Gears of War and its dreadful sequel prove once and for all that American tastes in entertainment are single-handedly undermining millennia of human progress -- of evolution, really. But instead of returning us to primal ooze, our pathetic excuse for a "culture" is single-handedly dragging us into the sewers, where we'll live furtively, like Morlocks, eating the filth of our predecessors and numbly twitching our thumbs in a compulsive reflex to chainsaw some thick, shiny dude in his misshapen face one last time. The problem, of course, is that Gears is wholly undeserving of its empty accolades; it's little more than kill.switch redux -- or rather, not redux, but dumbed down with dialogue that Roland Emmerich would be ashamed to use, and an aesthetic that looks like someone dipped a bunch of rejected sketches from a 90s-vintage Rob Liefeld comic in brownish Astroglide. Apparently the reason everyone who isn't Epic has trouble making Unreal Engine 3 work for them is because they're not making their games retarded enough. Gears' cover system adds nothing that kill.switch didn't already do better five years ago...and a lot more tastefully. Enjoy your sewage, you degenerates. Me, I'm gonna keep plugging away at my copy of this PS2 masterpiece. But don't worry — I'll think of you whenever I flush.