Blog Archives
Blood Dragon! The Eighties! High Five!
I covered Far Cry 3 at the tail-end of last year, though you could be forgiven for not remembering, tucked away as it was in that year’s leftovers article. There was a lot to say about how that game managed to house nigh-perfect open world gameplay and then mar it with vaguely racist plot-points that would have felt more at home in a boy’s imperialist adventure story from a hundred and fifty years ago. And talk everyone did, which is why I didn’t really bother engaging in the discussion except to affirm that, yeah, it kind of felt racist.
So I’ll also be brief with Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, a sort of do-over that fixes its race relations by omitting them. Does that fix the game? Find out below.
I Am Alive. Am I Satisfied?
The unnamed survivor, about to be surprised by the game title.
You might recognize I Am Alive as that game that came out on consoles and was withheld on PC and when PC gamers complained the developer accused them of “bitching” and then suddenly it was announced that it would be released on PC and then even more suddenly it was out a week before its release date. Or you might not. Either way, what a wild, wild ride. But does the game itself live up to its insane and wonderful origin story? Find out below.
Aition Agitation: Babel Rising
God smites some Shinarites.
Marketing people! Listen closely, because I’m going to tell you the secret of how to make me powerless against your advertising schemes! Here’s what you do: take your game—any game, really—and slap a glossy religious theme on top of your broken mechanics, tedious gameplay, and repetitive design, and I will lap it up in hopes that you’ve just created one of the few videogames ever to present an interesting take on religion.
On an unrelated note, Ubisoft and Mondo Production recently released Babel Rising on PC. What did I think of it? Find out, after the jump.
Celebrating the 4th with Future Soldier
A pack of patriotic pros.
Here in the States it’s Independence Day, in which we celebrate Benjamin Franklin burning down the White House with electricity, a distraction that allowed George Washington to conquer Yorktown while Betsy Ross falcon-punched Benedict Arnold, making the thirteen colonies free from taxes and stuffiness. The details are a bit fuzzy because nobody really kept notes back then, so we may never know the full story.
Four hundred years later, Americans are still up to some awesome stuff in Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, which, like the story of our glorious nation’s founding, is all about four guys beating the stuffing out of foreigners while wearing snappy uniforms.
SPACE-BIFF! 