The Fan effing Tastic and the Horrendously Ugly.

          ***SPOILER ALERT*** I WILL RUIN THE PLOT OF FAR CRY 3 IN THIS JOURNAL, READ AT YOUR OWN RISK, NOOBS!

            People who fancy themselves anti gamers have asked me what it is that draws me into a game and why I would waste my life doing it. I suppose I could ask them the same about their stupid hobbies, but I’m not an assface. But if I think about their question seriously, I would have to tell them that it’s because they are engaging and fun. They’re vibrant and colorful and they challenge my brain every time I jump into them. But those reasons alone don’t keep me coming back. I’ve played the game Bubble Shooter a lot when I use to work because it was the best way to pass through an eight-hour day, but that was the only reason I’ve ever played it more than once. Simply being fun isn’t enough for me anymore. I mean, it is, but it’s not what really draws me to video games. The real reason I’m drawn to video games, our modern view of games anyway, is because of the stories they can tell. If they wanted more details on that subject I would refer them to early posts I’ve written about it because there’s no use in beating that horse any longer than I have to. In fact, this is the longest introduction ever. This post isn’t about video game stories; it’s about my thoughts on one certain video game I played recently, Far Cry 3.

            “Did I ever tell you the definition of insanity?”

            I just beat Far Cry 3 earlier this week. On a side note, I hate that stigma that if you haven’t beaten a game within a month of its release, you’re all of a sudden behind the times. I do have a life people, sheesh. I digress. The first two Far Cry games had caught my attention, but I was unable to really get into them the way Ubisoft probably wanted me to. The story wasn’t there, the voice acting was subpar, but that has all changed with Far Cry 3. You see, they pulled out the big guns for this game and literally knocked me on my ass. The gameplay is fantastic. Shooting a bow feels natural and shooting guns can be challenging fun. The island our character, Jason Brody, is stranded on is beautiful, not to mention massive. There are so many activities to do that I literally spend over thirty hours in this epic first person shooter. I spent my time running around and unlocking radio towers, liberating enemy outposts, hunting rare and exotic animals, completing random bounties, and punching sharks in the face. All that stuff gives Far Cry 3 a unique and fun experience, but I’m telling you that you would be missing out if you didn’t delve deep into the main plot right away.

            The game isn’t just about Jason Brody rescuing his friends. It’s about him finding his place in this world. Or so he thinks. He starts out as an innocent young kid who is exposed to violence and slowly grows into a monster, a monster no different than the greatest villains he faces off against. Vaas is the first primary villain in Far Cry 3 and he is one of the best-written characters I’ve ever come across. This game really explores the psychosis of people who endure nightmare situations such as being kidnapped while on vacation and put up for auction. Vaas is absolutely nuts and he really drives the games suspense while at the same time posing as the perfect example of crazy. At one point in the game he proceeds to ask Jason if he’s ever told him the definition of insanity. His entire speech about it is amazing, especially because it outlines how crazy he truly is. He tried killing Jason once, so now he’s going to do it again. Then again and again. That is crazy.

            “His name is Buck and he likes to fuck”

            Hoyt is also a well-written villain, but his crazy is more controlled than that of Vaas. He’s the big boss man and he is running a human and weapons trafficking operation off of his cozy little island. But don’t cross him because he will place your head on a spike. Playing this game I really felt like I was in danger, and Hoyt really gave me the creeps. When I say that he controlled his crazy a little more than Vaas, it’s because he was organized and violent. He burned a man alive for betraying him, right before my eyes. Later, he blew up a cruise ship full of people because no one wanted to negotiate with him. Hoyts whole scene at the poker game is what really blew me away. I did put a spoiler warning at the beginning of this so I hope you’ve heeded it. The poker game was set up for Jason and his new partner Sam to kill Hoyt, but after the first hand is played, Hoyt quickly stabs Sam in the neck with a giant knife. Holy crap! It literally threw me for a loop because I did not even see it coming. He knew my plans before I had ever made them and we were really playing his game, not ours. The whole game keeps you on your toes.

           

            “Don’t take the yellow ones, they’re likely to kill you.”

            To help transition Jason’s character into crazyville, drugs come into play. They can range from anything that heals our character to enhancements in hunting and combat. Either way, Jason is injecting himself with foreign substances the entire time he is on the island, especially when he goes and visits the island’s crazy goddess chick who gets him to drink these weird poisons that toss Jason into some crazy ass trips where he is battling against a giant mask wearing warrior. These situations arise again when Jason comes to finish off Vaas and Hoyt. He is thrown into some trippy ass environment where he goes toe to toe with Mr. Bad Guy, and these sequences pay off wonderfully.

            “The first time I killed someone, I knew it was wrong. But after that, it felt like winning.”

            Throughout the course of the game as Jason’s body count piles up, his mental fragility continues to weaken. He starts out as a scared little pony that doesn’t know what he’s going to do without his brother Grant’s aid.  He seeks the safety of his other brother and his friends, but he also seeks revenge. As he becomes more of a fighter, he starts to go mad. After saving his girlfriend from a burning building he is laughing and having a good time. He thought the escape was fun. He thought killing handfuls of pirates was fun. It was just as mortifying for me to watch this transformation as I’m sure it was for his friends to see. He even tells his brother’s girlfriend that killing had begun to feel like winning to him. What? That one shook me to my core. That’s when I realized that Jason’s cheese was rapidly sliding off of his cracker. Enter Citra into the mix; the sister of our ever-popular villain, Vaas, and that chick is cuckoo for coco puffs as well. This flat chested bimbo brainwashes Jason’s weak mind and makes him believe that he is some sort of uber powerful warrior that will rule Rook Island once he’s saved it. But things take a nasty twist at the end when Jason finds himself holding a knife to his girlfriend’s throat. We get the choice to kill our friends and rule the island, or tell that mud hut living whore to fuck off. I chose the latter because even though Jason lost his marbles, my personal sense of humanity was still in tact.

            The single player story was just so epic and enthralling that it is an adventure that I’m likely to never forget. Move me onto the co-op campaign, an entirely separate story. I have to be honest here; I cannot believe how different this is compared to the journey I had in the single player. It’s like Ubisoft took all the tools they used for the solo story and wiped their asses with it. I mean the difference between the two is night and freaking day. On the one hand you have a journey that had the hearts and souls of hundreds of game designers poured into. The love is there, the writing is there, and the voice acting and dialogue are there. Enter co-op, and all that stuff has vanished.

            The voice acting is terrible. You have three foreign characters whose accents are so heavy that you can barely understand what they’re staying. They drop f bombs left and right like it’s the cool thing to do. Oh God, the Russian dude’s accent was so stereotypical that I’m not even sure whether or not that’s how Russian’s who speak English actually talk.

            “I have reload.”

            What the hell does that mean? I know he has to reload, but…ug, never mind. That’s not authentic; you sound like a freaking retard when you speak. Oh and the little stab they took at sexual innuendo failed miserably.

            “Don’t push his buttons”

            “I’ll let you push my buttons, baby.”

            Dear Lord, just stop it before my ears start bleeding. What a corny thing to say in a campaign that is meaningless. On top of the crummy voice acting, we were given a straight up lackluster plot. The captain of our boat betrayed us after we scored a ton of money, he blew up the boat as he got away and we landed on this island for some revenge. We save some dorky fisherman who was captured and he becomes our guide. He’s a fisherman, a lowly fisherman who shares the education level of an American five year old. He is now all of a sudden our “boss man.” The character development is non-existent. I mean I can’t even tell you the names of these four losers. All I can tell you is that pure amateurs voiced them and if they died in the plot, I would actually not care at all.

            The gameplay is monotonous on top of all the other crappy things offered. Each chapter is accompanied by a half assed competition sequence that pits the four co-op players into a “who can kill the most bitches” trial. They are all boring. The entire campaign is boring. Run here, kill people, hold the area for an hour, move forward, competition sequence, blow up a bridge that the bad guys can easily get around, finish an anti climactic battle, chapter finished. That is every single co-op chapter in this game.

            To make matters worse, the co-op campaign is littered with glitches and moments that make no sense what so ever. There was a point during the last chapter that I failed to see my co-op partner anymore. He was there; I just couldn’t see or interact with him. Shortly after that happened, I was struck down and instead of being put into a “revive” sequence, I died immediately. When the time came for me to respawn, I remained dead on the stairs, but the game accused me of being back in the action. This caused us to start the entire thing over again after my partner died. As far as things not making sense, there is a ton. We have to blow up a bridge using conveniently placed cardboard boxes and a detonator. Even though said bridge is so low that the enemies could literally swim across (or walk) the river and walk up the hill on the other side. Wow. The explosions in the game are ungodly huge compared the amount of explosions we placed. I put one tiny cardboard box at the base of a fallen tree; the resulting explosion began from the center of that tree (which was very large) and literally obliterated the entire thing. Yet moments later we had to place five bombs for a same sized tree and got the EXACT SAME EXPLOSION! Just, wow. Hell we even tried to blow up a radio tower once and after the explosion, the only thing that changed was that the base of the tower was black. Then entire thing was still standing!

            Finally, we are put into moments where we have to drive an ATV/ or Jet Ski to pick up, again conveniently located bombs, and place them in the area we need to blow up. How does that work? We basically drive over the bomb, which makes it so it’s automatically strapped onto our vehicle. We then drive to the detonation area and as soon as we are in range, the bomb is magically placed and armed. I normally wouldn’t give a crap about those petty inconveniences, but when it’s a co-op campaign placed on the same disc as a solo campaign that took the time to fully develop itself so I never asked, hmm how did that bomb just randomly show up there? Why didn’t this happen when it should have? It’s just hard to forgive such crap when I know what their true potential is. Jason Brody would have gotten his lazy ass off of the ATV and placed the bomb on it rather than just running it over. There you have it. The Fan effing Tastic and the Horrendously Ugly. There is nothing bad about Far Cry 3, just good and ugly in two different components. I hope you enjoyed this nonsensical post. Stay tuned for more.