Gears of War 2, featuring Marcus Fenix (above left), and Resistance 2, featuring Nathan Hale (above right), were both released this week. Now they're sitting on the retail shelves casting their grim manly-man alien-killing gazes at each other. Each is an exclusive on its particular system and a darling of its publisher, Resistance 2 for Sony's Playstation 3 and Gears of War 2 for Microsoft's Xbox 360. They're both tough, established, grizzled, and heavily armed.

But who would win in a fight?

Find out which is the better game after the jump.

I should point out that I'm not a super-big fan of either game. They're both corridor crawls with embarrassingly bad stories, but solid multiplayer. If I was to rate them on a 1-10 scale, I'd maybe give them both 7s (which is an 8 on the usual 7-9 scale used by videogame reviewers). But what if we break down each game by category and compare them? Who would win the most categories? Which game is ultimately the higher 7 (or 8)?

Single player
They're both strictly linear rat-in-a-maze trips through dynamic battles against handfuls of enemies. Neither has much replay value, and I can't imagine anyone caring enough to collect the silly collectibles. Gears has the occasional fork in the road and it does a much better job with its set pieces, but Resistance gets the slight edge for massive wide-open firefights.
Winner: Resistance 2

Lead character
Marcus Fenix from Gears of War is so bad ass that he talks like he has throat cancer, which would explain the doo rag. He's so bad ass that he doesn't even need to spell "phoenix" correctly. He's so bad ass that no actor could possibly play him in a Gears of War movie, so Marcus Fenix will have to be entirely CG. Nathan Hale from Resistance is...you know, I can't remember a single thing about that guy except that he has the power to receive three or four telepathic messages from a floating octopus. I'm not even sure I got his name right. Wasn't Nathan Hale one of the Founding Fathers? Or is he the guy who wrote Last of the Mohicans?
Winner: Gears of War 2

Back story
Resistance 2 is aggressively incomprehensible. I was lost from beginning to end, and I'm pretty sure the big spoiler has something to do with a scientifically engineered floating octopus. Also, for some reason, the Cloverfield monster is running around in Chicago. But in the 1950s. Also, pods turn people into zombies. Also, soldiers have to take drugs or their eyes turn yellow and they die from advanced hepatitis or something. The back story in Gears 2 is nearly as incomprehensible, but it has a much better sense for world building, complete with silly names like razorhail, rustlung, grindlifts, and beastbarges. And since the beastbarge is one of the coolest bits of videogame design I've seen this year, the award for back story goes to Gears, since I'm sure the beastbarge figures in there somewhere.
Winner: Gears of War 2

Manliness
Gears is the most homoerotic game since 300, which wasn't technically a game so much as a cutscene without a game. Gears is full of men being suspiciously overmanly with each other. Consider Dom's stuff about his wife (beard!), the way soldiers call land carriers by female names and attribute to them aspects of female anatomy (compenstation!), and a revealing instance of dream confusion in which Dom imagines Marcus Fenix is his wife (paging Dr. Freud!). Gears is so manly that it can totally be gay. In Resistance, on the other hand, the dudes just remind each other to make sure they have full clips while the next level loads.
Winner: Gears of War 2

Monster design
If I had a nickel for every time I shot Dom full of lead, or imulsion, or plasma bolts, or torque arrows, or whatever I was firing at any given time, I'd be able to afford the collector's edition of Gears of War 2. At least the monsters in Resistance stand out from friendlies and are therefore easier to shoot. Plus, the artists who made Resistance get a lot of mileage out of how weird it is when a monster has six eyes. Aughhhh! That's just plain freaky. Also plus, the name of the monsters in Resistance is better: "chimera" is a much cooler name for an alien race than "locust", which is particularly stupid for aliens that only appear a handful at a time.
Winner: Resistance 2

The alien plan
In Gears of War, the aliens come up from underground. There are some new reveals in Gears 2 about their insidious plans to abduct people (boo!) and the mechanics of how they sink entire cities underground (cool!). But all that pales in comparison to the convoluted alien plan in Resistance. It seems to go a little something like this: arrive on earth via the Tunguska meteorite, spread a virus that converts people into monsters who further convert people into zombies, conquer Russia in the 1950s (suck it Stalin!), then go through Europe (Marshall Plan revoked!), then across the English Channel (suck it, Hitler!), then to America (suck it, Eisenhower!), then to Mexico (Mexico?) where there's some Halo-esque stuff about ancient towers or artifacts or bases or something that I wasn't quite clear on because I wasn't really paying attention when the floating octopus explained it. But what mostly cinches the deal is that the aliens in Resistance establish air supremacy. Have aliens learned nothing from military history.
Winner: Resistance 2

Basic gameplay
Resistance 2 is a lot of running backward and shooting. I hate running backwards and shooting, but I do a lot of it, even in otherwise excellent games like Fallout 3 and BioShock, where I must have done several marathons' worth of running backwards and shooting. Running backwards and shooting is the stupidest videogame contrivance since med kits, so the nod goes to Gears' stop-and-pop cover-based gameplay.
Winner: Gears of War 2

Weapons
The weapons in Gears are certainly distinct and they each have very definite roles. But they don't hit very hard. Combat in Gears feels like trying to take down a gorilla with a BB gun, and I can tell you from experience that's not a good idea (don't ask). The weapons in Resistance, on the other hand, draw from the developer's experience with Ratchet & Clank where lots of stuff gets killed in crazy ways. The Resistance guns are a mix of the conventional and the outrageous, with each weapon having some sort of wacky secondary effect.
Winner: Resistance 2

Most improved
Gears 2 adds poison gas grenades, a flame thrower, and human (well, inhuman) shields, but it's mostly a retread of the original Gears. Resistance 2 cuts out the med kits and health bar in favor of the now popular Call of Duty system. I cannot overstate how much this makes Resistance 2 an improvement over Resistance 1, which was a game mostly about trying to find another one of those damn glowing health canisters.
Winner: Resistance 2

Bossage
Both games have really big bosses that look cool at first. Then they kill you for the tenth time while you're trying to figure out the pattern to get past them. But if you're going to have a tedious boss battle, at least make it as spectacular as Gears manages to do. In fact, both games have a battle fought against a water monster while you're stranded on a little floating platform. It's a great study in contrasts for how Gears does bad boss fights better than Resistance.
Winner: Gears of War 2

Death
When you die in Resistance, it plays the same DUM-dum-dum tune and then a reload to the last checkpoint. It happens a lot. A lot. When you die in Gears, it plays a sad etude or some such thing with the piano. But instead of Resistance's die-and-retry gameplay, Gears gives you a second chance by letting your AI buddy resurrect you. Marcus and Dom 4 eva!
Winner: Gears of War 2

Multiplayer (competitive)
Both games increase the number of players supported. Gears goes up to 10, Resistance goes up to 60. The really big news for Gears is the addition of bots, which is pretty nifty. Although Gears has a number of modes, they're mostly variations on deathmatch and there's nothing approximating the grand map-wide free-ranging skirmish mode in Resistance. Also, Resistance has a persistent leveling system that goes along with a mix-and-match scheme where you choose a weapon and a special "berserk" ability. It's wonderfully addictive.
Winner: Resistance 2

Multiplayer (co-operative)
Only Gears lets you play the single-player campaign cooperatively, but that assumes that you actually like the single-player campaign enough to share it with someone. Gears' new horde mode lets players team up against waves of monsters, which is the new hotness (Call of Duty 5 and Left 4 Dead, anyone?). The bots also let players set up matches against AI opponents. These are all great features. But none of them is as great as Resistance's co-op campaign, which is like an MMO, complete with classes, character leveling, randomization, and even a lite loot system.
Winner: Resistance 2

The overall tally:
Gears of War 2: 6 points
Resistance 2: 7 points

The winner is Resistance 2! Congratulations! Now go to Disneyland.