I like to laugh because life is a dynamic experience and it can’t rain all the time. Nor can a man or woman or transgender individual laugh constantly either, because you would edge closer and closer to insanity in the eyes of everyone around you, especially if you were, IDK, at the vet putting the family dog to sleep forever. While I favour giggling over glowering, there are times and places whence a lad such as I need court the grim of drawing breath (please forgive me, I’m reading A Song of Ice and Fire right now and I can’t stop talking like a halberd).

Most films, anime, and books I like are really serious and brutal, or really serious and foreign, or really serious and arthouse, and you get the picture: They’re really serious. I went to see the third Hangover movie last night and only laughed when I myself did a squeaky fart and the row of perfumed media professionals behind me chittered excitedly trying to work out if it had been what they knew in their hearts that it was. Subsequently, most games I like are also really serious.

It’s one of the reasons I enjoy shooters so much. There’s a po-faced sincerity to them that I can really grind on even though sometimes it’s so po-faced it is actually funny. That’s kind of the point: Humour in the face of incredible adversity – oft accidental or incidental – is a VIP. It is the only kind of laughter I will allow into the gamecave during kill time. The Duke Nukems have to wait outside, they’re trying too hard. Please bear witness to this personal highlight:

Now whether that is amusing or not is fairly subjective, I suppose, but it is the candid way in which Jensen articulates the way this woman’s beloved daughter has perished that has made me laugh for one, maybe two weeks. I wake up laughing about it. I know right, you don’t want this life. It is so insensitive and inappropriate it’s glorious.

It might well be the exact kind of thing that happens in that exact situation, were a weary detective answering the queries of a forlorn mother in reality. I absolutely would not laugh at that. No way in hell. I wouldn’t even feel the impulse. That’s horrible, I’m not a 100% monster unless you fail to deliver unto me the Seven Kingdoms that are rightfully mine, dear sister, and wake the drago-

But I’ve realised that these instances in my serious gaming time have shone somewhat of a light over just how ridiculous it can be to be alive. Free from the actuality of bad things going down, there is mirth there that would never be uncovered otherwise. The tragic comedies of Shakesy wished they had have been video games, for their hopeless mission is one now accomplished – tripped over, even – by video games every hour on the hour.

Were it that some might accuse me of cresting a fine lens too close to the sun that lights to entertain and little else, I would opine they have taught me something about myself and the art of coping.

Have you ever taken a particular interest in a game that is, at base, really not that good and in fact pretty awful? I know some of you have, you Alpha Protocol-loving goons (AMBLE TOWARDS MY PERSON, BROTHERS). The reasons for this are strange but powerful, like whatever passes for Tyrion’s sex appeal. Something beyond the dodgy mechanics and screaming imperfection calls to your gamer’s soul, or maybe even beyond that too. There is a unique setting at play, or characters that speak louder than what follows before and after them, or a particular sheen of fantasy rarely – if ever – explored by the “brown” and “military” status quo.

All three of those things apply to one of my most enduring and troubled romances in vidya. You see, I love Clive Barker’s Jericho.

It is a titanic cleft of anus where many crumbs gather, and I love it. It treats me like the ass it is, and still I love it. I would do anything for it, even buy it for $12. This Jericho thing is overwrought to the point of already broken. If you’ve never played it, well, it’s a squad-based FPS and it has no idea what it’s doing. Your squaddies — of which there are six at the start of things, six! — are all dumb as hell and their favourite thing is getting killed by all the unusually tough black slime otakus around every bend and fork.

Your favourite thing, by extension, is to forget about trying to save their dumb lives with orders so limited – and spread across two sub-teams, no less – they could never manage this much bad AI in the first place. Basically, it’s Clive Barker’s Mystical Medic Simulator. Eventually you’re the only one left standing, ala a very early and ridiculously difficult scenario involving possessed pillboxes and, again, no idea. Then you have to do something. Die, most like.

I’m not really sure how much Clive Barker himself had to do with its construction, but it’s a severely meta apparition of my enjoyment of his authorial work too. Man, this guy is overwrought, just like this game. At times his writing is so flowery and flawed it really is almost unbearable. But I’ve read Cabal (or Nightbreed in movie form) about ten times. Why? Wasn’t sure, just loved it, but have an idea: What a great place it has created. Jericho creates a great place, explored by great characters of which you are an intrinsic part: a motley crew of supernatural X-Men who live clandestine and lethal lives, each with their own hang-ups and attitudes.

Sometimes I just wanna stand there looking at ‘em, poking at ‘em until they say something like, “Stop poking at me or I’ll fillet your pancreas.” Heaven. Church is my kinda lady.

Sticking with a game that’s bad is different to sticking with a movie or book. It has to really be doing something right not just to keep you there, but keep you wanting to be there. A bad game is actively annoying to the point of real frustration; you can’t sail through the pillbox bit like you would a cheesewheel moment of dialogue. In fact it took me hours and I’m still not sure how I beat it. Luck, maybe. That is atrocious game design – but weirdly, would it be maybe less tantalising if it wasn’t awful? I’m still hanging out in this abusive relationship. Guilty pleasures feel good.

For a long time I thought tall poppy syndrome was a uniquely Australian construct, or that we at least suffered from it to a far greater degree than other nation or culture. We are, after all, the only human cattle on earth raised from penal colony stock: if one prisoner were to escape, the rest would be beaten. So the fear of those looking to liberate themselves, shall we say, from the safe average might be hardwired into our ‘Straya.

Nowadays we aren’t getting around the yard in balls and chains, so it translates to: Rampant success = You’ll keep, mate. Maybe we’re more globally influential than we thought. Shame it’s not in terms of Vegemite or servo stick-ups with bananas.

A panicked editor from a reputable gaming publication came to me yesterday and said, “Toby. You like Call of Duty, right? I need someone to write an article on Black Ops II.” At this I could only fondly reminisce over a billion hours spent toasting nooblets on Black Ops, after which I cut my CoD cord and haven’t reattached it since. I was just over it and felt, “Self, if you wanna pen missives complaining about the unenviable status quo as purveyed by this clone machine business model, you can’t be a part of it.”

So I stopped literally putting my money where my convictions were. I have no idea what CoD is doing right now, and I don’t care. Neither did this editor. Neither did the multitude of staff members he’d asked to write this thing before he turned to more mercenary options like myself. Who is actually playing Call of Duty?

Evidently, lots and lots of people. I’d reference some statistic about how much this thing still sells but the zeroes stretch off very far into the horizon and it hurts your eyes to look at it. Lots and lots of people, but seemingly very few within the industry (and its close followers) itself, where it draws incredible ire for continuing to exist and, I guess, prosper, against the hopes and dreams of these men and women.

It has become somewhat the Nickelback of video games, sometimes hated for reasons as baseless as every game of Domination I have ever played. Frequently it’s derided because it’s there, because it’s always there, and because it keeps guaranteeing it’ll be there again soon regardless of what it actually is. It’s at the point where it doesn’t even have to try anymore. I remember looking at the back of a box for Black Ops II and it just had about three images with three dot-point exclamations, only one of which came from a publication: “A Must Have!” Then, attributed to nobody at all, “The Best-Selling Xbox 360 Franchise of All-Time Returns!” and “The Biggest Game of 2012!”

It’s created an interesting and cyclical schism: Those who must write about it might abhor it but must do so because a large percentage of those who read what they write are assumed to love it. If a game is so incredibly popular on paper but has a notable dearth of actual correspondents the least bit interested in investigating it, it is now Nickelback. Or Justin Bieber.

CoD is pop music, I realised. It will keep selling records because it’s more or less social currency on the playground by now and it doesn’t matter what gets said, by itself or other selves. If it was an artist on Twitter it’d have millions of fans illiterately defending its honour, and would exclaim upon a visit to the house of Anne Frank, “Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have played Call of Duty.”

“Maybe,” I hoped after the editor had left, punching walls, “We can just follow CoD around now and write about all the things it does and says in its public and private life and this will suffice as coverage.” It really only had one song anyway. Plenty of people still digging this one song; enough so that it could just put its face on a lunchbox? Cheque please.

I’m fascinated by the moral quandaries as often posed by games now. More specifically, the bad choice. I always bet on black. Always.

I love to cringe, but it’s more about: How far is this game gonna let me go? Really? It’s a game, surely it won’t be that far. Nasty surprises all. So far I’ve managed to put myself in some stupidly uncomfortable places. I worked negligently hard to get Heavy Rain’s worst ending. It was worth it. That has got to be the most depressing and confronting finale of your own devising I’ve ever seen go down in gameland.

I don’t want to spoil it but Ethan, y’know, he doesn’t find that kid. No one does. And Ethan, he can’t live with that.

What I find surprising is that most if not every single gamefriend I’ve talked to about this never bets on black. Ever. They want to be heroes when they could be heroes, declaring “The end justifies the means,” in a Clint Eastwood rasp as I do. Because why wouldn’t you? Where else can you purge the terrible reality of living that collects in your soul over time, safely and in the comfort of a mad bag of Dorries, maybe a delicious bubbling beverage that looks like fizzy piss?

Only vidya, mate. This is my philosophy: I’m basically the Joker. In reality, I’m just happy to cop his fashion sense (and, post-spritzer, his mannerisms). Online, let us burn everything.

But I’m a pretender to the charred bone-throne. I reveal myself as a fundamentally harmless sloth creature by the fact I never go out of my way to do the wrong thing in games. I never create it. It’s always a click of the choice’s doomcore button. Commander Toberd, do you wish to annihilate this entire race of pe- YES I DO LOL. In a recent conversation with a fellow gamebeast, I posited the question, as I love to: “Brah-dog, what is the worst thing you’ve ever done in a game?”

Now he stroked his chin-scruff and, interestingly, answered in terms of himself when let roam free, not via the oft black/white decision-making most of us default to considering. He went:

“Grand Theft Auto IV. Yeah. I was playing that. I picked up a hooker, like always. Took her for a ride, know what I’m sayin’? Hey, hey? Yeah you do, you’re Toby. I just wanted to talk that day, though. I wanted to talk, and then drive that car off a bridge into the sea, with her still in the passenger seat, wondering what the hell was happening, wondering about the child back home at the projects she was working so hard to support, and now she’d picked up this madman, just another john, so she thought, right an-“

And we stop there. I turned away then, thoroughly disgusted. “You’re a monster,” I cried, and ran… back to my chair, where I sit just across from him. “I just wanted to see if I could do it,” he said.

That day I realised: I am actually quite boring, and will probably one day have a white picket fence and an illegitimate son that I call “champ”.

Sometimes when you do anything a lot you can start to get jaded and everything seemingly sucks. Say, writing about games. How’s that for a first world problem? “I play games and earn money for it. This is awful.” It’s like anything, though. If you ate bacon all day every day you would hate bacon. OK that is a fallacy but maybe you know what I’m getting at: Sometimes, I need some random awesome game to come along and remind me why I really, really love games.

Lately that’s been Dragon’s Dogma. Can’t remember the last time a game kept me up ‘til 5am. How bad is that cold grey light of early morning that whispers, “Loser!” on the wind?

Now, Dragon’s Dogma is an RPG. Shooters and RPGs are my neck-and-neck love interest as far as vidya is concerned. Now I don’t smoke weed like all you guys, but I do like to combine strange ingredients and see what I come up with at odd hours. I got to thinking, “I would like more guns in my RPGs, I would.” I’m actually not much for fantasy settings, really. I usually just put up with them because they seem to be the go-to, and that’s fine. But every time I’m having at a troublesome goblin with my enchanted potato hammer, my triggerlegs are itching.

So obviously, there is Borderlands. S’okay I guess. Then there is Fallout 1, 2, 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. First cabs (up on blocks) off the rank in my mind. I have loved these games very hard already, multiple times, from multiple angles. Same goes for Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I have unhealthily loved that game, multiple times, suspended from the ceiling and in the throes of Japanese rope bonda… anyhooha, mayhap we need turn to the orient for guidance in this grave matter of guns and grinding. These examples aren’t straddling as much RPG as I want straddled. Then I chanced upon Resonance of Fate in a store the other day.

It is JRPG that’s all about the guns. It’s so into guns that if you attempted to remove guns from its hardcore JRPG equation (and it is hard, it’s a bastard, it’s loving me hard instead, from multiple angles and with whi- err), you wouldn’t have Resonance of Fate. You’d just have cool leather and J-pop homoeroticism. Likewise my beloved Valkyria Chronicles. How could I forget you, boobums? An SRPG, sure, but same thing to me.

Every time Largo misses with his rocket-stick during the infamous Chapter 7 battle is a dagger to my heart. We are definitely aiming, or trying to. Excellent. Then the flashbacks start and I remember Front Mission 3. My Wanzer was pink and always died. Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines! Parasite Eve! The Wild Arms series, surely. Shadowrun if I’m feeling gamey in front of the emulator one day.

And the moral of this cool story (bro) is that if you pointedly do not get stoned and then set about playing mental Tetris with all your ill-fitting secular desires, you will tear open a rift to gaming heaven in your too-much-free-time continuum.

Editor’s Note: I promise this is the last time I’ll let Toby write about JRPGs on the site.

If FPS games have taught me anything, it’s that you always shoot first, shoot some more, and then keep shooting until everyone and everything has been shot. We expect that from games like this. We have for years and years now. Occasionally there will be the option to not shoot; to approach your target(s) in a more considered or subtle way. It’s always a clear and present line between force and subterfuge, maybe diplomacy too.

The choice is yours, so make it quickly before someone notices you and we default to shooting first, shooting some more and continually shooting until everyone and everything has been shot.

I was shocked to realise that this isn’t the way the world actually works during wartime. Sure it makes practical sense. You can’t just have soldiers going off full-cocked, and cocking hammers and… I’m just trying to use the word “cock” as much as I can right now. Be it the impressions left by too many hours spent blowing up digital worlds and people or latent sociopathy, that was previously my conclusion: When in conflict, kill everything.

Not so. There are rules. Rules of engagement. ROE.

Today I read a curious story about a man in Vietnam. This is during the Vietnam War circa ‘71, and this US soldier is piloting his scout plane around and he sees some Commie bastids down there. Obviously he wants to shoot them up, but the ROE forbid him from doing that unless they open fire first. He does everything to bait them into it, and by “everything” I mean he keeps buzzing them at lower and lower altitudes (eventually he even puts his landing gear down) in the hopes they’ll get annoyed and swat at him with bullets. They don’t. They’re aware of the sanctions the US is operating under, crazy as they seemingly are. They show him their asses instead.

Now there’s an idea. Not the asses bit, the other bit.

I imagine a game where you are already in the throes of some uncertain conflict. Things are tense in medias res. When you spot the enemy coming up over the horizon in their ones, twos, threes, you are not able to fire. ROE. You try. You hammer a key or click the mouse to hose down the area with self-preservation but your guy quips something like, “I’ll be court-martialled. Ain’t going back to my wife” or “I’m not a monster… yet ho ho.”

No, you have to wait for the other side to open fire on you, like our friend in his plane. To do that, they have to see you or at least suspect that you’re there, crouched or prone in the bushes. When and with what kind of fury they decide to pull their own self-preservation triggers is your worst guest. Maybe they, like those bum-bearing Viet Cong, are aware of the rules you play by. Maybe they mock you, their faceygons twisting into smirks. They saunter by on their way to lunch in the belief you can’t do anything.

What about: once this initial meeting has played out in this fashion, now your grunt clicks the safety off his guns and you’re good to go if you want. No one will ever find out about your M60 accidentally discharging 10,000 rounds into the backs of these Regulars – or will they? Who’s the authority here? Who lets moral high command know you’ve broken the rules of warfare in this theatre, and what are the gameplay sanctions for doing so and being caught?

Maybe it’s your superior officer’s (“Sarge”) duty to write you up when you get back to base. Maybe he somehow doesn’t survive this rumble in the jungle. Errant 7.62x51mm, sir. Friendly fire’s a helluva drug.

For more thoughts on combat in games, why not check out this piece from yesterday?

Pictures from Air & Space Magazine.

Dear Kim,

Even though this completely legitimate open letter has most likely been penned from the perspective of an American person, I must thank you. I must thank you for readying your weapons of mass nuclear destruction for pointage at my home. Let me explain, and tell you a little bit about myself in the process. I’m middle-aged and pale and probably male, and I have a great job. It’s a great job but also a frustrating one at times. I help make video games.

Do you know this thing, video games? I understand you guys have yet to find a reliable dial-up provider over there so please excuse any offense I may have just caused. I don’t mean to be patronising, but I like to be thorough. It’s part of my job in video games. I write stories for them. A very specific type of them, called “shooters” or, if I am at a dinner party which is never, “first-person shooters.” I feel you would enjoy this genre of video game greatly.

Except for maybe Homefront.

Thing is, Kim, I’ve been writing stories for shooting games for a long time. We all have. Just between you and me – and I know you kind of have no choice but to keep this confidential, I guess, I read recently the rollerblade craze is just starting to ignite the streets of Pyongyang – I’ve run out of ideas. You know, I have to write these games, and of course America has to be the guiding light. Of course.

I’m not saying we’re not better than you – we are, I mean I’d forgotten what a rollerblade even was until today – but variety is the spice of life, Kim. You of all people will understand th- anyway a guiding light isn’t even a light without some darkness to patriotise at, right? And that darkness, Kim. It’s always Russians this, Middle Easterners that. Germany or Vietnam if someone else only recently got to our two first-round draft picks first (bit of a b-ball joke for you there).

The brass insists. I’ve tried to shake up the status quo. I have. I thought to myself, we could do anything we want with the Democratic Republic of Congo. Anything. But they’re a long way away from rollerblades, even. You need the wheel for that. I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve knelt against my bunk at the studio praying for an outrageous new foreign guy with signature grooming and nuclear weapons. That’s the only way it’s going to pass inspection. You know this word, “inspection?” Of course you do!

I apologise again for any offense caused, it’s just that you have ushered in a very exciting time for the games industry. Yours and my clear cultural differences aside, we now come full-circle and maybe this is unexpected: Thank you, Kim, for giving myself and hundreds of others something else to write about. Not only have you single-handedly greenlit Homefront 2, you have rescued an entire genre from continually villifying countries who are now quite nice or at least pleasingly subdued.

I know how much you love our NBA. It is my personal mission to write in a ballin’-ass mini-game for you by any means necessary. Rodman hair DLC. It’s the least I can do.

Love,

- Some guy

17 minutes is a long time to sit and watch somebody else play some Battlefield 4, but it’s Battlefield 4 so we all did it (watch it for yourself here). The guy or gal playing it was definitely human (maybe too much), there were definitely some dramatic things that happened (I yawned really loud), and it was definitely believable if you prefix “believable” with “un.”

What’s unbelievable is two-fold: 1) “Fuck Yeah America” scripted single player where the Russians are the modern day bad guys? Really? Guys, Putin now uses those missiles as a couch for visitors he doesn’t like, and 2) Nobody even cares. I can count the number of Battlefield single player campaigns I’ve managed to finish on a freshly amputated hand.

There’s no doubt EA have reserved a carriage for the game’s multiplayer show-off further down the hype-train, but why bother? That’s why we’re here. Yes, I do speak for the universe. Just show it, and keep showing bits of it, until we’re playing it and I’m losing but not caring because it’s fun. Multiplayer is the reason this franchise continues to exist and kick so much ass.

I dare say acknowledging this fact straight away and with unabashed pride would’ve been a better way to come out of the gates. You aren’t Call Of Duty (thank heavens), you aren’t Medal Of Honor (really thank heavens). And so, when you show single-player rather than the multiplayer everybody actually cares about, you get this: Are they hiding something? What’s wrong with it? Oh god EA you are simply monstrous beings I’m not going to buy this (yes I am).

But if yesterday’s thingy was good for something, it was good for inciting a gang-vocal chorus of “More like Battlefield 3.5, lol EA etc.” While there is no mention of the game’s development for next-gen consoles – the packshots show PS3, Xbox360, PC, the usual – I mean, yeah. It’s clearly running on a high-end PC (“press F to drive”), so that’s a far cry from what it’s actually going to look like for those shmoes on the couch at home in front of their pedestrian enjoyment devices. And it looks very familiar.

Got to hand some serious props to an area DICE continually excel above all others in, though: the sound design is insane. Even more so than Battlefield 3, which is saying something. Anyone who’s ever come out on top of the scoreboard largely by tuning into their headphones should be stokered. Won’t be entirely surprised if there’s some kind of handicap for players who’re hard of hearing.

So here’s how this should play out and I don’t get why EA don’t just let their corporate hair down and live in the real world: Peeps are still playing Battlefield 3 online en masse. These peeps know EA’s rep and realise they’ll most likely have to move over to Battlefield 4 if they still want their kicks. These people, like me, are the reason this game is going to make poo-tons of money. Treat ‘em with the respect they deserve, drop the assumed majesty of this game’s pre-amble (seriously, you guys, read the press release, I barfed on myself a little) and just show it. Show the multiplayer.

Shee-it, maybe it doesn’t even matter. All they have to do is kill the BF3 servers and they have our purchase. Well played, entirely unfounded and possibly slanderous prophecy I just made, well played.

Dynamics, I think, are really important. Black, white, grey. Grey is a boring colour but it’s where you want to be (Grey is my favourite colour actually. —Ed). It’s a good ideal: Everything’s cool and I feel alright. I like music a lot, for instance. I like metal. Metaaal. But I can’t stand metal that is just loud and roargh all the time. Too much black, let’s say. Something more like Opeth is where it’s at.

Likewise I dig the softer stuff, but not if it’s a relentless coma of overt sensitivity ala City & Color. Bit much white, let’s say. Yeah you can tell Dallas I said that. Bor-ing. Give it an edge, like everything Steven Wilson has ever done. Is this too musical? Wee-hait, getting there.

I love shooters. Shooters are gaming’s metaaaaaaaal (sorry). But they are loud, and they roargh all the time. Some don’t. Deus Ex: Human Rev, for instance, but it’s a bad example and not at all indicative of the genre at large. For the most part, you’re killing everyone and exploding their homes. This is pleasing to me, but it’s a very one-dimensional (or focused, if I worked in PR) experience. I’ve found over the years that it needs a counterweight, so it might be the best Indian Jones catacomb trap it can be.

When I start sitting there going, “Gawd I hate shooters now,” that’s terrible. But it just means my shooter yin is too high. My murderise pH level is unbalanced.

The alkaline solution is RPGs. The RPG yang. There is no more diametrically opposed a genre to the FPS than the RPG, a fact even acknowledged, in-genre, by the fact most shooters include an RPG that is used to clear a path and continue onward. I am absolutely stretching for symbolism that is just handy coincidence, and thank you for noticing.

The FPS is fast and understandably shoots first. It asks no questions later because lol, questions, that’s for BioWare girls. The RPG is slow and might fire a weapon, maybe, but only when its allotted position in the turn order swings ‘round. The psychopath and the gentleman. The cigarette and the pipe. The cheap hooch and the cognac. Complimentary opposites, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Too much of either will turn you into a monster forever. Wear that headset and play Call of Duty (pick any of ‘em, they’re all the same) online. Do the same on WoW.

For every hundred hours of unenviable K/D ratio, there is a hundred hours of misshapen stat-maxing (my wizard must be strong and the master of unlocking).  A balanced diet is key. Look how normal I am. Some nights you want pie. What flavour is it? Pie flavour. For the past few months it’s been Far Cry 3 this, Far Cry 3 that. A lot of similarly dressed FPS archetypes are dead because of me. Now it is Persona 3: FES. Yes, on the PS2. The original Atlus grind. A lot of similarly psychosexual JRPG archetypes are dead because of me.

Hey, you gotta have at least one thing in common.

Dead Space 3 is not the clucking fuster its preamble suggested it might be. A lot of its more contentious ideas work on a few levels. The Bench is cool. A lot of the creations that come out of it are redundant, but you can have fun with it and fun is good. Shooting at other guys with guns isn’t that bad, either. They don’t take up much… spaaace and for the most part, it’s pretty close to the Marker the whole way through (which is saying something. This game is impressively long).

Co-op was the big one, though. Having another gun at your back just doesn’t seem very conducive to crapping your space suit. And, you know, it’s not.

With Carver all jacked up and good to go Dead Space 3 becomes very shooty. There are a zillion more enemies. You get less health. Those annoying mini-games become an edgy ballet of we-are-prolly-gonna-fail as one of you wrestles with the Tetris of things while the other runs out of ammo trying to keep whoever draws the Tetris straw alive. For a good, hearty experience, you need to find someone who isn’t stupid to play with. Easy enough if you have friends. I don’t. I sit on the bathroom floor all day typing and occasionally vomiting. I disgust myself that much.

So when I do the co-op thing it’s with some random.

The first time I jump in, I’m Carver, and it’s that bit early on where you have to telekinese some fuzzing pylons into place. The other guy does not even telekinese, bro. I watch him try to make the pylon go down into the pylon hole for a good ten minutes. I get the feeling he’s been here for half an hour. Occasionally he stops trying and shoots at me. I go for a stroll and do a barrel roll and come back. He’s still trying. I can only assume he became mortally embarrassed because then he kicked me out of his game. So far so not that good.

But I’m undeterred and I try again. This time I’m Isaac and the other guy is Carver. I think he’s Mexican. His name is something like “el_facko.” I laugh heartily and we set off into the cold walls of the CMS Roanoke. This guy el_facko, he’s what you want out of a Dead Space 3 co-op buddy: he watches my back, doesn’t dawdle at the bench (ten minutes max is the unspoken gentlemen’s rule), shares his swag, and thank ass, he knows how to telekinese. His telekinese is actually badass.

He’s better than me at the Tetris, but he doesn’t hold that against me. I think I love el_facko, and I follow him everywhere until, cruelly, we must part. I’m having pie for dins.

It’s a weird thing, going out there in a hallucinating bro-ship of custom mining death tools. You could say Dead Space 3 is even at its best in co-op, but it’s a co-op game not built for itself. There are so many conventions that jump in the way of the expedience required by its newest one. So this threequel of inhuman nightmares becomes an entirely human one of pot luck and unlikely camaraderie amidst grim fields of “ur ghey.”

When you find your el_facko, you hold onto him.  You hold on tight.

I have played and finished the new Tomb Raider. There. I said it.

 I was one of those lucky so-and-so’s tasked with writing ‘er up somewhere, and if one thing dawns on you when you yourself go a-Lara’ing, it’ll be this: Hot damn there is a lot of shooting in this game. And brutal shotgun-to-the-face finishing moves. Oh she looks like Bambi now, but she is soon as unlikely a mass murderer as Nate Drake. Those two should just date. More than any other game I’ve played of late, the distinction between Tomb Raider’s modest array of cannons is sharp enough that you work out what you like and what works for you pretty quick. Shotgun to the face.

It got my thinking about how I best like to dispatch digital people and creatures, and how. I don’t usually like shotguns. They’re slow, they have no range (silly shotgun, you are a gun), and they take forever and a few more days to reload when dry. I enjoy speed. Also playing games in a fast way. Heavy weapons have always been the bane of my existence. I like gigantor ‘splosions as much as the next sociopath, but anything that means I can’t be a ninja gets dropped to the wastes quick. Likewise anything that is also slow in execution.

I got to thinking about what my favourite boomstick of all time in any game might be, and I realised that it is fists. By the end of Tomb Raider, I’d maxed that Brawler skill tree so hard. If I can’t go Streets of Rage on ya’ll I will take a Shishkebab. Fire is good too.

Even though I’ve written about my newly discovered CCQ Vorcha love before, I didn’t fully realise how much of a way of gaming life getting up close ‘n too personal is for moi. Silly boss fights, the pointlessness of murdering folk instead of putting them to sleep, the over-emphasis on stealth – none of that bothered me nearly as much about Deus Ex: Human Revolution as not being able to bash people into comas as much as I wanted without having to chew a Powersauce bar every five seconds and master my augmented ass. I subconsciously built my Jensen around the express need to run into a hail of gunfire and brutally KO everyone.

OK, I sort of take something back: when I got to Yelena and she’d obviously been training MMA with The Boss from Snake Eater, I was her rag doll and it was not fun.

It’s a weird thing to be pretty anti-gun IRL and have such a diabolical fascination with FPS games, and this is the result. I want to see more fisting in shooters. The cut ‘n thrust of Skyrim was great. So were the grim punch-ons in the Condemned games. Zeno Clash for the obscure win. Mirror’s Edge 2 (think positive, crew) better let me kick guns out of hands have them discharge into people’s gullets. Most of the time, it’s a bit of an afterthought and kind annoying. You tend to have to gallop at people who already have guns and then wail on them while they’re still shooting you and peddling backwards. Come on, let’s get some more close combat rules up in here.

If I cross a certain distance, you go for the knife and we duel. Hell to the yee-hess.

Editor’s note: If you’re wondering where games.on.net’s Tomb Raider review is, it’s delayed because PC review copies aren’t available yet! All reviews you’ve seen to date have been done on consoles. When we learn more, we’ll let you know.

Because I try not to be mean even when someone is being mean to me, let us just say that Aliens: Colonial Marines is somewhat… divisive. In that it has divided the patience of many an expectant fan. You can’t win ‘em all, although some people like it. That is cool for them and their happiness is my happiness.

More people do not, though. Metacritic collate-paints a fairly unflattering picture, and I must admit that after less than ten minutes with it I had the same impulse that I’m sure lots of other peoples did: I just wanted to find Randy Pitchford and ask him why.

What happened? Why are the aliens drunk? Why can I put a silencer on my pulse rifle? Why are the textures from the Jurassic period and why can’t the game recognise a graphics card I’ve had for two-hundred years? Look into my eeeeeyeeee.

Subsequently, a lot of backroom details we’re not ordinarily privvy to started to surface: ACM had been in production at Gearbox for six years, continually pushed back in favour of Borderlands 2 until Sega began to suggest legal action was in order.

There’s a very interesting account of all that on Reddit by an alleged former employee.

Nothing will make a publisher (or anyone) move faster than the law, so Gearbox reportedly outsourced the bulk of the game’s dev-work to Section 8 studio TimeGate in a last-ditch effort to stave off Phoenix Wright.

Sega would go on to contradict Gearbox themselves and deny this, but it’s a spurious denial at best. This is not the handiwork of the men and women who gave us Pandora to play on.

ACM is not just a window into the tumultuous juggling act of publishers, studios, big expectations and bigger licenses, but also into the nature of the games press. This guy has clearly not, in my opinion, actually played the game. That is not an assumption, it is clear and present fact: the vagaries of everything he mentions were all covered to the exact same hollow extent in every bit of preview coverage ever.

I don’t believe he was “paid off” but rather that he banked, like so many of us did, on ACM being a great game and thought yeah, let’s get those clicks early. Beyond unethical, but if he’d been right, no disservice would’ve been rendered (that you knew of).

Unfortunately for him, no one could’ve predicted this, and further to that is the fact nobody has been able to convincingly answer why ACM seemingly got worse during development and not better. This video, hey. You’ve seen it, but it’s still a mind-fry:

Development, press, and also the press as given by the developers themselves has not been spared by ACM. Randy Pitchford has worked as a magician IRL and some are starting to feel he’s still an illusionist over at Gearbox too. It’s true, he talked up some things that were simply not in the game (slashed, so they say) and the demo he flaunted in his pre-show runs at the media (see above) looked a lot more impressive than what hit storefronts. Death threats are taking it a little far.  Don’t do that.

I interviewed Randy, in person, prior to the game’s release. He genuinely loves Aliens. He does. He knew more about its intricacies than anyone in that room. Not stuff media training would teach you; stuff a fan from way back would know. He looked like a big sad kid when he told me ACM director Brian Martell got to meet Ridley Scott to talk LV-426 and he didn’t. The passion is there and real, but Pitchford works with what he’s got, like any CEO stretched thin.

The whole thing has shone such a piercing light on just about all sectors of the industry it feels like it might actually have been good for something in that context. Gearbox are still suffering tremendous backlash and no doubt will for some time, but all’s not completely lost for ACM itself – because you know who’s going in to save the marines who went in to save the other marines? You guys are.

Click here for our Aliens: Colonial Marines review, and click here for our editor’s thoughts on Aliens: Colonial Marines as our ‘Game of the Month’.

Header image courtesy David Rayfield.

Warning: Spoilers for the Mass Effect series follow.

I don’t like replaying games. I think you’re either/or. Some guys and gals endlessly wring every bit of fun to be had out of a game by constantly going back for more (I know a crazy man who played Turok three times. That is dedication. Maybe even the gaming equivalent of waterboarding). Some guys and gals, like me, play it once and make it an event; a grand ol’ experience to be treasured but not, under any circumstances, repeated. That would say to its initial impact, “You were not an impact.” Which isn’t true, but the first impact would listen and fall into a depressive haze, eventually dissipating.

Mass Effect 3 has made me break this rule for the first time in years. It’s not the minor arcs of fleeting moral quandary, but the products of major covet or neglect: throughout the whole game, I could not stop thinking about what this whole thing would be like had my entire crew perished in Mass Effect 2. What happens if Thane’s not around to throw down with Kai Leng? Who’s going to take me through A Cybernetic Fairytale if I’ve sold Legion for scrap? I might just leave Grunt in his tank and Wrex is  mouldering on Virmire, so who’s the Krogan I meet in the Attican Traverse? The Genophage cure. Surely whoever’s standing in for Mordin won’t be anywhere near as vehement about pluming this thing over Tuchanka and thus I maybe won’t have to shoot them in the back?

Not that I would, this time around. I’m playing Mass Effect 2 and 3 completely in reverse. The first time through, my FemShep was as bad as they come. I never made one Paragon choice. Not one. Not even in regular conversation. Bottom right was right. It could be a harrowing way to play at times: Garrus stepping in to shoot Ashley as she mistakenly leapt to the defense of Udina was one thing, but Tali committing suicide made me take twenty showers. Extreme, and the suggestion of a different way is, for my creds, the strongest in Mass Effect 3 – but only via Mass Effect 2. This time I’m a guy, and I’m so good it hurts.

I’ve been living with this itching curiousity since last year and I’m doing it. Can’t be bothered with the first Mass Effect (although I should have been – if you just run through the downloadable wrap-up of it in Mass Effect 2, certain things are just scrubbed from the entire trilogy, like Conrad the huge fan!), so ground zero is the middle game. It’s also my personal fave of the lot. Jack, you know. That’s my kinda lady. I didn’t tune her the first time through, because I thought Thane’s terminal memoir mirrored the grim future of my own FemShep and they got it on. That is a weird scene for your girlfriend to walk in on, let me tell you: boy on the couch, playing Mass Effect as a woman, going to bed with a green man in leather.

But romance Jack, and her entire character alters fundamentally. Come on strong and you’ll reduce her to tears (!) as she recounts the Greek tragedy of her one true love. It’s almost heartbreaking. She’s also going to die, because safety on the new Normandy must come second to fixing my Darth Acne. It’s not so much the moral divergence as the revelations that are quietly freaking me out, though. Don’t let Garrus shoot Sidonis, and you get something you never expected. Garrus is gonna die too, just so he knows, which makes me a li’l anxious: What if there’s no one there to catch my ass at the end?

Confession time: I am an anime fan. Not quite otaku, but if I didn’t have to afford cans of salmon, I would probably live in a cargo container on top of a Tokyo apartment block and have a comfort pillow in the likeness of Rei Ayanami.

Speaking of, I’ve been rewatching Neon Genesis Evangelion lately and something occurred to me: Why are there almost no amazing shooters based on anime licenses? You can count them on one hand with most of its fingers amputated because of gangrene or severe boredom.

There was Oni for the PS2. And Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, which came out in 1998. That weird Team Fortress 2 rip-off thing H.A.V.E Online doesn’t count because travesty. There’s been a ton of stuff made out of Neon Genesis that never exited Japan, but they mostly consist of weird dating sims and stupid-awful fighting games:

Shudder. The only other license that has come into close contact with gamingdom is Ghost in the Shell. The first time, it was a fustercluck of weirdness where you just rolled around as one of those robots and had a terrible time. When Cavia gamified Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex into a third-person shooter for the PS2 in ‘04, though, the results rocked even though they were kinda repetitive:

It’d be a good example of how to go about this kind of thing if you could find it anywhere. G-artists (Who? Exactly) picked up the license again for the PSP the following year and made it a first-person shooter, but uh, yeah:

In any event, it’s not brain surgery while studying rocket science: anime is full of uniquely stylised violence, has a heady foothold in geek culture already, and there are a million and one awesome ideas just waiting to be used as a sweet excuse to kill everything in an excessive way. Akira springs immediately to mind. I never thought I’d say this but a part of me kind of wishes they’d made that live-action movie if only because it’d bring this bad-boy to the cultural fore again and we could roam Neo-Tokyo destroying everything with psychic migraines TETSUUUOOOOO! Surely we can do better than this:

Haha, what even is that. Gaming in the ‘80s, kill it with fire. Cowboy Bebop cries out to become more than a last-rate Star Fox rip. Hellsing would rip ass. Are vampires still, like, so in right now? Guns always are. It’s maybe-win. Full Metal Panic, let’s have it. Trigun sort of speaks for itself. This all seems like a no-brainer.

Is anime just too whacky for the West now that Japanese development is a little out of favour at the mo? All these things seemed to turn up during Sony’s console heyday and now, not so much. Okay. Some massaging is required. Here’s another reason we ought to have game-ine: games love girls. Capable (and overtly sexualised) girls who kill things. Like Bayonetta, say, or Jack and her belt-bra. It is here where, gosh darn, Japan has got you covered, kids. End the dominant sausage-fest paradigm. Ever seen Ergo Proxy? Cyberpunk is back, you know. What about Black Lagoon? Gantz? That’s right, off you go.

I, like you, was surprised by how good Mass Effect 3’s multi turned out to be. I played it a lot, became hopelessly addicted. But while hopelessly addicted, one thing bothered me (apart from the almost heinous, gambling-like commercialisation of its upgrade packs. I maintain to this day you’ll always get better stuff if you actually pay for them with real mo-ney-neys): I could never find my niche on the battlefield.

I’d regularly come in third or even shameful sub-bronze on the scoreboard. What le hell, I thought. I’m hurting stuff. I’m stealing that guy’s kills. What gives? Nothing was really built for my playstyle. Soldiers were too hands-off, Engineers too fiddly. I like to get my hands dirty, but that there Drellguard… bit squishy for my care-factor, regularly bottoming out at negative one million. The fact I’d never managed to score any decent weapons helped a lot.

This was before all the freebie updates. Recently I hooked back into ME3 to play me some Leviathan, which Tim said was good in between trolling all of Twitter with Brenn. I got instantly waylaid by all the new guys in the multi. After receiving about a hundred Spec Ops packs (I’m watching you, EA) I finally chanced upon a raw recruit that sounded, in theory, really not my thing: the Vorcha Sentinel.

“Sentinel,” I cried, spitting everywhere. “Those guys suck.” And it didn’t make much sense. Vorchas with tech armour, I mean what. So I got curious and started hitting the field with this guy. Turns out “Sentinel” is a real misnomer here. He’s anything but. He’s actually just some criminally insane guy with an oversize pack of matches.

I love to get in close and beat people in just about every game I can, and this Mass Effect Batman, that’s what he’s about. I have found my niche. It’s awesome: the Ventinel’s “tech armour” actually just fills him with adamantium rage and whenever he kills anything, it starts stacking (max three times, I think). His shields are for crap, but he’s got a long-ass health bar and it just keeps chargin’ and rechargin’ the more guts are splatted.

It also makes him really quick and even moar powerful. I don’t even fire a shot with this maniac and I love it. I give him the crappest, lightest gun I can and just streak past all those poor fools trying to bring down a mob with their guns and start slashing. Spec’d like Wolverine, your heavy melee kills grunts in one go and also cover a decent amount of ground before connecting, meaning you can make some really unlikely pounces that eventuate in grim vivisection.

He can even go hoof-to-hoof with Brutes and take them down real quick if you’re canny with the Vorch-dodge (best in the game, maybe, though Drell’s are light on the feet too) – and, most joyously, his flamethrower. It eats armour like Cannibals eat each other and will make those Cerberus bitches dance. I don’t even have grenades on this build. He is just a complete psychopath with intestines permanently stuck to the ends of his bad manicure. I think it’s love – and the top of the scoreboard (okay second place, but that comes right after first).

Alright. Who called it? Yes. It was me, thankyou for asking.I’ve written extensively about my jacked-in love for ‘80s sci-fi baby cyberpunk in the past, both for games.on.net and elsewhere. Naturally and because every game dev hungrily devours just about everything I write ever*, the resurgence I picketed for in an annoying way has not stopped at Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Syndicate and even Gemini Rue.

In fact, it looks like it’s becoming a thing all over again in 2013. This year alone we’re gonna hear from Watch Dogs, Remember Me, maybe Prey 2 (I’m an optimist), and most blinding and recently of them all, Cyberpunk 2077. Okay, that last one’s slated for “when it’s ready”, but it’s definitely got your attention. Kick. Ass.

You know, I just finished reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer for the first time. I was pretty late to that party, but I seriously still wasn’t ready for that book. It may not have coined the term “cyberpunk,” but it made it what it is. It’s futurist and quaint in the same way that makes the genre so sort of beguiling on an almost cute level; a crystal ball and a relic in one. It invented and visualised the concept of “the matrix” way before the Wachowski kids ever put keyboard stroke to screen, but yet it somehow failed to anticipate the mobile phone. It’s just so ‘80s that way.

Cyberpunk is full of turns still unrealised and contradictions only made known to it decades later. There is nothing else like it, and it’s such a perfect antithesis to brown military shooters I can totally envision the day when everything is instead a grey cyberpunk shooter instead (please don’t, big three).

It’s also turned out that it’s a cyclical kind of thing, and the ideas explored in it – the dystopian paranoia, the technological mores and the sinister enablement contained within – are now more relevant than they were 30 years ago. There are mechanised killing machines in the air above Syria, just watching (waiting). Your personal identity becomes more and more a part of the internet with each passing year. All those numbers that are so important to you – your credit card, your mobile – are in there in vast quantities, held by corporations mostly. The corporation rules; the world’s richest could have ended poverty four times over. The great irony is that gaming demands the most dedicated connectivity of all. We’re all cowboys; some of us are even artistes, as Ratz calls Case in Neuromancer, “of the slightly funny deal.”

And when I saw Cyberpunk 2077, I thought not of sexism and the patriarchy or whatever else gamingdom at large is hating on right now, but of Neuromancer’s Molly, the book’s real main character. Molly the razorgirl – Steppin’ Razor, to the Zionites – a street samurai augmented beyond belief by the black market surgeons of Chiba City. Ten 4cm double-edged blades, one in each finger. Mirrored lenses and she has cat’s eyes now. Reflexes to match, too. Hot-rodded nervous system. None of this stuff is cheap, she tell us later. She had to do some things to get the money. Work as a meat puppet, she says. Renting her body out for the night and turning off her consciousness. One night her employers switched her back on in the middle of things and her John was acting sick. Something had to be done. You were definitely watching cyberpunk that rainy trailer day.

*live in the golden clouds, it’s fantastic

It’s 2013 and we’re not dead but we could be, and for that we should be thankful. We could always be dead, I guess. The other night I heard a chick saying the white light you allegedly see on your way out is, in fact, your newly reincarnated baby self emerging from the womb of your newly acquired mum. I don’t know, I think you’re just dead, hey.

That means you only get so much time with which to game while alive, and so this year I would like to make a few suggestions to Activision, and 2K, and Gearbox, and all those people who make games that go boom. These few suggestions hinge on but one overarching suggestion (imperative), and that is:

Take revenge.

On Uwe Boll, mostly. Stop letting movies make themselves outta you and get Soviet Russia on that thing: make random movies into games. Not licensed tie-ins blah blah, gross. No. As in, let us actively plumb the glorious history of violent cinema and exploit it for personal gain. The Hollywood reboot mentality given a gaming twist. Desecrate them. Desecrate them like Spielberg and George Lucas desecrated old Indiana Jones that one time. Like Falling Down:

Jilted office workers, nice. Although I think Postal III and to a lesser extent the Grand Theft Auto stuff do an OK job of simulating life on the collared edge already. It’s not exact, but never mind. We’ll move on. I was also thinking maybe Escape From L.A. Shut down America!

But then, Hideo Kojima has kind of stolen a lot from Snake “Call Me” Plissken already and maybe this wouldn’t be at all fair. You guys ever notice that Kojima steals a lot from just about everywhere? Like, Snatcher was basically just Blade Runner but stupider. This man is considered a gaming auteur. Speaking of stealing, I think I’ve got it:

Right, so. Far as I know, Point Break: The Game of the Quite Old Movie does not yet exist. This could be big, guys. Especially if they get all the actors back to do the voices: Keanu Reeves, Gary Busse, Patrick Sway- ummm. Actually, with respect to the man, I don’t think we can move forward with this project. I loved Ghost. I’m sorry, Mr. Kotick. Yes, I know. I know. You were really looking forward to Guatemala this year. But sir, I- sir? Sir. I’m seeing Lori Petty in her prime here and I’ve thought of a brilliant follow-up on this. Hear me out:

Bobby hung up on me then and I didn’t blame him. Tank Girl was all wrong, he said, it was too much fun. And so I was out of a job, like I had been many times before. This is Australia and all a man needs is a fairly average idea, though. While I am not a man I have average ideas, and this last one I assure you is potted chromium:

Groan. Holidays. Aren’t they great? For a while. The gravity of the situation is horrible, though. What goes up must plummet shockingly back down to earth in a great flaming meteor of terrible gamer. So while I went away and forgot my troubles with many a Melbourne chardonnay (shut up, Sydney habits die hard okay), I have returned unto the Emerald City a broken man. Rich in spirit as always (and actual spirits, oh my god, have you guys tried that Belvedere vodka?), but nowhere near the slaughterhouse of mostly accidental FPS carnage I was before Christmas happened and look, Tim. Somehow, I don’t have much money right now. You understand.

Normally I could explain away my crippling ineptitude with this handy pie chart:

But that only explains away my middling Call of Duty outings (and quite neatly and accurately, might I add), which are fewer and fewer these days although I hear that BLOPS II was actually quite the good. There is nary an internet pie chart to let my long-suffering squaddies in BF3 or those poor-ass randoms who chance upon my wobbly friendly fire just about anywhere else know that I, my good sirs, have been on holiday. I’m rusty. “Why Toblet,” they say. “That is funny, you’re still just as terrible as we all remember. What’s your WD40?”

WD40, as we all know, is a salacious lubricant a disreputable young woman I once knew used to oil her bedsprings with so that the squeaking of said overused bedsprings would not distract her many paramours from the task at hand. In this context, it is an antidote to my poor performance. How does one shake the rust from one’s well-worn gamer’s gauntlet even as that rust seemingly stacks ever onward like transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water with each passing year?

Gaming is always training, I’ve realised. More so, too, as you get older. It’s weird. Until I visited the StarCraft II finals last year, I had no concept of games as sport. The physicality of the RTS and the FPS especially is so mutable but prone to instant erosion the moment you slack off and decide, “Whatever. I am going to drink this entire pop-up bar and not get out of bed for an extremely long time hereafter.” That kind of thing only works if you’re Michael Phelps or that Australian long-jumper who eats a pack a day and still goes home with silver.

I am neither of these people, and while 2013 is going to be my YEAR, baby, I have not started it with any panache where gaming is concerned. You might say I have less online friends than I did in December. The journey to win all thousand of them back starts with a single step, and that step is actual training. No kidding, how strange. Who even does that? I am seriously using one of those wrist-enhancing exercise squeezy things right now as well as checking out detailed schematics of all those maps my addled upstairs has fogged the intricacies of.

It’s all crappening.

More and more, I’m finding that, for me, every year as a gamer is wholly defined by one game. Generally one game that explodes a lot.

Last year, it was easily Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the soundtrack of which I’m still grooving to work with. The year before that, Fallout: New Vegas. This year, it was The Darkness II. At least, I thought it was until Far Cry 3 pretty much blindsided me with its endless litany of uproarious possibility. I’m a gamer torn: Jackie Estacado’s cel-shaded brutality or Jason Brody’s accidental pyromania? I thought it’d be Mass Effect 3 all the way and while I loved it to bits, the experience was marred externally somewhat by all the snotty hate that surrounded it.

I have got to stop reading the internet.

The world is ending this week though (actually, I think it was supposed to end two weeks ago and didn’t, but let’s hold out hope here, there was a fierce wind the other night), so this indecision must become decision: What game, I wondered as the outdoor cinema’s giant projector screen curled over in the possibly apocalyptic evening breeze, would I most want to be playing if the world was going to end? And also, quick follow-up on that: Am I ever gonna get to see Looper? I want to know what happens to Bruce Willis. I worry about him.

Tough one, huh. One game to rule them all. I think back, and think hard. It’s weird: I don’t think “present”. I think past. I’m not sure if that says more about me or the state of gaming. Maybe a little bit of both, but I can’t help but feel games in the ‘90s and early 2Ks – where I had most of my formative experiences – were a lot less self-conscious than they are today, and thus free to just be games as opposed to living a conflicted double-life as an enterprise beholden to a whole new demographic they often don’t really seem to understand. Games now are fun. I don’t get worked up about ‘em or their perceived or actual wrongs. I just switch on and switch off. Back then I’d just be switched on.

MechWarrior 2 showed me crushing scale was possible. Wing Commander III taught me the value of great supporting narrative and execution. Duke Nukem 3D turned the environment into a playground. I was more afraid of Realms of the Haunting than is reasonable to admit. Deus Ex floored me by not letting me get away with murder for once. I can’t think of one new thing this generation that’s really turned me on quite like the defining qualities of the aforementioned.

Games look prettier now. That’s nice, but if gigantor tidal wives were lapping at my windows and I had but a precious few moments left with which to do naught but game, it wouldn’t be Human Revolution, or New Vegas, or Far Cry 3. It’d be pin the tail on my DOSBox piñata.

I don’t always stay up playing games ‘til 4am, but when I do, it’s because I’m playing Far Cry 3 and things have gone horribly wrong. I’m hesitant to use a jerk-off clinical buzzword here, but the emergent gameplay in this thing is awesome. Seriously. I remember its preamble: No two encounters are ever the same. Sure, sure, I thought. Heard that before. All encounters were subsequently the same except people got shot in varying orders and I died in ever more embarrassing ways. Yawn.

Not yawn. Absolute truth in this case. There are a lot of reasons Far Cry 3 has really gotten its claws into me – sometimes literally – but the biggest is this: When things go wrong, they go brilliantly. I’m an anarchist at heart. I derive immense joy from the sudden eruption of chaos and confusion, so long as nobody actually gets hurt. Someone knocking over some other guy’s beer and then that guy getting mad at the wrong person and that wrong person’s girlfriend suddenly vomiting and then a light fixture falls down. Spoiler: I’m the guy who accidentally [*citation needed] elbowed over the beer.

In Far Cry 3 I am the most profoundly dumbass trickster god of all time. How often have you sleuthed your way through the bushes, expertly camera’d up all the goons in that base, and initiated Glorious Master Stealth Protocol #999 only to have the slightest thing absolutely derail your efforts and all of a sudden the entire jungle is on fire and a tiger is loose? My answer is: lol always. I don’t think I’ve ever successfully infiltrated anything. I am a bumbling oaf laden with automatic weapons and explosives and a flare gun, for some reason. Wait, I know the reason: Hilarity. Pizz-ow.

Even better: Sometimes it’s not even about the goons and their bases. A lot of people on Rook Island have problems, and I seem to excel at making them worse. A great deal of these problems involve broken down cars. One time I’d just decided to take the repair torch thing out for a spin and I was busy skiing up and down a grassy knoll when I chanced upon a guy and the smoke sizzling from under the bonnet of his Ford Laser or whatever at the bottom of it. Let me stress: This knoll was very grassy.

“Help me out bro,” he said, or something. It just so happens I was out taking my repair torch thing for a spin that day! The number of times I’d hooned past befuddled Maoris and their junked rides without being able to help was a lot, so I thought, I can make amends here.

“Step aside,” I told this guy without saying it, and got to work waving miraculous car-healing blue fire on his side mirror. This guy starts screaming, like, I thought I was doing something wrong. How am I meant to know? I’ve never repaired an entire car by blasting a side mirror with fire before. I look up and he’s on fire. The entire grassy knoll is on fire. The car, is on fire. I’m also on fire. My love for Far Cry 3 is the most fiery of them all.

So last week I thought it would be hilarious to put together a whimsical article charting the horrible demises of all gamingdom’s wonderful, unsuspecting creatures off the back of your outrage. Ha, yes, see those digital goats burn. Man is dominant. Destroy. Metaaal.

Some of you did not find this funny in the slightest and have yet to forgive me. I consoled myself by playing loads of Far Cry 3, and I’ve realised that gaming’s animal kingdom has not forgiven me, either.

“Who is the real monster here?” cry its leopards and tigers from the undergrowth I hunker in, silenced sniper rifle in hand, watching, waiting for the perfect time to strike that there red-flagged outpost in the short distance. Soon the perfect time arrives, and I miss it because I’m dodging tigers and leopards. So I have to make do with the imperfect time to strike, and I do, and then this happens:

I have never, ever played a game where I’m genuinely more fearful of the animals, for Christ’s sake, than all the guys with guns and grenades. I now flatly refuse to spend more than a few seconds in any river. I just can’t do it. Those crocodiles, man. They make no sound. Then they have you in a deathroll and it’s all you can do not to become a sloppy croc borry some hours later.

Likewise the goddamn tigers. Venturing off the beaten track is terrifying because of these majestic assholes. There you crouch, hidden from view and lining up the shot to end all shots on some meandering g goon yapping about his chlamydia, when you hear it. What sounds like a yawn so chesty it could inhale the skin from your bones. You peek over to the left or right, ever so carefully, and there he is. Tiger man. Sniffing for you.

Killing and skinning enough of them, I thought, was a missed opportunity on the part of Ubisoft: You’ll net the “Poacher” trophy, which is worth something. I thought it should’ve been worth nothing, and that’s a little statement I’d have been pretty happy with. Instead, you have to exist in a state of perpetual terror as man VS. beast quickly becomes man very averse to beast. It’s kind of worse.

I’ve become so scarred by Far Cry 3’s jungle pantheon that, last night, I reached an absolute personal gaming low. Moments after liberating a base from Vaas’ henchmen, the predatory peals of a leopard still trapped in its bamboo cage tapped into an over the top instinct I’m pretty sure has been cultivated solely by this game. I did a mad pirouette, brandished my RPG, and sent a rocket crashing into a caged animal. I wouldn’t even go near the result until the smoke had cleared just in case it was some kind of cyborg leopard.

I am imagining cyborg leopards. Are you happy now, Ubisoft?

Tim’s Far Cry 3 video review is cool. Tim Cool-will, surely. Can I get a raise? No? That is very fair. However, during the course of his cool video, Tim heinously slew a tiger, which upset a few people. Tigers are beautiful, endangered – possibly misunderstood – creatures IRL, and Coolwill just went on out there and executed one, even going so far as to bemusedly chase its shattered body as it slid down a steep island incline. Subsequently I too was filled with righteous resolve: We can’t let Far Cry 3 have all the fun of trolling PETA.

Battlefield 3’s Callous Murder of an Innocent Rat

Speaking of PETA, they did actually kick up a massive stink about this one particular scene in Battlefield 3 when it came out. Remember that? It’s early on in the single player, which no one played anyway. You’re creeping through some rubble and all of a sudden your hand is waylaid by a tenacious rat. To be fair, our man gives it a swatting chance to back off. Then he vivisects it like it was nothing.

Fallout: New Vegas’ Endless Bestial Harvest

It’s the end days and every remaining creature, horribly irradiated or not, is precious. Just look at those brahmin, they never hurt anyone. They’re just lazin’ and grazin’. No harm no foul – until YouTuber whitenightmare309 decided to go on a killing rampage that only includes animals which, in his opinion, “look (censored) and (censored)”. From what little I understand of America, he is possibly a Republican.

Postal 3 and the Wholesale Slaughter of Science Animals

Sure, one of your weapons is a domestic shorthair with a gun stuck up its ass, but one very special little level tasks you with murderising an entire lab full of furry experiments that have allegedly gone mad. It starts modestly with monkeys and cats getting the machete treatment. Then a gorgeous rhino must be dealt with by any means necessary. “I blame Christian metal,” indeed.

Skyrim’s Big Game… Immolating

In the absence of guns man must turn to his most embyronic of human offensive tools, that being either some form of hefty club or fire. In this case it’s fire, because there is absolutely nothing funnier [citation needed] than setting terrified herbivores alight and breathing in the sweet, hilarious fumes of their swiftly blackening hides. Canada, take note: Spare the rod and instead torch the baby seals. An award-winning sitcom will follow

Cabela’s Actual Big Game Hunting

Right, well. You don’t even have to ad-lib at all here seeing as these games are all about ruthlessly hunting the entire cast of The Jungle Book with high-powered telescopic rifles. It doesn’t get much worse than this. Here, watch. Some people get extremely excited playing this game. I like the bits where they scream in triumph as the last doe-eyed creature falls to an onslaught of .308 Winchester, which incidentally you can also stock up on from Cabela’s. PS. We are all doomed as a civilisation.

No, No, Wait: It Gets Worse

I lied to you. Here we have a man shooting Bambi between the eyes with a double-barrelled shotgun. Thumbs up, guy. You deserved it. Now return to base, there’s a sparrow with a broken wing that needs treading on. You’re a monster.

When our own esteemed editor Tim Colwill recently took it to ACL bullhorn Dan Flynn on the unending topic of an Australian R18+ rating for garmz via SYN FM, not only did he completely demolish that guy but the whole thing got me thinking about which shooters have inspired in me which deadly sin. Happily, the currently recognised order of these bad human vibes starts with the one that’s arguably the most appropriate to the genre: wrath.

Wrath

Ah, yes. “I want to kill you, so badly.” Surely a multiplayer game is responsible for this most reactionary of illin’ feelings, and that it is: Call of Duty: Black Ops. I’m not a twitchy shooter kinda guy, but I was hooked on this game. I was hooked on it because it filled me with murderous rage and I just had to show those assholes. Whereas in Battlefield I rarely find myself annoyed post-death (quite the opposite, I usually admire the way in which I was dispatched), CoD: BLOPS kills you for the stupidest reasons ever and then your game crashes right when you’re about to take horrid revenge. Just thinking about it makes my bottom lip disappear under my teeth.

Greed

Greed is good. It’s good and also especially prevalent in Borderlands. How I must have everything. I must. I don’t even care what it is, give it to me, I’ll sell it and amass all the coinage. Of all the sins I have committed in shootersville, Greed is the one that has punished me the most in return. One time some hackers dropped into my game, hosed the area down with a bunch of obviously hacked-up super weapons that were each worth billions, and left. I picked ‘em all up and sold ‘em and my game was completely challenge-less and gimped from then on. Atonement is ongoing (I cried).

Sloth

If ever there was an FPS that encouraged extreme bouts of laziness, it’d be the precious, Battlefield 3. Some of the crew I play with regularly are really good and frequently go on to win this thing utterly without my participation. Naturally I then take the opportunity to behave like a complete jackass, beeping around the warzone in a jeep (or: rad wagon) before settling my sniper into an obscure part of the map and maybe occasionally spotting someone with the MAV I’m attempting to ram people in the balls with. A K/D of 0-0 is common. No one is amused at my Snorlax-like inability to do my goddamn job.

Pride

Doom 2 on Nightmare mode, zero question. The apex of crapping difficult. Just staying alive long enough to choke a low-level demon-bitch filled me with the kind of thunderously girthy pride that expands a man’s moobs. Or that could be these mad bags of Dorries I have. Regardless, this was a mountain I just had to climb. Which is to say, I did it all for you, pride. The only way I did it was because of insane slow-down, a fact I still won’t acknowledge internally. It nags. I will never be whole.

Lust

Extremely appropriately, SiN stirred in my corduroy something resembling embarrassment had anyone entered the room at that exact moment. I was very much alone at the time and maybe naked, but I don’t think I’m alone now even though I’m still naked when I say: Elexis Sinclaire. Oh what’s that, some of you have to excuse yourself to the nearest bathroom for five minutes? I completely understand. Wait your turn. I’m sweating because I was watching Cops on my iPhone.

Envy

While all the cool kids with their ninja PCs back in the day were having the times of their stupid-excellent-hate-you lives playing the original Crysis, I could barely run Word. How I envied them and their fun, those harlots of the Crytek morning, noon, night. I sank into a deep, dark depression; an unwellness of the soul so cold as to be warmed only by the glow of my best friend’s mother’s liquor cabinet. I became a drunkard, then; no more a dignified man than the anonymous filth gushing ever onwards down the pipes of those serviced apartments as inhabited by Crysis players taking rare toilet-breaks in between sheer, unadulterated hi-res merriment.

Gluttony

Speaking of mad bags of Dorries, there is but one game that heretically welded me to thine gaming throne for days with only foul, delicious convenience store produce for nourishment: Duke Nukem 3D. “Obsession” does not begin to describe it. I grew an extra fat roll in a matter of seconds and I did not care, look at me, my bullets make holes in the walls. For me this was the single greatest revelation (!) in gaming at the time. It’s a simple something that I’d always wanted to see and by god (!!) did I stand there for hours at a time, just shooting walls. And eating.  

When Casey Hudson quizzed the Twittersphere on what it wanted to see in Mass Effect 4, that was both a) A colossally bad idea, never ask Twitter anything especially if 99% of your followers are entitled nerdlingers, and b) Not exactly illuminating.

Predictably, a whole bunch of people just starting taking pot-shots at Mass Effect 3’s ending, like there was a tremendous point to doing so and they simply had to be heard. Again. For the millionth time. What was slightly more surprising was that nobody really seemed to have any good ideas, or their ideas simply stemmed from their dribbling ME3 rage, ie. “The sooner BioWare moves away from the Catalyst/Reaper mythology that got them into trouble, the better.”

Yeah, no.

What trouble? It’s a cool story. It just wasn’t ultimately told to established spec. I think the biggest problem here will be the fact that there is no Shepard. As has been so profoundly demonstrated by Halo over the years, gaming’s “shared authorship” is an absolutely gigantic part of its contemporary allure.

I mention Halo specifically because of something 343 Industries guy Josh Holmes recently told me on just this, which basically boiled down to: It’s cool to be able to play a game where my experience is so different to that of my friends that I can relay it to them, blow by blow, like some kind of awesome pub novel.

Y’know, goddamn, we thrashed our way across Tuchanka. Urdnot is the worst guy to be stuck in a transport with. Needs Mentos, makes me feel like that thing with Wrex way back when should’ve gone differently. Had an epic stoush with a Reaper killbot on the way up top, but that was nothing ‘cos you know Mordin? Oh that’s right you don’t, you left him to die on the Collector base.

Right well, he’s there and he’s all about heading on up and dousing this place with the cure for the Genophage. Why? Trembling with guilt. I’ve just been sitting next to Urd-bro for the past twenty minutes. This is the guy who’s gonna be leading the Krogan, and neither is he particularly subtle about his desire to destroy the universe once they can breed out of control again. One Salarian’s night sweats is not a good enough reason to doom the cosmos. So, we lost Mordin, too. Threw my gun away in disgust at myself. “Damn war,” said Garrus. Agreed. To the bar.  

Anchoring that individual fiction is, ironically and needfully, a main character shared by all: Shepard here, Master Chief back there. Think about it: How many people hated having to play as Hawke in Dragon Age II? Taken in isolation, Dragon Age II’s storyline is really nuanced and Hawke’s interactions – your interactions – with everyone around him or her run the dynamic gamut from hilarious to interesting to devastating.

But it’s not your Warden. It was like going back to start writing a book again from scratch after hitting 50,000 words. You are attached to your Shep whether you know it or not. Your Shep is you. Not sure about you, other Shep, but by the end of ME3’s things, I wasn’t dead. Buried under a tonne of compressed civilisation, maybe, but still breathing. So don’t ya’ll tell me I’m gone for good, ‘cos I still haven’t finished my model starship collection yet.

To wit: I would not be at all surprised if Shepard returns in ME4, for all these reasons and more. BioWare have told you sexy lies before, y’know.

THQ have been falling to bits for a while now. It’s hard to pin down exactly when it started, but I noticed whispers of their decline around the time Homefront came out and, er, didn’t do very well at all. One game-bomb can’t sink a veteran cruiser this big, but then Red Faction: Armageddon spectacularly failed to hit the mark for many a gamer (why, I still don’t know. I love this game) and it seemed more or less official: The good ship THQ was in trouble. Trouble that persists and appears increasingly dire, as this week’s news will attest.

If it all comes to a calamitous end, that’s a hopelessly weeping shame. Not just for the men and women who work there, but for gaming as a whole. A shadow of their former self they might be circa right now, but when I think back and think hard (it hurts), I realise that THQ have put out a tone of games that rendered an absolute if frequently unsung service to the endless and gratifying pursuit of blowing things up. One of my gateway drugs to the fifth generation of gaming’s firefights was a THQ title. The original Red Faction, in fact. Prior to discovering the beauty of railguns that could see through walls argh, I’d gotten pretty down on gaming and had committed myself to becoming a tethered swimming champion.

The day I sent an Ultor war machine plummeting through the crude hole in a rock bridge I’d just made with the rocket I’d let fly with no expectations of awesome devastation on that kind of level was the day I rediscovered The Precious. Red Faction II copped a critical beating and while it did stray from Parker’s epic Martian misadventure in a narrative sense, goddamn it, that’s Jason Statham flying me places.

True, those were ten years ago. Okay, seven years ago: The Punisher. I don’t read the comics, but I played this game. Oh baby did I play this game. At that point I’d never experienced a shooter that made me feel physically ill in a profoundly great way, and this was it. The vague monotone censoring fuzzed over the reprehensible (and glorious) violence of the environmental kills did little to prevent scar tissue forming over whatever lobe is the one that used to be responsible for crying me to sleep. You think The Darkness II took brutality to another level? This did it first.

Still, 2005. Groan, come on. What’ve THQ done for me lately? S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, for one. Hot dang if that game wasn’t a flawed masterpiece of spiritually Falloutish glory. Fumbling in the subterranean dark with Metro 2033 was the logical next step for most, and I get uncomfortable and kind of itchy just thinking about it. I can’t recall another game that gives me a rash quite like this one. Maybe Haze, but for an entirely different reason. Man, that thing can get fu-

Hey, I’m neglecting Saints Row: The Third and that simply will not do. Any game that can legitimately turn people away in significant droves from Grand Theft Auto’s cult of personality is doing something right, in an extremely wrong way. You can’t leave, THQ. I won’t let you. I’m like the ship out of Event Horizon and you are my Laurence Fishburne.