Captain Price VS John Rambo - Violet's Dissenting Verdict

This will not be a prediction blog of its own of any sort: this is simply an addendum to Bang’s Blogs take on Captain Price VS John Rambo as an individual with the dissenting opinion on the verdict. For any further context, please read the actual blog before you view this one.

Blog Spoilers Ahead!

Putting it simply, I ultimately did not feel satisfied with how the debate was handled with this blog. Without detailing any further information on the development process, a lot of the verdict was written out quickly in 24 hours because a lot of the Call of Duty calcs ended up being extremely inflated. Which, for the most part, is fair, but because of the deadline (which was right after these recalcs) I did not feel like I had the time to process everything that had happened.

I had a heavy presence on researching Price but I didn’t do much for Rambo due to my crippling lack of knowledge on him, so it wasn’t until literally the night before release when I read the verdict for myself and realized there are extremely gaping flaws in the logic used. I realize that I did not gun for my perspective as hard as I should have, so I will be using this blog as an outlet to express my own opinions on this matchup.

Also I have no idea who’s going to need to hear this but if you ultimately end up agreeing with my take on the verdict then please do not slam or harass the other members who’ve worked on this blog because you believe their views are flawed. They’ve been very friendly and helpful during this entire process which was already tough enough to begin with and I am grateful that I was given the opportunity to be a guest for this.

Without further ado, let’s begin.

Violet’s take on Price VS Rambo

(P.S. listen to Ave Mujica)

Extra Source Material Note

For additional context, all researchers of the blog agreed that Modern Warfare Zombies and Rambo: The Force of Freedom could not be used without the other, for fairness’ sake. They are both wildly beyond the realm of the normal shenanigans seen in both franchises’ main content and would ruin the “essence” of the grounded gunfight matchup that most people think of when it comes to this matchup. As such, I will do the same; if one is mentioned, then I must also bring the other up.

Speed

This is the part that irks me the most about the current verdict. For the most part, I do not generally believe that anyone in realistic verses like Call of Duty and Rambo would get sort of bullet timing speeds. This is the same problem I have with their Rick VS Joel VS Bill blog (which I might do my own take on at some point as well) where there are just so many blatant anti-feats of these combatants in question taking bullet wounds that you would need a miracle to convince me that they would be bullet timers. In this case however, I’ll entertain everything listed off in this blog to make my point because there’s one major feat in particular that I am not a fan of.

A huge part of this debate was comparing each combatant’s speed because whoever wins in a quickdraw would almost instantly get the edge in a gunfight since both have no issue with their aim. The highest end stat that was given to Rambo is Mach 1.09 due to being able to dodge bullets in the Sega Master game. The problem with this is… well, literally everything regarding this source to begin with lol.

For one, the speed of projectiles in this game are terrifically slow. The calc used to get Mach 1.09 is based on measuring the speed of the projectile in-game, but the actual distance between Rambo and the target is not at all questioned here. I did a calculation of the latter and these were the results:

For the record, this is somewhat outdated as a quick search of this game on Wikipedia says Rambo is using a M60 machine gun (which has a faster muzzle velocity than an AK) but it’s not major enough to nullify this and would just make it worse. Bullet dodging in the Sega Master game should not be used as a quantifiable speed feat because the way they are designed is very evidently a gameplay concession. You simply would not be able to react to weapons that should presumably insta-kill you in a game like this if they were as near instantaneous as they are in real-life or in your average first-person shooter. Furthermore, tank shells, sniper rounds, and RPGs are firing their own projectiles at the exact same speeds as Rambo’s gun, all three of which very much do not have the same travel speeds IRL. Even fucking flamethrowers are shooting projectiles in this game for some reason, so I am very much inclined to believe that this is something that should not have been included to begin with.

Because otherwise, the non-cartoon calcs given to Rambo don’t even reach these kinds of speeds at all. The fastest quantified feat given to Rambo from the films reaches upwards of 68.4 m/s, which isn’t even remotely close to Price scaling to Mason and Woods’ slow-mo reaction speed of Mach 1.16. Another feat listed off for Rambo from another arcade game puts him at 258 m/s, or Mach 0.75; which somewhat closes the gap but is still not enough to beat out Price in a quickdraw. Even with Rambo cartoon scaling beating out that number with a maximum of Mach 1.45, the equal leeway rule we established requires Price to scale and be given Zombies equipment, which gives him a gun that shoots electricity, so if this quickdraw isn’t a 50/50, Price should be faster than Rambo by all accounts.

Strength and Firepower

Rambo definitely takes physical strength here. I’ve only seen a few clips of Rambo stuff myself but the amount of people that he’s goring and absolutely tearing apart in the final fight of Last Blood as a 70 year old man is genuinely absurd. Price on the other hand I don’t think has anything on this level of strength so in hand-to-hand he’s probably going to get slammed.

But in terms of destructive power from their weapons, I believe this is a category that should not be considered as a major factor in this debate. Price and Rambo are obviously human and would at minimum be incapacitated and killed at worst by one good gunshot. Explosives are obviously deadlier than guns and getting caught by something even as simple as a grenade could spell instant doom for either man, though they have survived plenty of big booms in the past. Call of Duty especially has a habit of people surviving a ton of vehicular crashes and there's even instances of people like Price himself not getting their limbs torn off by rockets, though Rambo has similar feats.

In terms of numbers, Rambo is listed as 10 megajoules from surviving the shockwave of a huge bomb that he set off. This took some digging because the number wasn’t listed in the feats section for some reason but as I understand it uses a generic destruction calc from the VS Battles Wiki. But this looks like a massive stretch considering the calc is for completely pulverizing a tree and Rambo was already a distance away from the blast. There’s also a 0.1 ton calc for Rambo destroying a tank with his arrows, but it’s coming from the exact same source that I already declared as unusable in the previous section so on principle I will be ignoring that here. In terms of cartoon feats, Rambo threw a grenade inside a tank which blew it up, and somehow the goons inside came out completely unscathed, which gets up to 88 megajoules of KE. However I’m entirely convinced this is an outlier purely because this would kill someone in a normal Rambo movie and also because the people making this show were not interested in showing kids bloody murder but whatever. In general most AP stats for Rambo come from destroying vehicles, all of which you can do pretty easily with normal firearms in every CoD game ever; and of course as the necessary Zombies inclusion, Ray Guns do this stuff too and even does so in its initial easter egg in World at War. And if we want to get technical, the perk PhD Flopper completely negates explosive damage in gameplay, though this could most likely be seen as a no limits fallacy.

The ultimate point I’m trying to make here is that both men are glass cannons and firepower is not a major category to consider when they would both get instantly incapacitated at best by any of the other’s weapons anyways.

Skill / Training

53 years pass in the time between Rambo’s enlistment in Vietnam (1966) to the events of Rambo: Last Blood (2019), so by sheer metric of years of experience Rambo would have more under his belt. Furthermore there’s more showings of him with martial arts knowledge unlike Price who we can only assume knows basic training so again if it came down to it a hand-to-hand fight Rambo would almost certainly win especially with his strength advantage.

Price isn’t really slouching either though, 20 and possibly more years of service (between All Ghillied Up and Ashes to Ashes) is still very long and he’s more trained in modern tactics that I do not believe that Rambo would be familiar with. He’s also consistently landed much more impressive shots at greater distances, whether it be the near 900 meter shot on Zakhaev in One Shot, One Kill (as a rookie, mind you) or the entirety of the Recon by Fire mission in MWII.

In summary, Rambo would win in CQC, and Price would win out in extended ranges. The blog just barely gives Rambo the edge here probably because he’s been in the game longer but Price’s own advantages in this case make me feel like they’d even out.

Arsenal / Technology

I really do not have to explain this one since Price already takes this in the original verdict. Price is a guy whose technology comes from several decades after Rambo’s time in Vietnam.

Any of Rambo’s attempts at stealth, which is his main gimmick mind you, would outright be nullified by a single UAV. Even if he attempted to cover himself in mud to protect his thermal signature, Heartbeat Sensors and Snapshot Grenades would still detect his presence. In the former’s case, while you might be able to argue that Rambo can slow down his heartbeat, there simply is no evidence of him being able to do it in the middle of a fight, and regardless of if he does, he’s only slowing down his heartbeat, not hiding it, which means there is still a heartbeat that can be detected to begin with. In all fairness, Rambo’s own enhanced senses would mean that Price’s own stealth tactics can be nullified, but perks like Cold Blooded, Ghost, Ninja, etc. would counter Rambo’s attempts to track down Price. Regardless, Price does not need stealth to fight Rambo and only needs to counter his, of which he’d have in spades with the sheer number of gear he has. Rambo has a large number of explosives, but so does Price, and with the additional versatility of Tactical Grenades like Flashbangs or Stun Grenades, he’d get overwhelmed. Even Rambo’s signature traps wouldn’t work on Price; Rambo needs time to set them up to begin with, which he would not have mid-fight, and Price would just be able to see them with Engineer. Similar characters like Alex Keller also have experience against traps not unlike Rambo’s in the Middle East, so it’s unlikely that Price would not be on the look out in neutral or disadvantageous environments.

With extra source materials, Rambo having a jetpack with mounted machine guns on it would cause some trouble for Price, but Price has his own mobility weapon in the form of the Scorcher which can literally launch him several stories into the air. I don’t really think the machine guns would be much of an issue for him either; literally all Price would have to do is take over and wait out Rambo’s barrage until he runs out of ammo or fuel; it’s not much different from fighting air support like VTOLs. But putting it nicely the amount of bonuses that Zombies would provide Price, whether it be Wonder Weapons, Pack-a-punch or Perk-a-colas, would totally overwhelm what Force of Freedom gives Rambo.

Scenarios / Win Conditions

Frankly arguing about how many different ways this fight would start out was probably the most stressful part about this entire debate. Death Battle rules stipulate that the winner is chosen out of who would win in the most scenarios, but I quickly realized after arguing with the others on this blog that figuring out how many of these there are is far too abstract and takes away from the debate overall.

Rambo would undoubtedly beat Price in a hand-to-hand fight. He’s shown himself to be able to rip and tear into people with ease with his weapons and has significantly more showings of martial arts knowledge. But CQC is Rambo’s best chance of winning, and Price is simply not going to allow that to happen. Price has not and would not push himself into going into a hand-to-hand fight and only resorts to it when he’s forced to, like when he gets snuck up on (again, not happening here) or in his fight with Shepherd in MW2 when both were disarmed and heavily injured.

I’ve stated before that I don’t really buy into any sort of Mach speeds for realistic verses (especially these two), however going by the numbers used in the blog, Price is much faster than Rambo and would by default win in a quick draw, which has been the standard fight scenario that has been presented in every argument with this matchup as I remember it. And in a long ranged fight, Price is not only equipped with multitudes of snipers, but he’s also very well trained in long range assassinations, and seeing as his aim is absurdly accurate at distances approaching a kilometer, Rambo would get picked off easily without much of a chance to react, especially if Price spots him on something like a UAV.

There’s a scenario presented in the original blog’s verdict which I take issue with and it’s Price starting off with a Juggernaut suit. The Juggernaut suit, which he uses at the end of Modern Warfare 3’s campaign to chase after Makarov, is not something he actively brings into combat at all times and was only used because he and Yuri had intel that the literal biggest terrorist on the planet with the funds for heavy military weaponry was in a highly guarded location with his goons protecting the site, and thus needed to assault the place without bringing an entire army. Otherwise, the assumption is made that Price would not think highly enough of Rambo firing an explosive arrow at him, which would result in Price getting one-shot as per their numbers. This is too tenuous of an argument and dare I say rigged against Price; not only are explosive tipped arrows a thing in Modern Warfare, but Rambo exclusively uses his against groups/armies and vehicles, both of which Price is not, unless Rambo is feeling particularly petty or vengeful against his enemy. There’s no reason to assume Price would treat a bow and arrow unlike any other weapon, and as such he could just… dodge it. Rambo prefers to hit his targets directly with his arrows rather than using the blast radius to stun, and I’ve already stated my belief that Price is faster with the numbers given. Arrows very much do not have a faster projectile velocity than bullets, so there’s no reason to assume that it’d be something that can be dealt with easily.

Verdict

Ultimately I believe that there are just way more scenarios where Price wins more often than not. Rambo’s main win condition is getting Price to engage with him in a hand-to-hand fight where he can either beat or cut him up brutally, but that just isn’t how this fight isn’t going to end up in most cases. Firepower is irrelevant as both men have enough weapons and explosives to one shot the other. Marksmanship might be relatively even between the both of them, but Price is faster which allows him to take superior advantage of his, especially at longer distances. Furthermore, being from several decades into the future is pretty damn helpful when his technology is leagues ahead of Rambo; he is a walking counter to Rambo’s stealth, which is his primary combat method. And if we’re talking extra media, Zombies gives way more versatility for Price at his disposal than Force of Freedom does for Rambo.

The Last Blood that will be drawn is Rambo’s. That’s the Price to pay for engaging in this fight.

The winner is Captain John Price.