs were sent in to retrieve it. On approach, however, Marcinko discovers that the rounds loaded into their magazines are lighter than usual, and sure enough, they’re blanks. The Macheteros don’t have a nuclear weapon, they don’t even have a presence on the island. It’s a training exercise, much to Marcinko’s disappointment. Things then flash all the way back to Marcinko’s childhood, his relationship with his parents, what he did for fun as a kid, his first job, how many of the girls in town he slept with, vital formative details. Marcinko becomes aware of the Lebanese Crisis in 1958 and sees it as an opportunity to go and kill some people. His application to join the Marines was rejected, but the Navy accepted and it all kicked off from there. I actually had a scheme for marking points of interest in the book. Each of the different coloured tabs denotes a different thing. Pink is for things that are just propaganda, some of which Marcinko believes as fact and others he seems to just be saying. On page 49, for example, the Amphibious Force Commander John S. McCain delivers a speech to the trainees going through Hell Week. “We took his words to heart. (He must have been inspirational at home, too. His son, John, (is) now a US senator for Arizona…)” That’s Republican politician John McCain, there, likely Marcinko’s favourite politician and probably explains how he ended up on conservative talk-radio. Green tabs were for strange sentences. Originally I intended for these to be sentences that featured strange grammar or things that you can say in conversation but don’t really work in written form. “A boxer, light heavy-weight division, he’d been to EOD school so he could play with explosives. And he understood CT: he’d taken over Paul’s old job commanding MOB-6. He was big, ugly, and aggressive. Yeah.” (p.254). In the end, though, most green tabs were put beside things that I had to make sure I read correctly because of how ridiculous they seemed. Weird, racist sentences, talking about the Vietnamese people as “a useless class of nuc mam-swilling subhumans who needed two sticks to pick up one grain of rice but used only one to carry two buckets of shit” (p. 166), having his Cambodian houseboy say “You go fuckee-fuckee tonight, Mr Dick?” (p. 188), and creeper stuff like “... he’d married a young beauty named Denise, the girl he’d been dating since she was fifteen and he was eighteen or nineteen.” (p. 255-256). Green tabs were the ones I used the most and it made that line in the game about the Great-leader’s penis much more tasteless than it already was, though at least it was something Marcinko would’ve said. The orange tabs indicate murderousness. Marcinko wanted to kill people and his aggression isn’t limited to the US government’s victims of the day, though they are the only ones who saw the realisation of Marcinko’s fantasies. After returning from that training exercise in Puerto Rico, Marcinko notes “...it might be gratifying for the men, if ultimately unrewarding for our careers, to stage a live-fire hit on JSOC headquarters.” (p. 289). Frustrated by their lack of deployments to Japan or Iran, Marcinko ponders attacking the Joint Special Operations Command headquarters to give himself and Six someone to kill. I think the orange tabs are the most numerous in the book since Marcinko really wanted to end a lot of people’s lives and enjoyed killing the people he was able to. Blue and yellow tabs are by far the rarest, mostly because there isn’t a lot else to the book outside of what I’ve already mentioned. Blue tabs are for unexpectedly good takes and I used three in total. One was for recognising Operation Just Cause was an invasion, another was a Lebanese taxi driver explaining that the Israelis brutalise Palestinian refugee camps - which isn’t even Marcinko’s opinion, and the last one is Marcinko realising how horrific a car bomb actually is. Of course, this realisation doesn’t cause Marcinko to reconsider his own actions in Vietnam but I probably shouldn’t have expected it to. Yellow tabs were my Other tabs and point at things like Marcinko’s baffling Godfather impression - which is nonsensical in written form - as well as his embarrassing interactions with the people who worked at the Pentagon and some pathetic whining about how Six didn’t have enough time to make him a plaque when he got booted. Despite all of its clear failings, Rogue Warrior was the New York Times bestseller during its first week on shelves, though that was probably pretty disappointing to many working at the publication at the time. Writing for The New York Times Book Review, David Murray said “While his story is fascinating, the method of telling it in "Rogue Warrior," written with John Weisman, a freelance writer who specializes in espionage and military nonfiction, is not. Mr. Marcinko, 51 years old, comes across as less the genuine warrior than a comic-book superhero who makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Little Lord Fauntleroy.” (The New York Times Book Review, 1992). Naturally, this quote was chopped up and plastered on the front cover as though it were praise. Too bad Bethesda weren’t able to do the same for the video game.
Rogue Warrior was built within Rebellion’s in-house Asura engine, the same engine used to develop their Sniper Elite franchise, so it should be more than appropriate for Rogue Warrior. Mysteriously, though, Rogue Warrior refuses to run for more than an hour on my PC. Once an hour passes, the program shuts down. The game is only 2 hours long so it isn’t a huge problem, but there are other things I had to resolve. Rogue Warrior doesn’t natively lock the mouse to the window and it has horrible screen tearing throughout most of the levels. Also, the default controls put grenade on the right mouse button and aim on the space bar like some kind of maniac. And the menus aren’t mouse navigable, you have to use the arrow keys and enter which is mostly an annoyance. There isn’t a means to fix the menus, but everything else can be resolved if for some reason you also want to put yourself through this. Firstly, the game seems to have fewer issues when running in Windows Vista (Service Pack 2) compatibility mode. I do not understand why, but doing this prevented some of the hitching I was encountering early on and seemed to prevent a majority of the crashes. Next, there’s a file floating around in the Steam community section that’s part of an unwrapper called WineD3D. Putting both the D3D9 and WINED3D files in the game directory stopped my mouse from leaving the game window and resolved the last few crashing instances compatibility mode didn’t catch. I don’t fully understand all of this, and those older Sniper Elite games work just fine, so maybe Rebellion don’t care about making Rogue Warrior functional today. And honestly, fair call, they probably shouldn’t care for their own sake. With that done, though, we can finally play the game.
Rogue Warrior is listed as a tactical shooter online, which is to say that it moves at a snail’s pace and there might be some kind of stealth section now and again. The stealth doesn’t actually work; so long as you don’t sprint or shoot and you’re outside of the enemy’s field of vision the game considers you to be in stealth. I think there are two or three total sections of a level where the player might get a whiff of stealth gameplay, but this game does not compare to the likes of Splinter Cell at all. The player can just walk right up behind an enemy and press the kill move button at their leisure. If I can compare what the gameplay is actually like, in most aspects Rogue Warrior is eerily similar to Shadow Ops: Red Mercury. The gunplay is basic, with next to no recoil, bullet-spread, or screen effects other than the tearing. A headshot kills an enemy in one hit, and hip-firing is pinpoint accurate so even the highest difficulty level is a breeze. And the enemy scripting does nothing to make shooting them interesting. It seems like every enemy encounter is a mini set-piece event, where the enemies are spawned by the player crossing a trigger point, then they run to their specified cover point, and then they stand there and shoot at the player while occasionally dipping behind cover. It’s like one step removed from a Kim Jung Il whack-a-mole machine. There are a bunch of different guns to try out, though, so there’s a little replayability built in through that. And replayability was absolutely on Rebellion’s mind when they shipped Rogue Warrior. The Steam achievements are all things that can’t be done on a single playthrough as a desperate attempt to drag out the run time somehow. In order to complete the single player achievement list, the player needs to kill 180 enemies in different ways and there are nowhere near 180 enemies in the game. Something that also blew me away after my first playthrough was the lack of a turret section! These games always have a turret section. They were really hoping walking and shooting were all people wanted. Or maybe they were hoping people would just be so astonished by the game’s middling presentation that they wouldn’t notice how bare the gameplay is.
This game is very grey, but I doubt you needed me to tell you that. There could have easily been more green in the palette since these places aren’t as far north as they might seem. Rason, formerly known as Unggi, is as close to the equator as San Francisco, so it isn’t some frozen wasteland. Most of the game takes place in these semi-industrial areas which means a lot of sheet metal walls, workshops, chain link fences, and big pipes. There isn’t an awful lot of variety throughout the environments, and even the Russian palace level quickly transforms into more pipe-lined concrete corridors. The character models are fine for 2009, Marcinko’s mouth looks a little off and the animations are jerky and robotic. I think putting Rogue Warrior next to Uncharted 2, which was also released in 2009, shows what I’m talking about. The Rogue Warrior animations almost feel like stock animations, they’re so lifeless and flat. Even the kill move special animations have no punch. The soundwork isn’t even good. It sounds like nothing, and then Mickey Rourke says a Marcinkoism. Mickey Rourke might actually be the best part of Rogue Warrior - just his voice. The things he has to say are very stupid, and there are some line reads that don’t seem correct, but his gravelly rumble is fun to listen to at least. The only notable piece of music in this project is basically just a drum beat with the Rourke lines arranged over it, which is funny, but it's competing with that “wrap ‘em around your mouth” line.
Rogue Warrior definitely goes all-in on the stupidity but whether it was a conscious decision or not is hard to say for sure. The plot isn’t just poorly conceived, it’s idiotic and kind of despicable. After his voiceless buddies are killed in the intro, Marcinko makes his way through Unggi to try and meet with the CIA informant alone. He’s too slow to save the informant from being killed by a North Korean officer, but manages to piece together the location of the missile factory from notes left in the apartment. His commander again orders him to retreat, an order Marcinko ignores, choosing to head to the factory alone. Upon making it there and after fighting through waves of North Korean soldiers, Marcinko learns that the missiles have almost all been completed, and that they’re being transported to Russia on a train. Marcinko then travels to the loading facility, where he fights through scores more soldiers before diving onto the train. His commander then tells him to keep a low profile, as if that is at all possible after the massacres left in his wake. The train changes hands as it crosses the Russian border bridge. The bridge is rubble shortly thereafter as Marcinko steals a Russian military vehicle and heads to an old palace where the missile silos are being kept. Beneath the palace is a large control room with a display that coincidentally shows a representation of the Soviet Missile Defence system which is basically a targeting computer that allows the Russians to shoot incoming missiles out of the sky. Marcinko decides that the only solution to this is to destroy the palace by retargeting the missiles to hit the building he is standing inside. Not only is he somehow capable of operating a Soviet computer, but the computer is also able to target inter-continental missiles accurately enough to destroy a single building. Marcinko’s plan for surviving the missile strike is to wait in the bunker below the palace. His CO rightfully calls this plan insane. And it is. Nothing about this should work, especially since the missiles are supposed to be a defence system, and the control facility is on the eastern coast but all the diagrams are firing across the Atlantic. Moscow and St Petersburg are over 9000 kilometres away from where Marcinko is standing, so why would that be the operation centre of the Soviet Missile Defence system? Naturally, this totally nonsense plan works without a hitch and Marcinko is off to the next place. I do think it bears repeating, the Cold War wasn’t an actual war. The Americans and the Russians weren’t happy with each other, sure, but they weren’t formally in conflict. Marcinko is just killing people and blowing up buildings and bridges on a whim and against direct orders from his commanding officer. Rogue Warrior concludes at a hydro-electric dam that has been fitted to also be a dry-dock for submarines. The Russians are in the process of fitting an anti-ballistic missile system to the submarine docked there and that apparently warrants destroying the dry-dock and the dam. The sub base is by far the worst level in the game for variety, but once the player manages to slog through it they are finally released from this horrendous experience.
I think it’s very easy to point the blame of Rogue Warrior’s badness at Richard Marcinko - and while his contribution informs the specifics of the game - Bethesda were the reason the game exists at all. Rogue Warrior wasn’t being developed by a team who actually wanted to make a Dick Marcinko adaptation; Bethesda contracted Zombie Studios to make the game, decided they didn’t like what Zombie had made, and moved the project over to Rebellion Developments who squeezed the final release out in under a year. Rogue Warrior’s inception likely happened in a boardroom as a bunch of Bethesda executives pawed over some Rainbow Six and Splinter Cell numbers. Nobody actually wanted a Rogue Warrior video game, a bunch of company higher-ups decided it should exist so the company could win some more capitalism tokens - which is no way to make art. Since nobody actually wanted to make the game, is it any wonder that it ended up as one of the most critically panned video game products ever made? Did the Bethesda exec who scrapped the Zombie Studios project really think Rebellion’s game was going to print money? It might seem cynical to suggest this, but I genuinely cannot think of any other reason for Rogue Warrior’s existence.
From the minds of Bethesda’s opportunistic producers, the team at Rebellion who likely wanted nothing to do with the project, and the world’s most insecure, bloodthirsty radio host, Rogue Warrior is a pallid, pitiful, chauvinistic, cretinous, inane display, desperate to be perceived as cool and aspirational, a desperation so visible that everyone instinctively knows it is okay to bully the people responsible for it. How anyone could have looked at the Tom Clancy franchise enviably was already confusing to me, but for Bethesda to attempt to capture that audience by willingly associating with Richard Marcinko? Did they really expect more? Marcinko was a deeply stupid man, a murderous monster who could only fail upward for his entire life. He was sort of involved in the writing of a bunch of books about how much of a badass he was. I don’t think there is a more potent way to signal how extremely insecure you are. This man was pathetic. This game is a joke. I’m so happy I don’t have to think about it anymore.
Is it “fief” or “fife”?
What makes a video game ugly? Is it the aesthetic qualities? If a game’s palette features too many clashing colours or is primarily grey and uninteresting, or the technical graphics are amateurish and the animation is awkward, maybe the music isn’t produced well or doesn’t keep to a single key, does that make a video game ugly? Perhaps a game’s technical implementation makes it ugly, or its mechanical components. Does it run just poorly enough to be noticeable without being too intrusive, or are the tools the player has to achieve their objectives unsatisfying to use? Could a game’s narrative be the source of ugliness? Are the things happening in the game distasteful or just cruel and evil? There are clearly a lot of variables at play, but I think we’d all be in agreement if there was a game that featured all of these possibilities. That game would rightfully be regarded as truly awful. Well, here it is. After the relative flop that was Shadow Ops: Red Mercury, Zombie Studios partnered with Bethesda Softworks who - after noticing Ubisoft’s successes with their Tom Clancy franchise - decided they wanted a piece of the military fiction money. Bethesda brought author Richard Marcinko on board, and in 2005 development of Rogue Warrior began. Over the next four years, the project would go through a variety of iterations, be stripped from Zombie Studios, and then sent to Rebellion Entertainment who would completely transform the final game. In December of 2009, Rogue Warrior was finally released, to critical savagery. The reception at the time was so bad that Rogue Warrior is often in the conversation as one of the worst games ever made, and I think it is no exaggeration to say that it absolutely belongs in that conversation. The game is short, it’s barely functional, the palette is bland, the enemies are vacuous, the dialogue tasteless, and this story of Marcinko’s murder spree throughout North Korea and North-East Russia is downright villainous. Rogue Warrior is terrible, and it is the ugliest game I’ve ever played.
If you’ve been watching my videos for a while, you’ll know that I like to play a stinky shooter every now and again. Sometimes they’re brilliant, but mostly they’re just fun lay-ups so I can use all the words I know that describe how bad something is. Rogue Warrior is special among these, though, and that’s down to its association with its main character: Richard “Dick” Marcinko. Marcinko was a member of the US Navy SEALs, an elite fighting force that focuses on coastal and riverine combat, similar to the Marine corps but usually more covert. In 1980, Marcinko was given the go ahead to establish his own SEAL Team, Six, who would go on to be known as the most effective fighting force throughout the USA’s armed forces. Despite all that he was afforded, however, Marcinko was jailed for defrauding $113,000 from the United States’ government in 1990, and was subsequently kicked out of the Navy. While in jail, Marcinko drafted his autobiography which was then rewritten by ghostwriter John Weisman and published by Pocket Books in 1992. The book sold well, and Marcinko and Weisman would go on to produce a series of self-help books and fictional sequels to the autobiography until Marcinko’s retirement in 2014. This summary of his life makes Marcinko sound like an intelligent, articulate man, but after reading the autobiography and playing the game, I can say that he was most certainly neither. Marcinko loves cursing, he even makes up his own new curses just so he has more to say. The expression “swears like a sailor” does not do his vocabulary justice. He sounds like a teenager once their parents are out of earshot, and it gets tiresome both in the game and in the book. Additionally, Marcinko’s motivations for the things he does are generally horrific and often unreasonable. Throughout the book, Marcinko makes it very clear that he just wants to kill people. He did three tours of Vietnam and relished the opportunity to kill as many Viet Cong as he was able to, though he wished he could have killed more. Marcinko regularly bemoans the administrative structure of the Navy; they didn’t see his murderous rampages through rural Vietnam as necessary which ultimately hurt Marcinko’s naval career in the long run. Those administrative types would still control where Marcinko would be working and who he’d be working for, afterall. He was moved away from SEAL Team Six in disgrace, hidden away in the Pentagon for a while, but he managed to start another organisation whose purpose was to deliberately annoy Navy base commanders before finally being indicted for fraud. Marcinko would then go on to have his authorial career while also hosting a politically conservative talk radio show - which seems counter-intuitive to me, like, the systems were the problem so advocating for them doesn’t follow, unless he just really hated gay people for some reason. After his final novel was published in 2014, Marcinko spent seven years in retirement before passing away in December of 2021, a period where many old conservatives seemed to all coincidentally die at the same time - wow, amazing. Marcinko led a full life, people threw themselves into frozen ocean water for him, opportunity for success came wherever he looked and he took those opportunities. When the concept of a video game based on his novels was pitched to him, there was likely no hesitation from Marcinko, and thus, we are here today.
Despite the shared title, Rogue Warrior the autobiography and Rogue Warrior the video game contain vastly different material. The events of the autobiography are probably true events, while the video game’s narrative is totally fictitious. The game is set in November of 1986, Marcinko and two nameless accomplices have been deployed to Unggi in North Korea where they are to meet with a CIA informant to receive information about a missile factory. The trio are dropped from a helicopter somewhere outside of town, before making the trek through the forest. They come across a patrol of North Korean soldiers, and while they were able to kill all of them, both of Marcinko’s buddies are killed in a grenade explosion. From here onward, Marcinko is alone, and despite orders to retreat, Marcinko chooses to press on. The rest of the game follows Marcinko’s murderous fantasies of killing as many North Korean and Russian soldiers as he desires, slightly justified by the thread of trailing the manufacture of intercontinental ballistic missiles throughout North East Russia. Each step of this story features Marcinko disobeying his commander’s orders, saying the dumbest one-liners ever written, enacting his own moronic plans that all magically succeed, and providing as many opportunities to kill as many non-combatants as possible. That might sound strange since these are clearly soldiers the player is fighting, but there was no formal declaration of war between the US and North Korea or the Soviet Union during the 80s. While there was political tension between all of these states, East Asia was the only region that didn’t earn any attention from Reagan’s military meddling. And without a formal declaration of war you can’t just roll up to a foreign military base and start gunning people down on a whim, that just makes you a murderer. The missile hunt eventually leads Marcinko to a large Russian dam and submarine base, which he promptly blows up as the game’s finale. The player does this by shooting people, placing explosive charges Marcinko pulls from his magic hat, and watching short movies along the way. Of course, this stuff never happened, but there is a book that features the same title and the same main character that is a record of true events.
Rogue Warrior 1992 is Richard Marcinko’s life story, his memoirs told from his perspective which detail his Navy recruitment in 1958, to his expulsion over thirty years later. It’s a fairly short book at around 370 pages, the language is simplistic when not referring to everything through Navy acronyms, and a hefty chunk of the content is useless descriptions of people who never speak or do anything as well as unnecessarily detailed explanations of whatever mundane activity Marcinko happened to be engaging in at the relevant point in time. The story opens in media res, as SEAL Team Six has been summoned to a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico. Apparently a Puerto Rican separatist group called the Macheteros had gotten their hands on a nuclear weapon and the SEALs were sent in to retrieve it. On approach, however, Marcinko discovers that the rounds loaded into their magazines are lighter than usual, and sure enough, they’re blanks. The Macheteros don’t have a nuclear weapon, they don’t even have a presence on the island. It’s a training exercise, much to Marcinko’s disappointment. Things then flash all the way back to Marcinko’s childhood, his relationship with his parents, what he did for fun as a kid, his first job, how many of the girls in town he slept with, vital formative details. Marcinko becomes aware of the Lebanese Crisis in 1958 and sees it as an opportunity to go and kill some people. His application to join the Marines was rejected, but the Navy accepted and it all kicked off from there. I actually had a scheme for marking points of interest in the book. Each of the different coloured tabs denotes a different thing. Pink is for things that are just propaganda, some of which Marcinko believes as fact and others he seems to just be saying. On page 49, for example, the Amphibious Force Commander John S. McCain delivers a speech to the trainees going through Hell Week. “We took his words to heart. (He must have been inspirational at home, too. His son, John, (is) now a US senator for Arizona…)” That’s Republican politician John McCain, there, likely Marcinko’s favourite politician and probably explains how he ended up on conservative talk-radio. Green tabs were for strange sentences. Originally I intended for these to be sentences that featured strange grammar or things that you can say in conversation but don’t really work in written form. “A boxer, light heavy-weight division, he’d been to EOD school so he could play with explosives. And he understood CT: he’d taken over Paul’s old job commanding MOB-6. He was big, ugly, and aggressive. Yeah.” (p.254). In the end, though, most green tabs were put beside things that I had to make sure I read correctly because of how ridiculous they seemed. Weird, racist sentences, talking about the Vietnamese people as “a useless class of nuc mam-swilling subhumans who needed two sticks to pick up one grain of rice but used only one to carry two buckets of shit” (p. 166), having his Cambodian houseboy say “You go fuckee-fuckee tonight, Mr Dick?” (p. 188), and creeper stuff like “... he’d married a young beauty named Denise, the girl he’d been dating since she was fifteen and he was eighteen or nineteen.” (p. 255-256). Green tabs were the ones I used the most and it made that line in the game about the Great-leader’s penis much more tasteless than it already was, though at least it was something Marcinko would’ve said. The orange tabs indicate murderousness. Marcinko wanted to kill people and his aggression isn’t limited to the US government’s victims of the day, though they are the only ones who saw the realisation of Marcinko’s fantasies. After returning from that training exercise in Puerto Rico, Marcinko notes “...it might be gratifying for the men, if ultimately unrewarding for our careers, to stage a live-fire hit on JSOC headquarters.” (p. 289). Frustrated by their lack of deployments to Japan or Iran, Marcinko ponders attacking the Joint Special Operations Command headquarters to give himself and Six someone to kill. I think the orange tabs are the most numerous in the book since Marcinko really wanted to end a lot of people’s lives and enjoyed killing the people he was able to. Blue and yellow tabs are by far the rarest, mostly because there isn’t a lot else to the book outside of what I’ve already mentioned. Blue tabs are for unexpectedly good takes and I used three in total. One was for recognising Operation Just Cause was an invasion, another was a Lebanese taxi driver explaining that the Israelis brutalise Palestinian refugee camps - which isn’t even Marcinko’s opinion, and the last one is Marcinko realising how horrific a car bomb actually is. Of course, this realisation doesn’t cause Marcinko to reconsider his own actions in Vietnam but I probably shouldn’t have expected it to. Yellow tabs were my Other tabs and point at things like Marcinko’s baffling Godfather impression - which is nonsensical in written form - as well as his embarrassing interactions with the people who worked at the Pentagon and some pathetic whining about how Six didn’t have enough time to make him a plaque when he got booted. Despite all of its clear failings, Rogue Warrior was the New York Times bestseller during its first week on shelves, though that was probably pretty disappointing to many working at the publication at the time. Writing for The New York Times Book Review, David Murray said “While his story is fascinating, the method of telling it in "Rogue Warrior," written with John Weisman, a freelance writer who specializes in espionage and military nonfiction, is not. Mr. Marcinko, 51 years old, comes across as less the genuine warrior than a comic-book superhero who makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Little Lord Fauntleroy.” (The New York Times Book Review, 1992). Naturally, this quote was chopped up and plastered on the front cover as though it were praise. Too bad Bethesda weren’t able to do the same for the video game.
Rogue Warrior was built within Rebellion’s in-house Asura engine, the same engine used to develop their Sniper Elite franchise, so it should be more than appropriate for Rogue Warrior. Mysteriously, though, Rogue Warrior refuses to run for more than an hour on my PC. Once an hour passes, the program shuts down. The game is only 2 hours long so it isn’t a huge problem, but there are other things I had to resolve. Rogue Warrior doesn’t natively lock the mouse to the window and it has horrible screen tearing throughout most of the levels. Also, the default controls put grenade on the right mouse button and aim on the space bar like some kind of maniac. And the menus aren’t mouse navigable, you have to use the arrow keys and enter which is mostly an annoyance. There isn’t a means to fix the menus, but everything else can be resolved if for some reason you also want to put yourself through this. Firstly, the game seems to have fewer issues when running in Windows Vista (Service Pack 2) compatibility mode. I do not understand why, but doing this prevented some of the hitching I was encountering early on and seemed to prevent a majority of the crashes. Next, there’s a file floating around in the Steam community section that’s part of an unwrapper called WineD3D. Putting both the D3D9 and WINED3D files in the game directory stopped my mouse from leaving the game window and resolved the last few crashing instances compatibility mode didn’t catch. I don’t fully understand all of this, and those older Sniper Elite games work just fine, so maybe Rebellion don’t care about making Rogue Warrior functional today. And honestly, fair call, they probably shouldn’t care for their own sake. With that done, though, we can finally play the game.
Rogue Warrior is listed as a tactical shooter online, which is to say that it moves at a snail’s pace and there might be some kind of stealth section now and again. The stealth doesn’t actually work; so long as you don’t sprint or shoot and you’re outside of the enemy’s field of vision the game considers you to be in stealth. I think there are two or three total sections of a level where the player might get a whiff of stealth gameplay, but this game does not compare to the likes of Splinter Cell at all. The player can just walk right up behind an enemy and press the kill move button at their leisure. If I can compare what the gameplay is actually like, in most aspects Rogue Warrior is eerily similar to Shadow Ops: Red Mercury. The gunplay is basic, with next to no recoil, bullet-spread, or screen effects other than the tearing. A headshot kills an enemy in one hit, and hip-firing is pinpoint accurate so even the highest difficulty level is a breeze. And the enemy scripting does nothing to make shooting them interesting. It seems like every enemy encounter is a mini set-piece event, where the enemies are spawned by the player crossing a trigger point, then they run to their specified cover point, and then they stand there and shoot at the player while occasionally dipping behind cover. It’s like one step removed from a Kim Jung Il whack-a-mole machine. There are a bunch of different guns to try out, though, so there’s a little replayability built in through that. And replayability was absolutely on Rebellion’s mind when they shipped Rogue Warrior. The Steam achievements are all things that can’t be done on a single playthrough as a desperate attempt to drag out the run time somehow. In order to complete the single player achievement list, the player needs to kill 180 enemies in different ways and there are nowhere near 180 enemies in the game. Something that also blew me away after my first playthrough was the lack of a turret section! These games always have a turret section. They were really hoping walking and shooting were all people wanted. Or maybe they were hoping people would just be so astonished by the game’s middling presentation that they wouldn’t notice how bare the gameplay is.
This game is very grey, but I doubt you needed me to tell you that. There could have easily been more green in the palette since these places aren’t as far north as they might seem. Rason, formerly known as Unggi, is as close to the equator as San Francisco, so it isn’t some frozen wasteland. Most of the game takes place in these semi-industrial areas which means a lot of sheet metal walls, workshops, chain link fences, and big pipes. There isn’t an awful lot of variety throughout the environments, and even the Russian palace level quickly transforms into more pipe-lined concrete corridors. The character models are fine for 2009, Marcinko’s mouth looks a little off and the animations are jerky and robotic. I think putting Rogue Warrior next to Uncharted 2, which was also released in 2009, shows what I’m talking about. The Rogue Warrior animations almost feel like stock animations, they’re so lifeless and flat. Even the kill move special animations have no punch. The soundwork isn’t even good. It sounds like nothing, and then Mickey Rourke says a Marcinkoism. Mickey Rourke might actually be the best part of Rogue Warrior - just his voice. The things he has to say are very stupid, and there are some line reads that don’t seem correct, but his gravelly rumble is fun to listen to at least. The only notable piece of music in this project is basically just a drum beat with the Rourke lines arranged over it, which is funny, but it's competing with that “wrap ‘em around your mouth” line.
Rogue Warrior definitely goes all-in on the stupidity but whether it was a conscious decision or not is hard to say for sure. The plot isn’t just poorly conceived, it’s idiotic and kind of despicable. After his voiceless buddies are killed in the intro, Marcinko makes his way through Unggi to try and meet with the CIA informant alone. He’s too slow to save the informant from being killed by a North Korean officer, but manages to piece together the location of the missile factory from notes left in the apartment. His commander again orders him to retreat, an order Marcinko ignores, choosing to head to the factory alone. Upon making it there and after fighting through waves of North Korean soldiers, Marcinko learns that the missiles have almost all been completed, and that they’re being transported to Russia on a train. Marcinko then travels to the loading facility, where he fights through scores more soldiers before diving onto the train. His commander then tells him to keep a low profile, as if that is at all possible after the massacres left in his wake. The train changes hands as it crosses the Russian border bridge. The bridge is rubble shortly thereafter as Marcinko steals a Russian military vehicle and heads to an old palace where the missile silos are being kept. Beneath the palace is a large control room with a display that coincidentally shows a representation of the Soviet Missile Defence system which is basically a targeting computer that allows the Russians to shoot incoming missiles out of the sky. Marcinko decides that the only solution to this is to destroy the palace by retargeting the missiles to hit the building he is standing inside. Not only is he somehow capable of operating a Soviet computer, but the computer is also able to target inter-continental missiles accurately enough to destroy a single building. Marcinko’s plan for surviving the missile strike is to wait in the bunker below the palace. His CO rightfully calls this plan insane. And it is. Nothing about this should work, especially since the missiles are supposed to be a defence system, and the control facility is on the eastern coast but all the diagrams are firing across the Atlantic. Moscow and St Petersburg are over 9000 kilometres away from where Marcinko is standing, so why would that be the operation centre of the Soviet Missile Defence system? Naturally, this totally nonsense plan works without a hitch and Marcinko is off to the next place. I do think it bears repeating, the Cold War wasn’t an actual war. The Americans and the Russians weren’t happy with each other, sure, but they weren’t formally in conflict. Marcinko is just killing people and blowing up buildings and bridges on a whim and against direct orders from his commanding officer. Rogue Warrior concludes at a hydro-electric dam that has been fitted to also be a dry-dock for submarines. The Russians are in the process of fitting an anti-ballistic missile system to the submarine docked there and that apparently warrants destroying the dry-dock and the dam. The sub base is by far the worst level in the game for variety, but once the player manages to slog through it they are finally released from this horrendous experience.
I think it’s very easy to point the blame of Rogue Warrior’s badness at Richard Marcinko - and while his contribution informs the specifics of the game - Bethesda were the reason the game exists at all. Rogue Warrior wasn’t being developed by a team who actually wanted to make a Dick Marcinko adaptation; Bethesda contracted Zombie Studios to make the game, decided they didn’t like what Zombie had made, and moved the project over to Rebellion Developments who squeezed the final release out in under a year. Rogue Warrior’s inception likely happened in a boardroom as a bunch of Bethesda executives pawed over some Rainbow Six and Splinter Cell numbers. Nobody actually wanted a Rogue Warrior video game, a bunch of company higher-ups decided it should exist so the company could win some more capitalism tokens - which is no way to make art. Since nobody actually wanted to make the game, is it any wonder that it ended up as one of the most critically panned video game products ever made? Did the Bethesda exec who scrapped the Zombie Studios project really think Rebellion’s game was going to print money? It might seem cynical to suggest this, but I genuinely cannot think of any other reason for Rogue Warrior’s existence.
From the minds of Bethesda’s opportunistic producers, the team at Rebellion who likely wanted nothing to do with the project, and the world’s most insecure, bloodthirsty radio host, Rogue Warrior is a pallid, pitiful, chauvinistic, cretinous, inane display, desperate to be perceived as cool and aspirational, a desperation so visible that everyone instinctively knows it is okay to bully the people responsible for it. How anyone could have looked at the Tom Clancy franchise enviably was already confusing to me, but for Bethesda to attempt to capture that audience by willingly associating with Richard Marcinko? Did they really expect more? Marcinko was a deeply stupid man, a murderous monster who could only fail upward for his entire life. He was sort of involved in the writing of a bunch of books about how much of a badass he was. I don’t think there is a more potent way to signal how extremely insecure you are. This man was pathetic. This game is a joke. I’m so happy I don’t have to think about it anymore.
Is it “fief” or “fife”?
paq250_
7 months ago