Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Warfare * But Were Afraid to Ask Far Cry 2

Far Cry 2 is a very serious video game, maybe the most serious video game ever created. Its unflinching earnestness makes it, in my opinion, one of the most important games of recent years, if not all time. Far Cry 2 is everything big-ticket games are almost always too scared to be: it is hard, it is strict, it is a pain to actually play, it is uniformly bland in its approach to conflict and interpersonal relationships, it is - well, genuinely amazing.

Return to (Castle) Wolfenstein: The New Order

General Wilhelm "Deathshead" Strasse is a gnarly looking old man, with the kind of exaggeratedly evil voice, mannerisms and disfigured face one tends to associate with modern depictions of Nazis. He’s crouched down staring at me through the screen, flanked by two giant Über-Soldaten, each with one of my comrades, Wyatt and Fergus, wedged under their weighty knees. He’s goading me - or more accurately William Joseph "B.J." Blazkowicz, the bloke I’m in charge of - in that wholly merciless way Bad People From The National Socialist Party tend to do. And because he’s a thoroughly amoral kinda guy, you see, he’s up for dissecting one of them and he - here’s the kicker - wants me to choose who is to be the lucky recipient of his scientific attention. Do I pick Wyatt, the spunky rookie who only minutes before had saved me from certain death and whom I now "owe one"? Or will Fergus, the gruff and straightforward Scotsman who clearly has a history with B.J - though to what extent I’m unsure; I didn’t play two thousand and nine’s Wolfenstein - be the last man allowed to possibly, maybe, perhaps stand back up?

Game Dev Story is a bit mean to its staff, int it?

Wolfenstein 3D, Custer’s Revenge, Ethnic Cleansing , Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, that game where you shoot JFK: all are examples of aspects of the real world being looked at through the lens of video games. They’re all - to differing extents and in their own ways - difficult to laude as works of high (even low, in most cases) art or defend as rounded, fair or (maybe) even worthwhile endeavours. They are all button-pressers: games that wear their controversy-courting intentions proudly on their sleeves (sometimes just above an insignia-emblazoned armband). While the first two examples are merely sillily offensive, it’s that all five are grounded in very explicit real world contexts - as part or complete recreations of specific events and happenings - that imbues them their power to wilfully shock and/or disgust. Game Dev Story isn’t like any of these because it hasn’t a divisive bone in its body. It does, however, centre itself on a very real world industry, and by doing so is actually quite mean in the process, if, of course, you’re inclined to look at it that way (which I am, just so you know).

Darksiders II isn’t sure whether the Internet exists or not. Sorry, it does.

In an entirely unintentional turn of events, I have an addendum to my previous piece about Darksiders II being too long for its own good. I of course appreciate any and all irony surrounding this occurrence, even if the below is not explicitly a continuation of that subject.

There is a ‘wholly optional’ dungeon within DS II called the Soul Arbiter’s Maze, which is essentially a wave-based survival mode wherein the player is tasked with besting an increasingly deadly collection of the game’s foes. What is interesting about the area, like much of the game’s core design, is its juxtaposition of videogame ideas old and new.

(Over) analysing The Bureau: XCOM Declassified’s chest-high walls (to within an inch of their lives)

I’ve done a close reading of the chest-high walls in The Bureau: XCOM Declassified and I’m happy to report that I think they could be a meditation on the tangible benefits of improved graphics. Furthermore, I reckon their implementation also questions if our lust to achieve increased verisimilitude between real and digital worlds is misguided.

In some of the Metal Gear games the player can take part in extracurricular virtual reality simulations. These largely take on the form of challenges, where the player is to focus entirely on their grasp of and prowess with game mechanics, unhindered by the troubles of setting, story, and the like. These VR excursions, in the guise of computerised training programmes, strip away all of these ‘distractions’ and stick the player-character in a glowing, geometric world made of cubes. In doing so, it could be said that the games are making a statement about where the real importance - the heart, if you were - of videogames truly lies. That while videogames are forced to inhabit the trappings of cinema, theatre and literature to attain wider cultural acceptance, the actual hallmark of the medium is, has and always will be the simple pleasures of the player moving things on a screen, and not some highfaluting screen moving the player. Pah.