MadCap's Game Reviews - "Best and Worst of 2013"

Wow, what a year we have had!  

2013. A year that has seen your favorite Munchkin journey into the field of film reviews, as well as play many, many games that have been the height of excellence or the cream of the crap.  And everywhere in between.  And on this, this glorious New Year’s Eve 2013, I look back on the reviews I’ve done and how far we’ve all come this year.  Because I haven’t done quite enough to do a list for film reviews, I’ve decided to break down what would have been a Top 10 List into simply the best and the worst.  That being said, let’s go ahead and get the good part of this out of the way…

Best Game of 2013 - Far Cry 3

Back in August, I reviewed a game that had already been out for a few months beforehand.  Drawn to it by friends sending me to the Let’s Plays of TrendKill, I got the game and went on a journey as a (in my own words) “third-place winner of a Zach Braff look-alike contest” by the name of Jason Brody found himself on Rook Island following being kidnapped by the affably evil Vaas and his merry band of equally psychotic pirates.  Despite the flamboyant nature of Vaas being entertaining, I had believed I had merely picked up another dime-a-dozen shooter.  “Skyrim With Guns”, as Machinima had called it (and, by the way, it isn’t).

But what it was, however, was a rather chilling and insightful trip by a person who is literally pushed to the limits of mind and body simply to survive...and then more.  In a rather seamless and very believable way, we see Jason Brody slip from a young man who goes into a panic when he murders in self defense to gleefully gunning down the men under the command of Vaas and Hoyt.  The game doesn’t question the morality in any overt way, there’s not a morality system or anything of that nature that many other games might have.  It is simply a descent into madness, very beautifully brought up in certain text screens displaying text from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland more and more throughout the course of the main plot.

Rook Island itself feels alive, and several NPCs speak about how those who come to the island are forever changed.  In Jason Brody’s case, it is not for the better in either case.  I praised the game on pretty much every point, especially its storyline. In fitting in with the themes of madness and change, there really is no good ending like in a lot of games.  There are no alternate paths to take to get a different one, no way to escape the two endings.  Either Jason descends completely into what he has become; or he leaves to return to the life he once knew and is forever changed, perhaps even unable to reconcile what he was with what he has become.  Either way is sad, and there really is no good answer or happy ending for him.  And it’s done well enough that I wasn’t at all mad, like I might be with some less well-crafted game.  Thus, the best game of the year 2013 is Far Cry 3.

Runner Up:  Pokemon False Red

Technically a ROM hack rather than a game, but False Red gets an honorable mention, having been my Halloween special for this year and being my second favorite game that I’ve reviewed this year.  Unlike creepypastas like Creepy Black or Lost Silver, False Red goes for the horror of making us realize that we, the player, might be the biggest antagonist of a video game at all in stealing the story from the player character.  This sort of thing is most appropriate, really, in the Pokemon series.  I’ve enjoyed other entries of the series, and I’m currently playing Pokemon X for those curious, but for me the classic three games of Red, Blue, and Yellow remain as the definitive symbols in my mind.  The fact is that people complain about the lack of innovation in the games with mechanics, but the storylines also have been the same when you boil them down to their bare basics.  What if that is just stealing the story from Red, doing the same things and achieving the same things again and again and again?

This misses the number one slot, however, by the ending being somewhat disappointing.  I was expecting, considering the climate and the attitude that Red had perished, that a final climatic battle with Red on Mount Silver was in order. Instead, we defeat the rival only to have him and Professor Oak pull a “taking my ball and going home” and erase the player’s save. In a way, this makes sense being that the lines between whether NPCs were aware or not of the changes had started blurring before you’d even left your house, but it still feels like there could have been more and a final battle against Red would have made it beyond perfect.

Worst Game of 2013 - Aliens:  Colonial Marines

I have already said all I can say on this.  This game is offensive, it is wrong, and it has absolutely no right to exist.  In a fair and just world, Randy Pitchford would be imprisoned for this absolute abomination of a game.  Gearbox Studios stole funds from SEGA to finance their “true” pet project (the first two Borderlands games), spent several minutes lying to everyone who was excited for this game and presented us with a steaming pile of references to a very, very good movie that deserved far, far better than this.  And, yes, by the way, FOX has declared that this is the canonical sequel to James Cameron’s Aliens.  Of course, these were the same people who were stupid enough to cancel Firefly, so I wouldn’t pay too much heed to what they say.

I could go into the literally dozens of plot holes that this game has in relation to not only Aliens but Alien 3, but I won’t.  I could go into how they managed to present a trailer that made the game look amazing and then gave us a thing that was so stripped down that it looked like a game from about ten years ago (and played even worse) and expected us to be impressed, but I won’t.  I could go into how Randy Pitchford and the entire team at Gearbox should never be allowed to work in video games ever again, but I won’t. But I will say that this is the worst game I’ve ever played.  Not just of 2013, but ever.  So far, this is the worst.

And I want you to think about that, I’ve played Vampire Rain, just to put that into context for you. That was horrific and unplayable, but you want to know why I rate it higher? If only just higher than this game? BECAUSE IT ISN’T TRYING TO BE ANYTHING ELSE!  There was no pretense about it, there was no set up that it was going to be a truly great movie-based game.  It was a pile of streaming shit and didn’t try to hide that fact.  Colonial Marines, and by extension the people who made it, represent the worst type of charlatans.  It will not change my opinion of Randy Pitchford, but I would like to point out that even Joel Schumacher apologized for Batman & Robin, and it’s the least he could do for this.

Or, to summarize my thoughts on the entire thing, I would like to amend my final sentence in my Colonial Marines review:

“You completely suck, Aliens:  Colonial Marines...completely…”

Runner Up: Nothing

After that rant, are you surprised?!

And now, my friends, I leave you as we go now to ring in the New Year.  What were your best and worst of 2013? Tell me in the comments!  Happy New Year, everybody!

MadCap's Game Reviews - "Far Cry 3"

There are some gaming experiences that you enjoy simply because of the story.  I’ve done several myself.  Sometimes I’ve been rewarded for my efforts, and sometimes there have been games that have been disappointing after having promised me the moon.  And now that I’m back to at least semi-regularly reviewing games that people actually give a crap about, I took a look at a release from last year that I missed, and sadly so.  Far Cry 3.  And where did it land on the scale of one to THIS GAME SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKS?!

Well, let’s take that little journey together, shall we?

I took on the role of Jason Brody, the third-place winner of a Zach Braff look-alike contest, who is vacationing with his friends in the Pacific when he ends up getting captured by a comically overblown and possibly racist pirate and his band of pirates who plan to sell him and all his friends into slavery.  However, timid Jason breaks out with the help of one of his friends (who gets a bullet to the neck for his trouble) and runs off into the jungles of the Rook Islands to avoid dying…

After reenacting the climactic bridge scene from Temple of Doom, Jason wakes up in a village where a (possibly) magic tattoo has been scrawled onto his arm that marks him as a warrior.  Thus begins an epic tale of revenge, flipping switches, several drug-induced hallucinations, and lots and lots of bodies scattered all around the island.

The best part is that I’m really not kidding, that could basically have been the blurb on the box art for as accurate as it is.  Jason journeys across the island learning how to make medicines from the herbs (the Richard and Tommy method of healing) and to skin the animals of the island in order to make holsters, packs, and ammo pouches of all sorts.  And by skin animals, I really do mean skin all of them.  Almost every animal you run into in the game has a skin to serve one of the aforementioned purposes, the highest tiers of which require taking special missions to hunt specific creatures and skin their pelts…which is easier said than done in many cases.

Not even getting into dealing with sharks, which have frightened me from a young age.

The game is open world, though the second island isn’t open until about halfway through the campaign.  However, there is more than enough space and enough on the first island to keep you occupied for quite a while.  The hunting of creatures for pelts alone can literally take up hours of time.  Plot-wise, a main objective is to clear out enemy outposts across the island to secure more territory from the pirates and re-activate radio towers in order for merchants to bring in new equipment.

"Do you have a moment to talk about our Lord, Jesus Christ?"

A neat bit about the merchants is that while the game does have a commerce system (a barter system accompanied by whatever loose change you find in the pockets of people you kill) you’re not actually required to purchase any other weapons but the starting gun.  Activating radio towers unlocks certain weapons for free, so after a handful of them you’ll have enough guns that you can access to blow a small crater into the moon. The game very much allows you to be self-sufficient in this regard, just a quick trip through a nearby glade getting you enough leaves to fill your medicine cabinet and thus making the only real need for money being ammo.

The game encourages stealth combat to a strong degree, largely in the second half of the game.  During the first half, taking out enemy outposts is rather easy.  A few well-placed shots, they’re all dead, no fuss no muss.  But as time progresses, new factors are added that make a direct assault possible but rather impractical.  Bases get alarms that bring wave after wave of reinforcements along, enemies get better weapons and stronger defenses, and so on.  So there is a strong emphasis on sneaking around and taking out enemies from the shadows whenever possible.  Unless you just have a death wish…particularly, again, on the second island where enemies tend to be more resilient than not to weapon fire and you have to look for weak points.

This focus on stealth is particularly irritating when you have escort missions, as you do have a couple of them throughout the game and they are really exactly what you’ve come to expect out of escort missions – very, very irritating.  The death of the piece of meat you’re guarding means, of course, that you have to start the section all over again.  And it is very, very frustrating when you complete your mission objectives and then have your escort taken out by a single bullet fired from a man you couldn’t see before.

That all being said, I won’t say that the game is unfair by any stretch.  If you’re observant of your surroundings and manage to have just enough manual dexterity to act, you’ll come out alright…nine times out of ten, anyway. 

The storyline itself is very interesting, certain text screens quoting bits from Alice in Wonderland as we see Jason’s descent into becoming what Rook Island will make of him.  And I have to admit, seeing that descent is rather chilling as he goes from being offended at the very thought of killing in cut scenes to doing it off-handedly and not giving it the least bit of thought.  

It’s a little harder to swallow all of the carnage in the very beginning, naturally, due to his attitude.  But once the narrative picks up, we start to see him slipping as he realizes what he has to do and then starts doing it.  Very well, in fact.  Enough so for the local native tribe to want him to stay and be one of their warriors, their priestess in particular wanting Jason to stick around after killing the two main Big Bads so she can have his uber-warrior children (more on that later).

That being said, both of the boss fights against the Big Bads, Vaas and Hoyt, are pretty underwhelming for what I was expecting.  Hoyt in particular, though considering the one with Vaas is a massive drug trip if I weren’t told that I’d actually killed Vaas I would have never known.  Also, for as much as knives are considered a sacred weapon by the Rakyat – in fact, certain people can only be killed by knives in certain side missions – you only get into two knife fights over the course of the story.  These boil down to quick time events that you have to memorize and that really just are irritating when they’re brought up right out of nowhere.

Even in the aforementioned side missions, you don’t fight with your knife anywhere else in the game, so it is rather jarring to only have the two sections of it right out of nowhere.

Beyond all that, you get a flightsuit/parachute combo during the second half of the game from a C.I.A. agent, so I really can’t complain too much (though hey, Ubisoft, couldn’t you have gone the extra mile and gotten me a jetpack?) as far as that goes.

What I could complain about but won’t is the endings.  Spoiler alert:  There is no good ending.  I’d normally complain, but it’s actually really nice to see an inversion like this in gaming what with so many games doing alternate endings or special ones you only get for achieving certain objectives or getting certain items.  Cut and dried, playing through the entire game, you only get two and it gets based from a literally last minute decision.

Vaas really steals the show...until he's killed off halfway through...

In the end, Jason can decide to join up with the Rakyat, kill off his friends and have some crazy hot sex with the priestess leader of the tribe…who promptly stabs him in the chest after conceiving (it’s implied, anyway, your guess is as good as mine as to how in the hell she knows that) and promises that he will die the warrior he has become.

Or, as his second option, he frees his friends and elects to leave.  The priestess tries to stop him and is immediately killed by one of her followers who tries to attack Jason for being a traitor.  Then Jason and his friends leave, and he lives out the rest of his days as the monster he has become.  Not to mention what is probably the complete demolishment of the Rakyat tribe and very possibly the beginning of the end for their civilization.

So, yeah, it’s the Kobayashi Maru.

  

There is no right answer.

But y’know what? That works.  That’s actually a really welcome change for me.  Again, this isn’t something I’ve seen that often, maybe I just need to diversify what I play, but…really, for a game to take a bold step like this and really just give no light at the end of the tunnel is pretty astounding.  Of course, it fits the overall feel as well.  The jungle is not a nice, inviting place.  It is foreign, it is hostile, and it will consume you given the chance.

Just as it does to Jason Brody, one way or another.

So as for a recommendation…yeah, I say go for it.  It’s pretty good beyond a few minor irritants here and there.

Far Cry 3 is available for Microsoft Windows, Playstation 3, and Xbox 360 from Ubisoft and Ubisoft Montreal.