An unintentional period piece.
Fair warning, I'm gonna be talking about the grim shit that happened during the war on terror. I'm also gonna be talking about 50 Cent's career. These two are intertwined.
I doubt there are too many people using this website who are young enough to have completely missed the meteoric rise of 50 Cent, but I'd be remiss to not make sure that everyone gets a primer. At the turn of the millennium, the golden age of gangsta rap was giving way to the bling era; what had become conventional in the late-80s to mid-90s was rapidly becoming less popular and less profitable than the revival of alternative hip hop. Of course, this didn't stop some artists from keeping their old sound in the face of new trends. Whether it was because they were stubborn, incapable of changing, or confident enough that they could keep selling exactly the way that they were, a genre shift will never be enough to completely unseat people from making what they want. 50 Cent had been making mixtapes for years, getting some notoriety from flipping the beats that other rappers had laid their voices on. He wasn't about to shift gears. 50 Cent kept his sound the same, and was rewarded handsomely: his debut album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, went 9x Platinum. The Massacre came out two years later and went 6x Platinum.
That was 2005, and it was the last time 50 Cent was relevant.
Blood on the Sand released in February of 2009.
A significant part of 50 Cent's fall is that, frankly speaking, he’s kind of a shit rapper. His style was already out by the early 2000s, and it’s only thanks to a fortuitous pick-up by Shady Records that you’ve heard of him. He’s not talentless, nor was he ever; his mixtape work prior to his studio debut is still good at its worst, and GRoDT is a solid-enough record (as much as I’ll get called an RYM backpacker for not saying it's outstanding). But 50 doesn’t really have any pen game to speak of. It’s more like crayon game. The guy writes like a fifth grader. The first bar off the first track in his debut album rhymes “off my chest” with “off my chest”. There’s another not even three minutes later where he drops the line “I'm the boss on this boat, you can call me skipper. The way I turn the money over, you should call me Flipper”. Christ. 50 Cent has a lot of friends in some really high places, but there’s a reason that Curtis couldn’t get certified in the year that Graduation went 5x Platinum; people were tired of him after less than a decade after his mainstream breakthrough. All of the Slim Shady and Obie Trice and Snoop Dogg features in the world couldn’t stem the tide that people like Kanye and Lil’ Wayne were creating, and 50’s monotone flows, GarageBand default beats, and garbage lyricism were reliquary.
But 50 Cent’s relationships are what propelled him, and they helped him build a legacy that he’s still controlling to this day. He made it big by starting feuds with virtually every other rapper he could on How to Rob, only delving deeper into his many, many beefs as he got involved deeper with Shady Records, taking up their fights as an associate. He turned getting shot for running his mouth into his armor — you become feared and respected in equal measure if the guy that puts nine bullets in you winds up dead before you do. He created a multimedia empire of television shows, of vodka, of luxury underwear, of investments in South African palladium mines.
And of video games.
Blood on the Sand originally had nothing to do with 50 Cent, and you can tell. It was meant to be a tie-in with a Jason Bourne sequel series written after the death of author Robert Ludlum, but the television show that was also set to release at the same time got cancelled before it could leave production. This left developer Swordfish Studios holding the bag; this is basically what happened with Croteam when they made Serious Sam 3. Swordfish had sunk two years of dev time into making their Covert-One game, and now they had nothing they could do with the prototypes.
Enter Vivendi Games, who order a sequel to 50 Cent: Bulletproof.
It's obvious while playing Blood on the Sand that 50 Cent was just kind of dropped into a product that already existed before he got involved. You have all of these wide, open vistas, with sparkling bloom effects casting rays of light down onto the sand-bleached stones. Dilapidated malls and bombed-out highways serve as the backdrops for stop-and-pop cover shooter segments, tearing up the surroundings with heavy machine gun fire. So much of this game visually tries to tell a story of beautiful landscapes, contrasting against the war-torn buildings and roads of this unnamed Middle Eastern country. It’s ripe for some gruff-voiced American special ops player character to glibly comment on war being hell and how the American invasion of this land is the only way to save these wayward people, mowing them down all the while.
50 Cent doesn’t give a fuck about any of that. 50 Cent just wants his fucking skull.
Blood on the Sand is honest. It's a puff piece for 50 Cent. It's a product that exists solely for the purpose of boosting his image and providing him with another brand tie-in he can point to as a marker of success. 50 Cent doesn't have any poetic musings about the nature of man or if he's the real monster for slaughtering all of these inexplicably Serbian and Slovenian goons. 50 Cent thinks this place is a shithole and he wants to go home as soon as he can get his $10 million jewel-encrusted skull back. The non-fictionalized 50 is on record saying that he loves the game because it shows him jumping out of helicopters and because his model has huge muscles.
The game attempts to answer the question of why 50 Cent is somewhere in the Middle East (the Covert-One books out at the time don't take place in the region, so there's basically zero clue which country this is meant to be) by saying that he's there to play a concert. We have to keep in mind that fiction, unlike reality, is designed from top to bottom to be experienced by an outside viewer. The in-universe justification is that he's there to make money. The real-world reasoning is because, in the year 2009, you're just kind of expected to set your game in the Middle East. They were easy "bad guys". Just because Obama was president doesn't mean shit. Just because the torture of political dissidents in Abu Ghraib was known for half a decade before this doesn't mean shit. Just because it cost untold trillions of dollars and a million lives doesn't mean shit. They — capital-T, bold-italics — did 9/11, so it's all fair game.
But this is all in service of making 50 look cool. Not of anything else. You're meant to watch him gun down five guys with a machine gun while the word MASSACRE takes up a third of the screen and and think "wow, this guy's a badass". You get Gangsta Fire slow-mo and 50 Cent bonus points to unlock music videos for killing quickly, because it makes him look cool. You have three separate helicopter boss fights because 50 Cent's son thought it would make him look cool. You listen to a rotation of background tracks that all sound the same and can only be differentiated in a firefight by whether 50 shouts "I run New York!" or "My gun go off!" at the end of the chorus. You have a dedicated taunt button that you can upgrade to make 50 shout progressively more profane things at his foes for bonus points. Because, you know, it makes him look cool. I think the target demographic for this game was 50 Cent.
Unsurprisingly, 50 Cent and the rest of the G-Unit do a fairly poor job of acting as themselves. Perhaps more surprisingly, everyone save for Lance Reddick kind of sucks in this. The final boss cycles through a Texan accent, a South African accent, a British RP accent, and at one point what sounds like a Chinese accent all in the span of a single helicopter battle. Tony Yayo just...whines all the time? Like, he doesn't do much besides complain about how much he hates being in a Middle Eastern warzone, which, y'know, valid gripe. The other members of the G-Unit are no longer on speaking terms with 50 Cent. That's not relevant to the rest of this paragraph, but I did all of this research into 50 Cent, so I had to mention it somewhere.
The story is nonsense, but it couldn't ever be anything else. 50 Cent just wants his fucking skull. Everything else is tertiary. The "love interest" crosses you, then double-crosses the villains with a story about how they're holding her family captive, and then triple-crosses 50 one final time by revealing that she has no family right at the finish line. 50 Cent quips that she's a "crazy bitch" and that's how he likes his women, and then blows her up with a rocket launcher. Your concert promoter/handler/blackmail victim inevitably turns on you — "trust no one," says the arms dealer, advice which 50 ignores three separate times before the credits roll — and just dies unceremoniously in a generic gunfight. You can blast him the moment you're out of the cutscene and get a 25,000 point bonus for doing it in under thirty seconds. This game is bordering on a work of deconstructive genius.
Blood on the Sand is funny, because Blood on the Sand is quaint. It revels in its own selfishness; the war on terror as an aesthetic to push a real guy as being tough, completely bereft of having anything to say other than "damn, 50 Cent is cool". It's almost refreshing to see something so concerned with itself that it's completely unbothered by its own implications. This is a better condemnation of the war on terror and the American culture that spawned around it than Spec Ops: The Line. Hit that big-ass ramp, Fiddy.
This is the good karma version of Rogue Warrior.
Fair warning, I'm gonna be talking about the grim shit that happened during the war on terror. I'm also gonna be talking about 50 Cent's career. These two are intertwined.
I doubt there are too many people using this website who are young enough to have completely missed the meteoric rise of 50 Cent, but I'd be remiss to not make sure that everyone gets a primer. At the turn of the millennium, the golden age of gangsta rap was giving way to the bling era; what had become conventional in the late-80s to mid-90s was rapidly becoming less popular and less profitable than the revival of alternative hip hop. Of course, this didn't stop some artists from keeping their old sound in the face of new trends. Whether it was because they were stubborn, incapable of changing, or confident enough that they could keep selling exactly the way that they were, a genre shift will never be enough to completely unseat people from making what they want. 50 Cent had been making mixtapes for years, getting some notoriety from flipping the beats that other rappers had laid their voices on. He wasn't about to shift gears. 50 Cent kept his sound the same, and was rewarded handsomely: his debut album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, went 9x Platinum. The Massacre came out two years later and went 6x Platinum.
That was 2005, and it was the last time 50 Cent was relevant.
Blood on the Sand released in February of 2009.
A significant part of 50 Cent's fall is that, frankly speaking, he’s kind of a shit rapper. His style was already out by the early 2000s, and it’s only thanks to a fortuitous pick-up by Shady Records that you’ve heard of him. He’s not talentless, nor was he ever; his mixtape work prior to his studio debut is still good at its worst, and GRoDT is a solid-enough record (as much as I’ll get called an RYM backpacker for not saying it's outstanding). But 50 doesn’t really have any pen game to speak of. It’s more like crayon game. The guy writes like a fifth grader. The first bar off the first track in his debut album rhymes “off my chest” with “off my chest”. There’s another not even three minutes later where he drops the line “I'm the boss on this boat, you can call me skipper. The way I turn the money over, you should call me Flipper”. Christ. 50 Cent has a lot of friends in some really high places, but there’s a reason that Curtis couldn’t get certified in the year that Graduation went 5x Platinum; people were tired of him after less than a decade after his mainstream breakthrough. All of the Slim Shady and Obie Trice and Snoop Dogg features in the world couldn’t stem the tide that people like Kanye and Lil’ Wayne were creating, and 50’s monotone flows, GarageBand default beats, and garbage lyricism were reliquary.
But 50 Cent’s relationships are what propelled him, and they helped him build a legacy that he’s still controlling to this day. He made it big by starting feuds with virtually every other rapper he could on How to Rob, only delving deeper into his many, many beefs as he got involved deeper with Shady Records, taking up their fights as an associate. He turned getting shot for running his mouth into his armor — you become feared and respected in equal measure if the guy that puts nine bullets in you winds up dead before you do. He created a multimedia empire of television shows, of vodka, of luxury underwear, of investments in South African palladium mines.
And of video games.
Blood on the Sand originally had nothing to do with 50 Cent, and you can tell. It was meant to be a tie-in with a Jason Bourne sequel series written after the death of author Robert Ludlum, but the television show that was also set to release at the same time got cancelled before it could leave production. This left developer Swordfish Studios holding the bag; this is basically what happened with Croteam when they made Serious Sam 3. Swordfish had sunk two years of dev time into making their Covert-One game, and now they had nothing they could do with the prototypes.
Enter Vivendi Games, who order a sequel to 50 Cent: Bulletproof.
It's obvious while playing Blood on the Sand that 50 Cent was just kind of dropped into a product that already existed before he got involved. You have all of these wide, open vistas, with sparkling bloom effects casting rays of light down onto the sand-bleached stones. Dilapidated malls and bombed-out highways serve as the backdrops for stop-and-pop cover shooter segments, tearing up the surroundings with heavy machine gun fire. So much of this game visually tries to tell a story of beautiful landscapes, contrasting against the war-torn buildings and roads of this unnamed Middle Eastern country. It’s ripe for some gruff-voiced American special ops player character to glibly comment on war being hell and how the American invasion of this land is the only way to save these wayward people, mowing them down all the while.
50 Cent doesn’t give a fuck about any of that. 50 Cent just wants his fucking skull.
Blood on the Sand is honest. It's a puff piece for 50 Cent. It's a product that exists solely for the purpose of boosting his image and providing him with another brand tie-in he can point to as a marker of success. 50 Cent doesn't have any poetic musings about the nature of man or if he's the real monster for slaughtering all of these inexplicably Serbian and Slovenian goons. 50 Cent thinks this place is a shithole and he wants to go home as soon as he can get his $10 million jewel-encrusted skull back. The non-fictionalized 50 is on record saying that he loves the game because it shows him jumping out of helicopters and because his model has huge muscles.
The game attempts to answer the question of why 50 Cent is somewhere in the Middle East (the Covert-One books out at the time don't take place in the region, so there's basically zero clue which country this is meant to be) by saying that he's there to play a concert. We have to keep in mind that fiction, unlike reality, is designed from top to bottom to be experienced by an outside viewer. The in-universe justification is that he's there to make money. The real-world reasoning is because, in the year 2009, you're just kind of expected to set your game in the Middle East. They were easy "bad guys". Just because Obama was president doesn't mean shit. Just because the torture of political dissidents in Abu Ghraib was known for half a decade before this doesn't mean shit. Just because it cost untold trillions of dollars and a million lives doesn't mean shit. They — capital-T, bold-italics — did 9/11, so it's all fair game.
But this is all in service of making 50 look cool. Not of anything else. You're meant to watch him gun down five guys with a machine gun while the word MASSACRE takes up a third of the screen and and think "wow, this guy's a badass". You get Gangsta Fire slow-mo and 50 Cent bonus points to unlock music videos for killing quickly, because it makes him look cool. You have three separate helicopter boss fights because 50 Cent's son thought it would make him look cool. You listen to a rotation of background tracks that all sound the same and can only be differentiated in a firefight by whether 50 shouts "I run New York!" or "My gun go off!" at the end of the chorus. You have a dedicated taunt button that you can upgrade to make 50 shout progressively more profane things at his foes for bonus points. Because, you know, it makes him look cool. I think the target demographic for this game was 50 Cent.
Unsurprisingly, 50 Cent and the rest of the G-Unit do a fairly poor job of acting as themselves. Perhaps more surprisingly, everyone save for Lance Reddick kind of sucks in this. The final boss cycles through a Texan accent, a South African accent, a British RP accent, and at one point what sounds like a Chinese accent all in the span of a single helicopter battle. Tony Yayo just...whines all the time? Like, he doesn't do much besides complain about how much he hates being in a Middle Eastern warzone, which, y'know, valid gripe. The other members of the G-Unit are no longer on speaking terms with 50 Cent. That's not relevant to the rest of this paragraph, but I did all of this research into 50 Cent, so I had to mention it somewhere.
The story is nonsense, but it couldn't ever be anything else. 50 Cent just wants his fucking skull. Everything else is tertiary. The "love interest" crosses you, then double-crosses the villains with a story about how they're holding her family captive, and then triple-crosses 50 one final time by revealing that she has no family right at the finish line. 50 Cent quips that she's a "crazy bitch" and that's how he likes his women, and then blows her up with a rocket launcher. Your concert promoter/handler/blackmail victim inevitably turns on you — "trust no one," says the arms dealer, advice which 50 ignores three separate times before the credits roll — and just dies unceremoniously in a generic gunfight. You can blast him the moment you're out of the cutscene and get a 25,000 point bonus for doing it in under thirty seconds. This game is bordering on a work of deconstructive genius.
Blood on the Sand is funny, because Blood on the Sand is quaint. It revels in its own selfishness; the war on terror as an aesthetic to push a real guy as being tough, completely bereft of having anything to say other than "damn, 50 Cent is cool". It's almost refreshing to see something so concerned with itself that it's completely unbothered by its own implications. This is a better condemnation of the war on terror and the American culture that spawned around it than Spec Ops: The Line. Hit that big-ass ramp, Fiddy.
This is the good karma version of Rogue Warrior.
4 Comments
@BlazingWaters it's astounding. they barely even pushed 50k copies. it never got a digital release so in-box copies are selling for like $150. it feels like something that fell out of another reality into our world
Blood on the Sand is unironically a banger of a game because it's so god damn unapologetically crazy and the arcade elements are addicting as hell.
Unironically, this might be one of the best reviews I've read on this site, paired with KB0's review of this very same game. Blood on the Sand sure gets people thinking a lot, huh. Great review.
BlazingWaters
1 year ago