I beat this game at least 5 times across different PCs and my old trusty 360. Now I am back to craving some Gears but my PC currently is not suitable for gaming and my Xbox was left in a different country altogether.
Still, I learned that since the Xbox Live for Xbox 360 is still active, Gears 1 PC …
I beat this game at least 5 times across different PCs and my old trusty 360. Now I am back to craving some Gears but my PC currently is not suitable for gaming and my Xbox was left in a different country altogether.
Still, I learned that since the Xbox Live for Xbox 360 is still active, Gears 1 PC online services are active as well, because they're running on the same legacy Xbox Live system. So, in preparation to eventually getting a better PC I decided to actually log in to the service through the game. I bought Flatout: Ultimate Carnage on Steam for 4 bucks. It's also a Games for Windows Live game, but it is still being sold, whereas the original Gears 1 for PC is abandonware. The steam version of Flatout: UC gives you a CD key which can also be activated in Gears 1. So after finding an ISO on archive.org I installed it, logged in, used the CD key from Flatout and was greeted to my gamertag in the lower left corner. It might not sound like anything, but there aren't many games from 2007 that still have an actively running official online service. At least on PC after GameSpy shut down.
Gears 1 on PC still has active PVP multiplayer and coop (although it's P2P and not dedicated servers). So I might actually find someone to beat the campaign in coop with on Insane difficulty while unlocking some GFWL achievements in the process.
It's such a monumental game. I don't know why but people don't seem to give it enough credit for being just a brilliant shooter. Perhaps it's fatigue since Microsoft can't stop milking its cows until they've started to decompose which is what happened to Gears (and Halo) eventually. If it was just the original trilogy, it would've been a perfect series. I love it and I think it's a shame that it wasn't able to adapt to the industry as time went on. Maybe it shouldn't have to, it's a 7th gen artifact of highest quality that should be left as an example of some of the best gaming had to offer. We still have backwards compatibility and emulation so these games will live on as people revisit or even discover them.
