PC Game Fun Time

The videogame industry is in the midst of a booming trend towards realism in games. In the first few generations of videogames, the graphics were sufficiently bad that they couldn’t come close to mimicking anything real anyway, so designers didn’t even try; hence Italian plumbers jumping on side-stepping anthropomorphic mushrooms. But shortly thereafter, rotoscoping lead to the first generation of videogames that tried to be realistic, and the trend has continued picking up pace to this very day.

This is how we find ourselves confronted with Far Cry 2, a game that tries so hard to be realistic that it only succeeds in highlighting, with neon strobes, the differences between the game world and the real world. If Far Cry 2 actually wanted to be realistic, it could have easily done so. Look at America’s Army as a good example of FPS realism: there’s no respawning, and medics can’t cure wounds; the best they can do is stabilize your condition so you don’t keep getting worse. Far Cry 2 is no America’s Army: it’s a traditional FPS that tries to disguise the non-realistic trappings of the genre, and fails horribly at it.

Far Cry 2 uses the amorphous concept of hit points like pretty much every first person shooter, but doesn’t label it as such. Get dinged up in a fight? Simply inject yourself — the game doesn’t make it clear what it is, but it’s presumably something like epinephrine — and your wounds are magically healed. Unless you’ve been badly wounded, in which case you first need to use pliers to extract the bullet from your gaping wound before giving yourself the shot. Because, and this is a little known fact, when you’re shot with a bullet, all the damage is actually caused by the presence of the bullet in your body (not the huge gaping hole it ripped through it), and so all gunshot wounds can be cured simply by removing the bullet. And, logically, gunshot wounds where the bullet passes entirely through you are self-curing. The injection system fails so badly at conveying realism that the only way to really explain it is by using the trappings of the FPS genre: those syringes must be full of pure, uncut, unadulterated liquid hit points, much like how the injections in Bioshock could best be explained as liquid mana.

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