Archive for December 3rd, 2012
Far Cry 2 was one of those rare games with unique vision. It dropped you into a shattered African country controlled by warlords. Everyone with any sense had fled. Even the beasts had fled. The new beasts were the other men with guns. It was frequently quiet and vast in the same way that ruined buildings are quiet and vast. You were racked with malaria. Your guns were often broken. You were miles from where you needed to be. Your rides were rattling dusty jeeps that ran on regular gasoline and needed a tune-up. Your friends weren’t even your friends in the end. It was a broken world of fire, misfires, disease, distance, loneliness, and betrayal. Even the ending sucked.
Understandably, some people wanted a straight-up player-friendly game designed to deliver maximum thrills per minute. They fled Far Cry 2 in droves to enjoy their Saints Rows and Calls of Duty.
After the jump, Ubisoft makes Far Cry 3 for them Continue reading →
When you start watching The Two Towers, you get a little reminder of important stuff that happened earlier, like the wizard who fell off the bridge fighting the flaming minotaur. It’s an integral part of the Lord of the Rings, because the mistakes made earlier in the story lead to the choices available to the protagonists at the start of the second book.
When you start reading any book about Stalingrad, you get a little reminder of important stuff that happened earlier, like Operation Barbarossa. It’s an integral part of the Stalingrad story, because the mistakes of the previous year’s campaign led to the choices available to the Germans at the beginning of the second summer in Russia.
Explanations are good, because things seem weird and arbitrary if you don’t know why they happened, whether it is two midgets taking a two-thousand-league trek into the heartland of a genocidal warlord, or a genocidal warlord fighting a campaign two thousand leagues into the middle of nowhere. On the other hand, sometimes things just seem weird and arbitrary.
After the jump, David Glantz vs. J.R.R. Tolkien Continue reading →
Borderlands 2 is way better written than it needs to be. It’s one of the last places I expected to find some of this year’s best videogame writing. Anthony Burch (pictured, figure it out) deserves much of the credit.
So what stuff did he write that didn’t make it into the game? In one of those Reddit “Ask Me Anything” verbal moshpits, Burch, who claims to have never been stoned or drunk in his life, explains that you missed out on a Scottish granny with a machinegun and Ellie with the body of Brick and the legs of Moxie. And then there’s this bit:
There is one thing that got cut from BL2 that I really really miss. After a certain character dies, you get a quest to go tell all of that character’s friends that the person is dead. Originally, you were going to go tell Tiny Tina and she — for the first and only time in the game — would lose her insane manic tone and actually get really solemn. She’d thank you for telling her and ask you to leave, before disappearing into her workshop. And then, if you moved really close to the workshop, you could hear her quietly sobbing.
One of the marks of a good writer is that he cares about his characters enough to make them actual people instead of just joke delivery systems.
Okay, so you probably know this as the week Far Cry 3 comes out. Which it is. And while Far Cry 3 is a perfectly fine open world game, I wouldn’t call it a substantial wallet threat. Instead, my wallet is in danger from the prospect of a Defense of the Ancients clone by Monolith featuring characters from Lord of the Rings. Balrog, I chose you! Guardian of Middle Earth will only be available on console systems, so Awesomenauts has some competition.
Also, the Dragonbone expansion is out for Skyrim. Just imagine Max von Sydow intoning, “Dragonbone!” Sold.
I’m about to have an awesome gunfight. I’m in a jeep, racing up to some bad guys on my right. I pass them and yank the wheel to the right so the car slides at such an angle that it will be between me and the bad guys when I get out, providing convenient cover from their gunfire. To add a little extra slide, which will look totally sweet, I hit the powerbrake. Well, what would have been the powerbrake in Need for Speed: Most Wanted. It’s not easy to shake twenty hours of recent muscle memory.
The powerbrake in Most Wanted is the X button. In Far Cry 3, it’s the B button. In Far Cry 3, the X button is what you press to get out of the car. So I basically throw myself out the right side of a car that is quickly and violently scudding to the right. What was supposed to be a sweet powerslide ending in a heavily armed man leaping out and firing as a big-ass machinegun is instead a guy tumbling out of a car that skids over him to death.
It is not the only time I will do this.
Overall, we’re pretty disappointed in Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly. But as far as disappointing movies go, you could do a lot worse. This week’s 3×3, which starts at the 46-minute mark, is old ladies. That’s right, old ladies.
Next week: Hump Day and Your Sister’s Sister
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