Ubisoft Montreal’s Far Cry 2 is not an inviting game. Like the war-torn (and presumably fictional) African state it depicts, Far Cry 2 is brutal, sparse, and offers little guidance.

Right from the start, your vulnerabilities are made clear: weapons you find on the ground rust and jam; you periodically suffer the effects of malaria; damaged vehicles require basic engine maintenance; and serious injuries demand improvised surgery, often with pliers.

On top of that, combat encounters (often approached with those rusted, jamming-prone guns) are fairly straightforward FPS affairs, and with the amount of mission-to-mission driving required in the game’s enormous open world, their frequency can grate.

Many gamers have gone online to post initial frustrations with the game — an understandable reaction from the perspective of somebody unaccustomed to its structure and design ethic, particularly in the context of an FPS.

But in the week since its release, there has been an interesting phenomenon unfolding. I have seen more and more posts by people announcing that Far Cry 2 finally “clicks” with them, that they have internalized the game’s structure and systems, and have been rewarded with unique, memorable moments.

For me, those have been Far Cry 2’s stock in trade. Game designers often speak about the dominance of the personal player story over the designer’s authored narrative. Indeed, that potential is powerful, and clearly more relevant to games than any other entertainment medium. But practically speaking, to me, relatively few games truly exploit that potential.

Far Cry 2 has been an exception. (more…)

When I think about Fable II, I think about real estate and sex.

That’s not to say the game’s mechanics surrounding those elements define the game, but I’ll focus on them here because they are areas not commonly explored in the actual gameplay mechanics of most fantasy-set action RPG.

At least, they aren’t often included with this kind of impressively egalitarian scope. With remarkably few exceptions, all property that seems like it should be ownable in the game can be purchased, be it a private home or a place of business. This includes a castle.

And matching that breadth, so too can you marry or engage in (strictly off-screen) intercourse with nearly any non-quest-related NPC with whom your sexual orientation and gender are compatible; each citizen is classified as straight, gay, lesbian, or bisexual, and nobody in Albion has passed a defense of marriage amendment.

Developer Lionhead Studios (and, one suspects, designer Peter Molyneux in particular) very much wants you to be aware of its sex-related feature set: the first item I encountered for sale by a merchant was a condom. Not long afterwards, my dog excitedly guided me to some buried treasure, and then panted and wagged his tail excitedly as I dug up another prophylactic. (more…)

So far, so good with the weekly schedule. We recorded the second episode of Idle Thumbs last night and got it published this morning.

This week features plenty of hands-on reporting on Diablo III and StarCraft II, as well as discussion about the various Blizzard announcements (some of which are a little controversial) and a bit from TGS. There’s also plenty of hands-on from LittleBigPlanet and Fable II. Hands-on is in the air. ‘Tis the season.

Also, I composed and recorded the track “The Fanboy’s Lament,” this episode’s namesake. It can be heard during the podcast in context, with the discussion of the events that prompted it, or downloaded directly from the Idle Thumbs front page. The goal is to feature this kind of musical interlude from time to time on the show if people enjoy it.

Be sure to subscribe to our RSS if you haven’t yet, and we do have iTunes up now. Tell your friends about Idle Thumbs! We don’t really know how to promote this thing.

And feel free to send questions, comments, or feedback to questions@idlethumbs.net — we’ll read and address it on the show.

(Update: iTunes support kicked in! Hooray!)

First things first: Idle Thumbs is back in podcast form. Go check it out. If you never knew Idle Thumbs existed in the first place (a likely scenario), feel free to read on for some self-indulgent history and explanation:

In 2004, as part of a team of mainly San Francisco Bay Area- and United Kingdom-based writers, I helped launch Idle Thumbs, a gaming site that (we think) at least partially succeeded in its goal of delivering video game writing simultaneously entertaining and informed. It’s hard to pin down what exactly the Thumbs ethic was (there was more than one heated argument to that end) but it definitely had one.

At least, for a little while. As it turns out, that sort of endeavor is difficult to maintain indefinitely, particularly when you’re doing it entirely in your free time. On top of that, the limited-but-fairly-unusual exposure we got through the site became for many of us something of a springboard to other (paying) jobs involving games. (more…)

I rarely make posts devoted solely to content published elsewhere as part of my job, but I did want to mention an interview that ran today on Gamasutra that I conducted with Dead Space’s producer Chuck Beaver. It was one of the more enjoyable interviews I’ve done recently, because Chuck was able to speak easily and entertainingly about the considerably thought he and his team put into the game’s design decisions. It’s always fun to be able to speak with somebody who can deliver a relevant response even when I get off the rails a bit with my questions.

From what I’ve seen and played, Dead Space seems to be one of those games that won’t be hailed as revolutionary inside and out, but will try its hand with a few intriguing progressive design elements and, perhaps more importantly, coalesces around a fairly defined and coherent design sensibility.

For example, the HUD interface, which takes the form of a projected hologram manipulated by the third-person protagonist, isn’t functionally innovative, but from a design perspective seems to take the best part of an in-world UI (the realism) and the best part of a traditional separate-screen menu (its cleanliness and straightforwardness). It’s not groundbreaking, but it’s very slick, and adds to the realization of the sci-fi game world.

Here are some excerpts:

You were saying when you make decisions about “no cutscenes” or the integrated UI, one of the hardest parts [of development] can be convincing [the team] to do it in the first place.

CB: Yeah. People are really almost religious about their belief in what we should and shouldn’t do. It’s a big binary switch, like, “Are we going to have cutscenes, or are we not going to have cutscenes?” because it’s a big, big deal in design. When we decided in the beginning that we were going to take [the switch], we’re like, “Alright, let’s go for it. Let’s go for it!” (more…)

Due to a strange quirk of my gaming history, I never played a numbered Civilization game beyond the original Civ (also known as Sid Meier’s Civilization: Build an Empire to Stand the Test of Time). That game I utterly consumed back in the early 90s when it was released, probably completing the game with every possible combination of civilization and victory condition.

Civ II, for example, wasn’t released until 1996, five years after its predecessor (I had spent much of that intervening period playing Civ), and at that point Quake, and then the mod Quake 40K/Chapter Honour (boy, there’s a site I haven’t seen in ages), become my time-sucking game of choice.

During most periods of my life, I’ve tried to consistently play games in a variety of genres—in the 90s, I was mainly into adventure games, shooters, and strategy games—but I’ve also generally had one game that lurks in the background, filling the cracks in my gaming time between this title or that title. Civ was probably the first game to hold that honor. (more…)