Baroness Thatcher and her legacy-NOPE VIDJA GAMES.

I was thinking about writing something about the passing of Baroness Thatcher today, but I've thought against it as it would be pointless waffle: nearly every newspaper has decided that she was the greatest most wonderful and perfect being on all creation so that's that. And if you disagree you're basically a baby rapist. I mean, I would of liked some debate. I won't sit here banging a drum declaring that she was the anti-Christ. She did a lot of things. Some of which, in my opinion, was for the best for this county. Others of which had a detrimental effect. Could we have a debate about whether one outweighs the other?

Yes, over 30 pages of tribute, which was standard for everyone else.

Er. I guess that's a no, then. Most wonderful perfect being ever. Got it.

So I'm going to talk about Farcry 3 some more. From here on in, I will be discussing the game including the endings, so... spoilers. For everything. You have been warned.

One of the things I previously mentioned I like about Farcry 3 was how it was way more intelligent than I originally expected. Of course, when you're playing a whiz bang shooter that isn't really saying much, but if definitely explored a variety of themes I haven't seen before... probably until I get round to going through Spec Ops: The Line. I was interested in how they started your character: as a colossal dudebro jackass Jason. You get thirty seconds establishing what a colossal dudebro jackass you and your friends are before being dumped into a cage with your brother and this guy:

Oh, hey Vaas? How ya doing?

More on that guy later. Oh god, more on that guy later.

And as you escape, you totally freak out. Which, you know, it totally fair. This scenario is a little out of most people's comfort zone. And your brother keeps you alive... until he's shot in the throat, and you spend a futile minute trying to hold his neck together as he chokes and bleeds out. Whilst you stare at him, and he stares back at you. Completely unable to help. It felt like a switch had taken place, as in order to explain the amount of ass kicking and weapon proficiency that would later take place your expect the elder brother with military training to be the main protagonist, not the first victim, so the younger, irresponsible brother is pushed into the limelight instead. Most strange as well that they had Jason panic, as most whiz bang shooter leads only get to be angry, as fear is like, for wimps.

It's a very curious thing that older horror movies tried to have sympathetic and relatable characters so that you'd connect with them and be tense, hoping they'd pull through whereas today most horror movies characters are bloody awful examples of human beings, and you're actively encouraged to cheer for their deaths. Here, in Farcry 3, we start with the latter scenario, but as control is given to you, and you stare through his eyes, your Jason and his friends become the former. I wanted to get everyone out – no one deserved this.

So you go get them back over the course of the game, as you wake up after escaping to a bloke tattooing your arm and telling you that you're totally a warrior. Ah, the 'chosen one standby,' happily explaining why we've been sitting on our asses for so long and why we're going to let you do everything. Any arguments over a man tattooing me without consent whilst I slept was mitigated by the fact it is a bitchin' tattoo, not something lame like a Fluttershy tattoo. Of course, yes, you are the fabled warrior to help them out, as if you were snivelling in police custody for months it wouldn't make for an exciting game. So, grab a pistol, time to do stuff.

Here's where I nitpick a little: you can only carry so much crap on you because your holsters and webbing is only so big, and you need to upgrade them over time. Makes sense. However, from the get go, you can effectively use every weapon in the game. Let's be honest here, I've never handled a gun. I might – just might – be able to figure out how to reload a pistol due to thier pop culture popularity. I mean, there's only so many moving parts, a short play would hopefully help me figure things out. However, if you handed me a grenade launcher or one of these...

Oh god, is that belt fed? How would you reload that? I'm just a British man-child!

I'd have no fucking clue. Hell, how would I fire one? The laws of physics suggest the recoil would be intense. And guns are fairly point-and-click. Bows on the other hand, that I used quite heavily in game? That would require some serious training. And it's never mentioned that Jason is an expert in all types of ordinance ahead of time. It seems odd to me that they didn't try to explain this, or have me be trained over the course of the story. But it's a small enough nitpick – it's a common video game issue, as Half Life for one demonstrates.

Back to intelligent bits. Farcry 3 makes a very good example of changing mindsets for the worse. As you start, you entire motivation is to 'I must save my friends.' Well, in that case, if you want help: go clear out that outpost. Go capture these explosives. Go tickle this baby goat. Etc. As time progresses and challenges mount, it subtly shifts to 'I must get stronger to save my friends.' Before long, as the body count rises, it moves a little bit more. 'I want to get revenge for my friends.' It's not long after that until 'I want to kill Vass and his boss, Hoyt.' Little, subtle, baby steps, from good and noble intentions to a rocky path. I found it especially intriguing when you talk to a friend about how killing people has stopped feeling wrong, and has started to feel like winning, with no Charlie Sheen joke to be seen. The tragic thing is that person who most would have been able to assist Jason confront these feelings and come to terms with them was his older brother... the first person he saw die.

That being said Farcry 3 friends, don't give me shit anymore, okay? When I come barrelling through the door to your compound, bow in one hand, flames covering the other, and fifty dead men behind me, that, that was officially the time that you lost the ability to ever give me shit for anything ever again. Ever. Okay, fine, I left you there for two months as I scoured the land looking for tapirs to kill and skin to make bigger wallets and quivers. But it wasn't like I wasn't going to save you! I needed it! How could possibly save you without them? Okay, fine, I probably could of without, but it was a hell of a lot easier with. And those bad guys has assault rifles! I needed every advantage I could get! So. Uh. Hope those last two months weren't too bad. Oh, and Liza? When I rescued you, don't give me shit about cheering over the mountain of corpses of dead guys. They lit us on fire, and after that grenade spamming car chase, it's perfectly natural to be having a giant adrenaline high. Actually, why aren't you having an adrenaline high?

That was another interesting aspect about Farcry 3: your relationship with your girlfriend, Liza. By the time you rescue her, you've been given enough clues to suggest that your relationship was getting strained by the time everyone went wrong, mainly on account of you be a responsibility-ducking dudebro dick. Originally, I was wary that she intended a break up prior to these events, and that by saving her you'd basically trapped her in the relationship; you can't exactly break up with the man who, as previously mentioned, broke down the door to rescue you with a bow in one hand, flames covering the other, and fifty dead men behind him. It's sorta rude. Fortunately this wasn't the case, and shows of affection in first person view were surprisingly intimate. Staring through a Jason's eyes almost felt intrusive on the quieter moments with her. However, further conditions you find yourself in don't help, especially when you have more friends to save and you younger brother is thought to be dead. Unable to process it, you turn away support and try holding things together until everything's over.

As Jason's slips into the 'Kill everyone who wronged me' mentality later, he decides to stay on the island with the people who he's been helping, with Citra – leader of the Rakyat warriors who assists you, a woman who understands and encourages his current frame of mind. When he breaks this to everyone that he isn't leaving, effectively ending his relationship with Liza as well, it's heartbreaking. She states specifically that she's been waiting for you to grow up, to shoulder responsibility as you do know for so long, so that she can see you reaching your potential she saw you capable of for so long... and now that it's happened, it's over, and it hurts. Farcry 3. Has deep emotional moments with the changing of set relationships between romantically attached characters. I was surprised as you are.

Now I want to talk about Vaas.

Vaas is fucking terrifying.

I cannot express just how much I did not want to be in the same room as his man. This man fucking terrified me. His walk, his baring, the way he talked; this was a man who one day woke up and truly realised to himself one terrible fact – he did not have to abide by any moral code if he did not want to. That he did not have to suffer any consequences if he did not want to. It's chilling. Look at this scene:

Yeah. When I went to kill him, I didn't want it to be up close, I wanted it through the scope of an over-powered sniper rifle as extreme distance. Knowing he was close to you or people you cared about? You had no idea what he would do, for no other reason than 'because.' I haven't seen a man define 'insane' like this apart from the Joker. And it completely sucked when you killed him, as Hoyt was not a good enough follow up. Hoyt was a business man. Big. Fucking. Whoop. It should have been the other way round: you take an opportunity on the fly to kill Hoyt, you succeed, and Vaas takes over his organisation and everything goes to hell. Further. Way better.

Hoyt and Buck was another thing that annoyed me. Buck has one of your friends, who he is implied to be merrily raping away, and you do jobs for him to retrieve a knife he wants. Okay. Fine. But when the trade off happened, he tried to kill you. Okay. Fine. He's a bad guy. Whatever. But when I walking into his shack, and he pointed to downstairs, the game ignored a critical thing. Remember that gun I showed you earlier? When I walked into Buck's shack, I WAS CARRYING ONE. (A heavily modified one, in fact, to make it even more dangerous.) Amongst other things, like a bow with explosive arrows, a silenced SMG of doom and a silenced sniper rifle if I remember correctly. Walking arsenal, thy name is Jason. So having Buck, in his underwear, no less, try to use said knife to kill me and I knife fight him back... yeah. That was weird. It wasn't like I didn't have options. All I could think of when he advanced on me was, 'This gun in my hands can fire around 650-750 rounds a minute, with a muzzle velocity of around 825 metres a second. It seriously fucks shit up. Why aren't I using it? Sigh.' 

A similar scenario happens with Hoyt. After making a big deal that you intend to infiltrate his organization to get close enough to kill him, you end up in his office alone with him as he talks to you about globalisation, before you get up and leave to torture someone on his request. Uh. Jason. Repeat to me back your goal again? What are you doing? Get close enough and...? Yes...? KILL HIM YOU DOLT. Once again, by that point, I was carrying FOUR silenced weapons. Shoot him and sneak out! Fuck it, knife him and sneak out even! Damn it Jason. This is why you end up being unable to count to ten using all your fingers. At least Buck was a boss fight!

While Buck was an example of an evil man who was gay, I would like to point out a surprising scene, considering I was wondering if the game was unfortunately unintentionally implying that gay = evil. One random quest I got was to investigate the husband of a wife who was afraid he was cheating on her with some woman. She was... half right. No woman, but he was cheating on her. And the conversion and delivery impressed me. Firstly, the overheard conversation between the husband as his male lover never referred to sex (although, yes, it was obviously happening) but the lover's hurt over the fact that at the end of the day he left him to go back to her, and it was killing him being apart like that. When you confronted the husband, you told him to man up – not that a homosexual relationship was deemed not masculine, but the dishonesty was. And the final words of the husband was that he had hurt both the people he loved, and deserved neither. One quick quest, and handled with great maturity. It says something disappointing about video games when the fact neither husband nor his lover spoke with an effeminate lisp surprised me. Video games rarely handle homosexual relationships with anything approaching maturity, so big kudos to the writers, develops, and publisher here. (On the other hand, they might be implying that lying is a feminine trait and gay people are evil, raping, cheating bastards, but I'm pretty sure that's not what they were going for.)

And one tiny little final nitpick about the main game: When you clear out an outpost of the previous inhabitants, Rakyat warriors drive up to man it. It is not cool, Farcry 3, to have those warriors then verbally announce how awesome they were. I just cleared out the base. Not them. They didn't dare move until every single person was dead. I went in alone. I don't want to listen to them bragging about something they didn't do. I mean, sometimes even I didn't brag, like when I once freed an emu by shooting out it's cage, and it slaughtered the whole damn base, and when I tried to get into the base afterwards to chased me off and I ran straight into a perfect dick-height thorn bush. No bragging was done that night.

Now comes the bit I discuss the ending. So, if you weren't paying attention to the spoiler warnings before, pay attention now, you jackass.

When the game ends, you're rescuing your little brother who you'd previously thought dead, who fortunately finds that operating a helicopter and aeroplane are totally alike.

Basically the same thing.

As you go to recover your friends, your allies the Rakyat warriors, on orders of Citra, raid their hiding place and kidnap them. When you arrive at her temple, a real big 'WTF' at the ready, she does what she always does around you; dose you to the eyeballs with a new drug. Whee. When you come to, you're holding a knife to your girlfriend's throat, Liza (though technically ex-girlfriend may be more appropriate,) and given a choice: To kill your friends, or to spare them.

Let's continue firstly under the assumption you let your friends live.

Citra? Hi, Citra? Uh, you remember why I came here in the first place, right? To save these guys and gals? To get strong enough to save these people? Yes, sure, I may have gone off the deep end with the desire to kill Vaas and Hoyt overriding that, but that was back when I thought I was two brothers down and it now turns out it's only one. He's over there, at the back, where you trussed him up. Say hi, Riley. Citra, Riley, Riley, Citra. It's important to meet each other's family. We've all met her brother, Vaas, right? We all remember? Well, of course we remember, he's the one who kidnapped us, hah, not going to forget that... er... yeaaaah. Okay.

Moving on. 

Even assuming I was still riding the revenge train, you do realise the root cause of my growth was to rescue these people right? I spent a lot of time, ammo, blood, sweat and tears that one time I stumbled into a thorn bush groin-first frantically fleeing from a emu. And look, I already established I was staying. With you, you crazy drug-addled bitch. Christ. Yes, please go on about how my friends would only live boring lives settling down when my true destiny was to be a warrior – that is what I was aiming for. They go away, live safe, and I stay here. God. We should probably rethink this thing we've got going. While admittedly, I'm liking the sexual implications of the whole 'I just want to worship you' thing, I'm remembering some old advice about crazy bitches. So. Liza. So sorry about this. This entire situation is messed up to hell and back. Can we talk about this later, when we're good and safe? Please ignore the ranting nutter. Yes, she's working herself up something fierce, shhh, don't make eye contact, I think she might be on drugs. Just a hunch. Oh look, here's my friend Dennis, he'll calm things down.

Dennis, you suck at calming thing down.

Okay, that happened. Right. This is awkward. You know I was going to not bring up the state of mine and Citra's relationship, Liza, but it's kind of obvious Citra and I had a thing the way she saved me and you know what? I'm blathering. This is all... this is all... very sad. With your leader dying, and all. Sorry. I didn't do it. He did. Bad Dennis. Ah. Everyone untied? Yes? The helicopter's still out front. Let's ghet out of the Rakyat's way, let them grieve, and stuff... we'll just... yeah. Hah. Yeah. Sorry about this. Just... we're just gonna go, right? Right. See you.

Oh course, you could decide to kill you friends... because, so Citra sexes you up, and then this happens.

Um, if I wasn't very good or finished too fast baby, there were other ways to get this across.

Okay, Citra? I'm going to be honest with you. I think we need to see other people. This relationship clearly isn't going anywhere. What with the fact we're different people, wanting different things, and there's the fact you just stabbed me in the chest.

You know what, I'm not going to be petty bring that up right now. I will bring up your plan instead. Look. I get your plan. Kind of. You want me to be the ultimate warrior, and then have my child, and then kill me at my height so I am forever the ultimate warrior without any diminishing things, such as aging, having an off day, etc. I see the train of logic there. It's not good logic at all, but if I squint my brain I sorta see it. However, we have had sex once. Just the once. Maybe twice. You see that confusion is the important thing: I have done a lot of drugs recently. A staggering amount of drugs really. I've been going through them at an alarming rate, what with the fighting and hunting animals and stuff. How I haven't had multiple cardiac arrests astounds me. I've seen better veins on hobo corpses. And I know you know this, because you've given me half of them. Considering the amount of beating I've also been taking, with rampant drug abuse, and that one time I ran in a thorn bush groin first – I don't want to talk about that right now – I can say with some degree of certainty that my sperm count may not be at it's best right now. Most couples with healthy sperm don't get that lucky first time. So I'm just saying, killing me now? Perhaps a little too soon. Please don't take this for me being a typical guy, trying to get more sex out of you, I'm just offering constructive criticism to your plan and you probably should of had way more sex with me. Incidentally, I have pair of pink furry handcuffs in my loot sack, 'cos I'm guessing your the kinky type. Just an idea, right?

And if you don't get preggars this one time, you've got a problem, because you need a child to lead this clan, and you can't just grab another guy as I'm the only white guy here. No wait, that sounded bad when I said that out loud, I'm not implying any race is superior to the other, I am not trying being racist or anything, but you need the kid to look like me, right? It's just that every other white guy on these islands? So dead. I just came back from grinding that flamethrower achievement, and let's be honest, no mercenary is coming to this island to fill staff shortages where the last fifty people all died via generous application of flamethrower. It puts people off. That and they'll be no more staff hirings anyway, because I killed the head honcho and burnt down his base. I was very thorough in that regard, I'm afraid.

Besides, I'm not entirely sure that I'm this 'ultimate warrior' thing you want. I'm still a shit shot with a bow, for example. Half the knifing quests I've yet to do because I got bored when money stopped mattering. Also, I'd imagine an 'ultimate warrior' might of, you know, not let himself get stabbed. I imagine a real ultimate warrior would of hip-thrusted you over, disarmed you, thrown your knife killing another dude for funsies, made you orgasm and getting you instantly preggars to boot in one simultaneous move. That would have been badass. Instead I laid here and got stabbed like a chump. Be a dear and get me some medical attention, please? I'm not angry with you. We'll just call this a wacky misunderstanding and move on-ohwaitmyfriendsarealldead. Huh. Ah. Crap.

Also, woman, did you just seriously stab me in the chest? Really? You know what, I will be petty, now I am bringing it up. Not cool. Kinda dick move. Also, you must of noticed this before: this isn't the first time this has happened. We're kinda naked here, surely you can see the giant ass scar where Vaas did the same exact thing. Okay, fine, not the same exact thing, my penis wasn't in him at the time, for example, but you get the drift. And I killed the fuck out Vaas afterwards. So fine. Let's do this. You versus me. We'll call this little scratch a handicap.

Wait. Something just occurred to me.

Vaas. You said it was his destiny to lead the clan right? Your brother? To be head of the Rakyat? As... the ultimate warrior?

Was... was it meant to be Vaas here that you were riding?

Oh that explains so god damn much. You know what? Fuck this. I'm out.