I’m gonna have a lot to say about Far Cry 3 in the next few weeks, as it’s a game with a lot of fantastic features and some seriously baffling shortcomings. So, I’m gonna go piece by piece, and I want to start off with one of the high points: the animals.

There are a lot of animals in Far Cry 3. From farm animals like chickens and pigs, to sea creatures like sharks, rays, and turtles, to birds like vultures and these horrible vicious walking birds that I can’t remember what they’re called but they’re very mean. There are bears, panthers, tigers, leopards, boars, buffalo, komodo dragons, crocodiles, and even crabs (though they’re not mudcrabs, as everyone is not constantly discussing them).

The animals have a couple purposes: you can hunt most of them for their skins, which allows you to craft things, like extra holsters for more weapons, bigger ammo bags for more bullets and explosives, and bigger satchels for more health syringes. They also have second purpose, a more important purpose, and that is to make the game incredibly and hilariously unpredictable. The animals roam where they want, and often in the midst of exploring or combat, they’ll just sort of pop up and make a big hilarious mess of things.

Here’s my bullet points of the most enjoyable, funny, and deadly animal encounters I’ve had:

• While exploring, I came across a group of pigs crossing a bridge. I just think that’s about the best thing I’ve ever seen.

ERMEHGERD: BERGE PERGS

• Climbing a radio tower, I heard shouting and gunshots below, and figured I’d been made. Nope. Just a komodo dragon attacking and killing two enemy soldiers, and then proceeding to chase down and kill some nearby goats. Somebody was hungwee!
• I was trying to flush an enemy thug from behind a tree, so I chucked a grenade. He saw it, took two panicked steps out from cover, and was promptly savaged to death by a leaping tiger neither of us knew was there.
• After taking over an enemy stronghold, I found a cage with a giant walking bird in it. I said “Aw, don’t lock up a giant bird, you jerks!” and let it out. It promptly kicked the shit out of me.
• While creeping through tall grass toward an enemy stronghold, I heard a grunt. I looked to my left and saw a pig just as he looked to his right and saw me. We both went on our way, me to conduct my violence and him to conduct his pig business.
• Deer on a beach? Why not. Deer on a beach.

I hunted them with my most reliable weapon: the Jeep I was driving.

• I successfully fended off an attacking leopard, only to turn around and get the shit kicked out of me by one of those giant walking birds. Again.
• While perched on a cliffside, trying to snipe an enemy on the road below, a boar charged me from behind and knocked me off the cliff, to my death.
• While taking an extended hang glider tour, a vulture swooped in and flew along side me for a bit. Good idea. Stick with me, and you’ll have plenty of corpses to dine on. Possibly including mine.
• While cornered in a shack by two enemy soldiers, I heard a roar. Then nothing. When I peeped outside, I saw a leopard had dispatched them both.

Who’s a good leopard? You is! Yes you is!

• While trying to run over a komodo dragon with an ATV (I HAD MY REASONS) he slithered out of the way and I drove off a cliff and died.
• After taking over a stronghold, a group of those big walking birds wandered in and basically kicked the shit out of my allies. I just sort of watched, thinking there was no way three guys with automatic weapons could lose a fight to four birds. But lose they did. Those birds are jerks!

My money is on the bird.

• Finally, there are sea turtles. They don’t try to kill me or nothin’.

So, I finished up L.A. Noire, at least the main storyline cases.

Overall, I really enjoyed it. The game has plenty of problems and there are a number of elements I wish had been handled differently, but I have to give Rockstar and Team Bondi some kudos for trying something a little different and succeeding where they did. Looks like it took me about 27 hours to finish the cases, handle about half the street crimes, and just muck around in general: well worth the price, and I’ll probably play a little more from time to time until there’s some DLC.

As for where they failed and succeeded, well, I don’t want to get specific. There’s some mostly general, non-spoilery stuff below.

• I didn’t really care for the detective you play, Cole Phelps. That isn’t to say he wasn’t well-written or performed; he was. I just didn’t like him much, and even with his back-story revealed, I just didn’t care that much about him. I think I felt more empathy for Niko Bellic, which is kinda weird.
• Cole’s partners were very well done. You get a few different partners depending on which desk you’re working, and I thought they were great and evolved nicely as the game proceeded.
• Examining clues was just plain fun. I will never, ever tire of having a roomful of stuff to pick up and examine. If you could have picked up an examined every single object in the world, I would have done so. It’s just neat, even with items that have no relevance to the case.
• Someone should make a detective mod for Oblivion or Fallout 3, where you actually can pick up and interact with every single object in the world. I would play the shit out of that.
• A couple bugs: there was a remaining clue in a location in a certain case, but even using the intuition feature that told me exactly where it was, there was nothing there. Unless it was buried in the floor, but I didn’t have a jackhammer either way.
• At one point while driving through a neighborhood, I pulled into the driveway of a large house, just to look at it. When I stopped, a large, closed gate rendered directly behind me, meaning I couldn’t exit the driveway, and had to restart.
• During one chase, an empty car materialized in the sky, and plummeted about fifty feet down onto the street. Not complaining: it was funny as hell. I think the script called for the fleeing suspect to crash into someone, and there was no one around, so the game just created a car in mid-air to satisfy its requirements.
• The overall story didn’t please me that much. Part of it was that I figured out something way ahead of where the game apparently wanted me to (I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about the same thing, so I’m not saying I’m some kind of detective genius). Part of it was not really caring much about Phelps. Part of it was just kind of weird.
• I can see what they were going for with the overall story, though. I just don’t think it was a success. I can’t really be any more specific than that without spoilers. I’ll probably do a spoiler-heavy article in the future when more people have played and finished.
• There are some genuine, eye-rollingly clunky moments in the game. It feels like they threw a lot of ideas into a pan but didn’t bake them long enough.
• There’s a lot more action in the game than I originally thought. This is fine: I like shooting people. It makes a nice change of pace from closely examining hairbrushes and carrots. But there is so much action in places it just feels a little incongruous with the general slow, deliberate pace of the game.
• I never really got very good at interrogating people. Lies, I get: they say something, I have evidence that shows otherwise, I confront them with it. Truth vs. Doubt seems a little wiggly, though, and Doubt always seems to end with my blowing my top when perhaps a more cool-headed approach seems in order. Maybe some sort of interrogation strategy option would have been good: Make Nice vs. Intimidate. Good Cop vs. Bad Cop. That kinda thing. I know from reading books and stuff that a lot of successful interrogations result from making the suspect feel like you completely understand and agree with what they did, or from telling them you know stuff that you don’t actually know. There wasn’t much of that in the game. Mainly, Phelps just yelled at people.
• I wish there was more to do, I guess — Los Angeles, for me, remains largely unexplored.
• I can walk into restaurants, and sit down, but I can’t figure out how to order drinks or food. Maybe some games of darts or pool or bowling, like in GTA, would have been nice. Though I’m glad Phelps doesn’t have to go on dates.
• Street crime is fun enough, but I wish there were a few of those “people in need” from GTA, where you could stop, talk to an informant or acquaintance, maybe help out or get involved in some off-the-books crime solving or muscle work.
• Definitely looking forward to DLC. I welcome more individual, stand-alone cases.

Something that’s cool and shows just how different this game is from GTA, according to my stats:

My time spent brawling: 12 minutes

My time spent gunfighting: 1 hour, 55 minutes

My time spent examining clues: 3 hours, 16 minutes

Los Angeles. Nineteen-forty-something-or-so. My name? Chris Livingston. I’m a police officer. My name? Cole Phelps. So, uh… forget about the Chris Livingston thing. I got confused.

I’m investigating a murder. It’s not just any old murder. It’s a tutorial murder. Maybe it’s the damn heat, or maybe it’s just this damn city, but tutorial murders are up 23% on my beat. Damn these tutorials! They cost too many lives. Lives this damn city can’t afford.

I find a gun, and take it to a gun dealer to see what’s what. The gun dealer won’t give me a damn thing, except for the fact that he had the gun in his shop, that he sold the gun, the name of the person he sold it to, and that person’s home address. Fine, play it cool, Buster. Let’s see how cool you are when I closely examine all the DECORATIVE WOODEN DUCKS you’ve got in your store. Feel like talking now? Oh, wait, you did talk, and you’ve been extremely helpful. I’ll just put all your decorative wooden ducks back and leave. Thank you for your time, sir.

So, yeah! I started playing L.A. Noire yesterday on X-Box 360, and here are my thoughts in bullet-point form. I won’t spoil any specifics of the cases (I’ve only played through three of them so far).

• I’m almost instantly in love with this game. I have a notebook. A NOTEBOOK. Everything I find — every clue, every detail, every witness statement, every location, every suspect — goes into my notebook. I love my notebook.
• I think Rockstar/Bondi looked into my brain and mapped out exactly how I wanted crime scene investigations to work. It’s great. Examine the body, search the pockets, hunt around for nearby clues. Not everything you find is a clue. Sometimes decorative wooden ducks are just decorative wooden ducks.
• Okay, the much-heralded motion-captured facial expressions. They’re a little weird, especially pasted onto very generic looking computer game bodies. As a complete package, the characters are kind of awkward. It’s sort of like how in The Incredibles, everyone has cartoony bodies but ultra-realistic hair. Doesn’t quite all fit together.
• That mis-match aside, the facial expressions are undeniably great. You can really see the actors’ performances, and it makes a world of difference, not just when interrogating a suspect but when someone — a witness, your partner, another cop — is talking to you. It’s just fantastic. I just stare like a gob-smacked owl anytime anyone is talking to me.
• The interrogation itself is a little lacking. You ask someone about a topic from your notebook, they answer, you can choose to believe them, doubt them, or decide they’re lying, but you have no idea what you’re going to say to the suspect after choosing from those options. I think a Mass Effect dialogue wheel might have been better to let me feel a little more personally involved, for a more tailor-made interrogation.
• Doubting and lying seem to equal yelling like a mean jerk. I was talking to an underage victim and she was clearly lying, and I was a big old mean jerk to her, and I didn’t want to be. So, that’s not so great. At least give me a good cop button and a bad cop button.
• If you decide someone is lying, you need some evidence to confront them with or they can shut you out.
• Sometimes you can talk to someone, gather evidence, and talk to them again. Sometimes you can’t.
• I do love that while looking through your notebook, you can look up at your witness or suspect and observe them squirming. Or not squirming. It’s fun.
• There seem to be multiple ways to solve a case. I screwed up an interrogation: I thought a suspect was lying, but didn’t have evidence to prove it, so the interrogation didn’t lead anywhere. I got to follow the suspect, though, and wound up solving the case that way. Fantastic.
• You can also partially solve cases. In one instance, I nailed one person for a crime, but someone else who was almost definitely guilty got away because I didn’t gather all the evidence I should have.
• Cases you’ve completed are replayable independently from the main menu, so you can try them again as sort of a stand-alone experience: also great.
• Flashbacks! My brain is remembering things and I don’t care about them right now. I just want to solve my case.
• The huge explorable city of 1940’s Los Angeles laid out for me like a glittering whatever. I don’t care about it right now, I just want to solve my case.
• Apparently, there are 95 different cars I can discover and drive! DON’T CARE. WANT SOLVE CASE.
• Seriously. This game could be taking place on gm_flatgrass in Garry’s Mod for all I care. I don’t want to explore, or drive, or remember things about my past. At all. I just want to solve cases!
• There is some shooting in this game. I care about it a little because I like shooting. But mostly, I’d prefer to use my notebook instead of my gun, and most of the game is about your notebook.
• While driving a cop car, you can answer radio calls, which take you to street crimes. I did one street crime, which involved chasing a dude and shooting him. Chasing is kind of fun, and so is shooting.
• There is a pretty big, ridiculous gunfight at one point. It’s entertaining and silly. I guess after a couple hours of walking and talking, it’s nice to see things explode. But I’m still eager to get back to walking and talking.
• Sometimes the instructions flash on the screen too quickly and I miss them, because they’re explaining what to do at the same moment I’m supposed to be doing it. Sometimes they don’t explain things at all, like how to fire warning shots. It took me like five replays to learn how to fire a warning shot because I didn’t know that was what I was supposed to be doing.
• I think this is a pretty ballsy game. I know critics are loving it, and I’m loving it, but it’s almost entirely talking, taking notes, and examining clues. Curious how it’s going to go over with the mainstream crowd who are maybe expecting Grand Theft Auto: Noire and are instead getting Grand Talking To People: About Murders.
• I mean, part of the appeal of GTA and Red Dead Redemption was, that when you didn’t feel like following the story you could go off on destructive rampages for a bit. I don’t know how to rampage in L.A. Noire. There doesn’t even seem to be a way to pull your gun unless a crook is involved. I guess you can drive around fast and crash into things, but that’s about it. Again, ballsy game.
• This would be great on PC.
• What, no multiplayer? Just picture up to 24 homicide detectives wrestling over shell casings and blood spatters, then all of them cramming into a widow’s kitchen, shouting dozens of questions at her, then everyone tearing off in their own cars on the way to the next crime scene.
• Almost entirely loving it. I just wish there were comprehensive dialogue options during interrogations so I could really become my detective, instead of sitting there wondering what my detective is going to say.

Well, I finished Portal 2 last night. To avoid spoilers of any kind, this installment of Bullet Points is going to be pretty short. Even the spoiler-free reviews I read after finishing the game gave away stuff I’m much happier to have found out myself while playing, so don’t read any of them! Don’t even read this one! (Actually, this one is fine to read.)

• While I can see my entire body through a Portal, I can’t look down and see my own legs. This, of course, is not even remotely important for gameplay or enjoyment, but I think we should be out of the era of the “floating gun” style first-person game by now. Everyone should have legs. And shadows.
• Every time I settle in for a long, late-night bout of gaming, my cat strolls in and takes a huge toxic dump in the litter box. Without fail.
• I know there have been complaints about the length of the game. Too short? If anything, I felt it was maybe a bit longer than it needed to be. And yet, over so quickly at the same time. I think they got it about right.
• As the puzzles grow more challenging, I’m regularly hit with the following few thoughts:
• “I have no idea what the game wants me to do here.”
• “I’m an idiot. I can’t figure this out.”
• “Oh, okay. I see what the game wants me to do. I’m smart after all.”
• “Wait. What the game wants me to do is impossible. I know it’s not impossible, but seriously, it’s impossible.
• “Once again, I’m an idiot.”
• “Oh. Ohhhh. Okay.”
• “Boom, done. I am the smartest human being ever.”
• The Aperture facility is wonderfully realized, fun, amazingly detailed. A living, breathing, dying place.
• Again, Stephen Merchant does an amazing job with the material he is given, and the writers do an amazing job with the material they give to Stephen Merchant. I think this is the best voice performance in a game since… GLaDOS in the original Portal? What other games have such good voice performances? Is this the best voice performance ever?
• Oh, the Mass Effect games. They do a great job, too. Okay, Merchant does the best comedy voice performance, then. In a game. Ever.
• Forgot about the Lucas Arts adventure games. Great comedy voice work in a number of them.
• Look, Merchant is really good, okay?
• I spend a lot of time doing things to try to get Merchant to say more stuff. It’s often worth the extra time.
• One performance hiccup: during an especially noisy and dynamic moment, everything hangs, freezes, and stutters. Doesn’t crash, but a good 5-10 seconds of hanging/stuttering. WAY TO GO VALVE WHERE’S MY REFUND.
• I will say nothing about the ending other than that I enjoy it.
• This is a great game. Laughed out loud a number of times. Puzzles are very good, often quite challenging. The art direction and level design is fantastic. I’d maybe have trimmed out a few test chambers, as I felt impatient during some of them because I wanted to explore more of the story.
• This didn’t turn out so short, after all.
• That’s it! Play this game.

I played great gobs of Crysis 2 over the weekend. Enjoying it still, for the most part. I’m seven hours in, according to my Steam stats.

I think I’ve been a little too sloppy with posting spoilers, blatantly listing out the storyline and such, so sorry about that. I’ll try to be a little more general with my descriptions from here on out, for those of you who haven’t played but are interested.

• So, when I last checked in I was getting killed repeatedly.
• I am still there, doing that. Or having that done to me.
• My third attempt at surviving the current blitzkrieg is successful. It’s one of those fights where you’re stuck in a relatively enclosed area, and have to stand your ground until everyone is dead. These are my least favorite types of fights, as I prefer to be able to run away and hide and regenerate.
• Though I kind of liked them in Bioshock 2, because you could set up defensive perimeters and such. The stand-and-fight sequences in Crysis 2 are sprung on you, though. As I suppose they would be in real life.
• Some street skirmishes follow. I can once again run away and hide and kill people at my leisure.

• Remember the intro movie I talked about? I am now sitting in a chair watching an NPC watch it. He watches some of it twice. Take your time. Maybe you could watch some Portal 2 promo movies while you’re at it.
• More fighting after a too-long bout of not-fighting.
• I realize I am the type of person who complains about lack of story in games, but am also the type of person who, when forced to sit and listen to story, gets impatient and doesn’t listen very closely. This isn’t really fair.
• Though in my defense, the story is not being explained interestingly.
• Heh. I go to try to open an apartment door, but wind up just ringing the doorbell. Bing-bong! Cute. The apartment is full of soldiers, who have been alerted to my presence by my ringing the doorbell like I’m delivering a pizza.
• I am not delivering a pizza. I am delivering BULLETS and a six-pack of GRENADES with your choice of DEATH and a side order of GARLIC TWISTY-BREAD.
• A few more street skirmishes, including some involving aliens. Some of them kill me, and I am brought back to the last checkpoint, which is miles away. Gnurf.
• Killed again. Shit. It’s like three blocks of jumping over rooftops just to get back to the start of the fight that I keep losing.

• Alien ship flies through the city, pursued by choppers. Again, I hope I get to fly a chopper soon.
• The plot now calls for me creating a diversion.
• I kill twenty soldiers and blow a couple things up. This somehow does not count as a diversion.
• Ohhh, okay. There’s specific designated diversion targets I have to blow up. Gotcha. Thanks to the enemy soldiers for planting Diversion Bombs everywhere. I wonder what they were going to do with them.
• I’m, um… getting a little bored with fighting soldiers. Some of it is me, not being more imaginative with how I’m killing them, some of it is the game. But this bunch of soldiers I’m killing aren’t much different than the last few hundred.
• I take it back. I just got to snipe a ton of soldiers from a very high rooftop. That was fun. They are not terribly bright, these soldiers.
• Ahhh. Okay. I owe Crysis 2 a big apology. I’ve been complaining that all this killing could be avoided if only I would open my mouth and tell the enemy army I’m not who they think I am. The game just explained why I can’t do that. And it wasn’t even like an NPC looked into camera and said it, it was done very naturally through some dialogue that wasn’t even addressed to me personally. Very good.  Sorry, Crysis 2! You were right and I was wrong. I am a jerk.
• A bunch of things happen. Now, a new NPC is talking to me on the radio. I don’t like him.

• I have a bunch of alien cooties collected now, so I buy a power for my suit that will show me the routes the enemies have taken. A tracking program, in other words. As a stealth machine, I am interested in tracking.
• Wait, I shouldn’t have bought this. It’s very easy to tell what routes my enemies take because I am usually watching them from a distance through a sniper scope.
• I think this power would be useful in a jungle setting where I foliage obscures everything. Not so much in the city. Buyer’s remorse.
• Some fun fights with a bunch of friendlies and a bunch of aliens. I think these friendlies are indestructible, because I just watched one getting whaled on by an alien for a couple minutes and he didn’t die.
• Another stand-and-fight section involving loads of aliens. Stressful. By the end I’m just running around my little area firing wildly with whatever weapon I happen to be holding. I don’t care for these parts.
• Major, major me-vs-alien stuff. I am so desperate for a checkpoint because I’ve killed tons of them and don’t want to have to do it again because I killed a lot of them by sheer luck.
• For instance, I tried to switch guns, and accidentally switched to C4. I tried to fire the gun I didn’t switch to, and wound up throwing C4, which landed in the perfect spot to blow up an alien.
• If anyone was watching, it probably looked cool, but in reality I was just clicking my mouse like a total spaz.
• Checkpoint. Whew. Good place to stop.

Review Score, Part 5: Some entertaining fights, some not-so, more checkpoint woes. B

There will be no spoilers below, I’m just going to be talking in very general terms about the game (which I haven’t even finished). There’s too much fun stuff to discover on your own, which is why I avoided as much of the pre-release media blitz as I could. (And I feel like I’ve probably had too many spoilers in the Crysis 2 stuff I’ve been posting). I’m not even going to post screenshots. About the only thing I mention specifically below is about an actor who does some voice-work in the game.

Anyway. Portal 2! It’s finally here, and out a few hours early to boot. It unlocked for me around 10pm last night, and after about ten minutes of waiting for the files to decrypt, I was able to start playing. I played about two hours last night, and followed it up with a little more this morning (I called in late). I haven’t tried multiplayer yet; I want to finish the single-player stuff first.

How is it? It’s great and you should buy it and play it. Some general deets and thoughts below. If you leave a comment, please keep them spoiler-free as well.

• What do we want from a sequel to one of our favorite games ever? More of the same stuff that made the original so great, plus a whole bunch of new stuff to make it feel like a whole new game. So far, Portal 2 seems to have accomplished this.
• Looks great, runs great, and is funny almost immediately. It’s good to be back at Aperture. Screw HL2: Episode 3. I’d like a new Portal game every couple years.
• Loading screens. A lot of them. I miss the way Valve used to load levels, sort of in the background or while in an elevator, without loading screens. I assume there’s some technical reasons they can’t accomplish this anymore. The loading doesn’t take more than a few seconds on my machine, but it’s still noticeable. Not really a complaint, just an observation.
• I have to admit, I’m a little impatient with the early test chamber stuff. The puzzles are fine, and fun, and satisfying enough due to some new puzzle elements, but what I really want is more story. Luckily, there is plenty more story.
• Stephen Merchant voices a character. He does a great job, very funny and charming. I’ve been a fan of his from the old radio show he did with Ricky Gervais and Karl Pilkington (their XFM show, pre-podcast, which you can listen to here apparently, the link I posted earlier is no good). I actually prefer him to GLaDOS, simply because we already know GLaDOS from the first game.
• In fact, if Stephen Merchant could please come over and narrate for me while I play other games, I’d appreciate it. He’d be great in Crysis 2. “Oh, bugger! Look out! Aliens! Ooh, they seem livid.” Or if he could just come and talk to me while I do laundry, or pay bills, or whatever else, that would be great.
• Portal was a very short game, which was fine, but I had hoped Portal 2 would be longer and it certainly appears to be.
• There are more on-screen prompts than are probably necessary, but I’ll take all the help I can get.
• Some elements of this game remind me strongly of elements from a non-Valve game, but I don’t want to say which. In fact, this is kind of silly to keep going on when I don’t really want to say anything about anything.
• So, I’m going to stop.
• I want to go home now and play more. It’s a lot of fun.
• Also: In the game’s “Extras” section, there’s a little “interactive” “game” “preview” thing for the movie Super 8. It’s worth a look, I guess? It doesn’t take long, and I don’t recall ever seeing a promotional tie-in like this in a game before. It’s a little lame, honestly, but different.
• Also also: there’s a store where you can buy skins and hats and gestures for your Portal 2 multiplayer robot. I don’t know what my opinion of this is, but if people want to spend more to buy stuff for their robot, Valve is certainly ready to take their money. I wonder if all this in-game merchandise is being put into place for some new game further down the road.
• If HL2: Ep3 ever does ever come out, I wonder if I’ll be able to buy Gordon Freeman a hat.

I’m starting to realize that the stuff Prophet was doing in the intro movie is a bit different than the stuff I’m doing. He was jumping off buildings and blowing up trucks and ripping giant guns off vehicles and staring down helicopters like they couldn’t even hurt him. Me, I mainly sneak around, invisible, shooting people when they’re not paying attention and then scamper off and hide.

Not that I’m not having fun, I am. But if we were both in The Fantastic Four, Prophet would be The Thing and I’d be The Invisible Woman, if the invisible woman had a machine gun.

• Okay! I’m in a new area, creeping though a building.
• The game makes me look through a window so I can witness a conversation between a man and a woman. I can’t do anything but watch them and listen, so they must be important characters and the game doesn’t trust me to not kill them immediately. Honestly, I wouldn’t kill them. I’m a good listener. I love eavesdropping in games.
• Okay, I might try to kill them, but not until they had stopped talking.
• They are in disagreement about whether or not to kill me. Well, not me, but Prophet, who they have mistaken me for.
• I sort of can’t believe this is the entire reason that I’ve been killing people for four days, simply because they all think I’m someone else. Surely, at this moment, I should be yelling to them: “LOOK I’M NOT PROPHET ALREADY YOU JERKS” but I continue to not do that. I’m sure I have my reasons.

• The woman doesn’t want to kill me, the man does. I assume I’ll be teaming up with the woman later in some fashion. I fully expect her to be calling me on the radio at some point. “Hello, Prophet? This is [whatever her name is]. Look, I don’t have much time to talk. I can help you, but only if you [whatever the thing is she wants me to do].” This is my prediction.
• After they leave in a helicopter, I sneak around killing everyone like The Invisible Woman again.

• There’s an earthquake that kicks up a ton of dust, giving me a reason to use my infrared to kill everyone. This is fun and a nice use of what had until this point seemed to be a useless visor function.
• The scientist keeps calling me, telling me to hurry up. He tells me to find a vehicle.
• In video games, the guy calling you on the radio always knows everything about everything you’re doing, somehow.
• In real life, the guy calling you on the radio would be all “Hey, where are you now? What street are you on? FDR Drive? What’s the cross street? Is that, like, by the place with the coffee shop on the corner? Not the coffee shop  with all the window planters, the other one, that looks like maybe it used to be a Taco Bell? With the big windows and weird roof? No? Then I don’t know where the hell you are. Call me back when you’re on the corner by the record store near where there used to be a yogurt shop that’s now a shoe repair.”

• As instructed, I steal a tank thing and drive, blowing up everything in my path. It’s very explodey in an arcade game way.
• The driving is sort of blah. It should be more like FarCry 2’s driving, which was great.
• I think the driving bits are in here so the box can proclaim “drivable vehicles!” or something.
• Blew up everything, and now I’m in a new area.

• Picked up a ranged scope for one of my guns! These noisy soldiers don’t have a chance now. I can kill them from miles away without moving. I’m basically griefing an entire military organization.
• Where’d all the aliens go? I haven’t seen any today.
• These soldiers are really dumb. I kill one, then listen. If I hear someone yell “Man down!” I know there’s another one coming. I kill him, then listen. “Man down!” Wait. Kill. Listen. “Man down!” Wait. Kill. Listen. Nothing? Then I’m done and can move on.
• One of the soldiers says “Man down!” in a way that makes him sound genuinely upset. I think I just killed a very good friend of his. Maybe they grew up together. Maybe they were in love. Maybe they — oh there he is. Now he’s dead too.
• It’s a shame these two soldiers were in love and now they’re dead simply because I can’t bother to tell anyone I’m not the guy they think I am. I hope I never have to explain this to a jury.
• Ugh. Okay, dumb plot device. I basically reached the science lab where I was going to find the scientist, but he left, but before he left he forgot to do something, so now I have to do what he forgot to do and then go find him in the new spot he’s in.
• Games need a better way to motivate you from point A to point B besides the “Find the guy who is talking to you on the radio who can somehow see your every move.”
• The scientist calls me all scared, warning me that there are THREE SOLDIERS IN THE LAB. Three? Come on, man, I’ve killed hundreds of them already.
• I go up to the lab in a slow, noisy elevator, but I’m invisible so the soldiers in the lab don’t think anything is wrong. They are stupid. They would never be in The Fantastic Four.
• I eventually do the thing I’m supposed to do, prompting the game to try to start killing me again.
• Chopper attack in the science lab! That’s my cue to look for a conveniently placed, helicopter destroying  weapon.
• Sniper rifle in the corner three feet away! That’ll do. I kill a gunner and the chopper flies away.
• Died while trying to figure out where I’m supposed to go now. There are soldiers all over the damn place now and the chopper is back and they killed me.
• Died again, same place. Also I forgot to take any screenshots of this part. Think I’ll stop here.

Review Score, Part 4: Hm. It was okay, I guess. Got a ranged scope and sniper rifle, so I can shoot guys from far away. No aliens this time around. The driving wasn’t much fun. Stupid plot is stupid. I give it a B-

CRYSIS 2, PART 3

• Starting the level over from last time.

• Ooh, I just found “reflex sights” for my guns. Now we’re talking! It’s like a laser sight and an iron sight combined. This is my favorite kind of gun sight.
• I also found silencers for my machine guns. I need to start examining these dropped guns more closely, they seem to have goodies I may have been missing.
• Killed some soldiers, and discovered I can get into their car and drive around!

• I’m driving. The dead gunner is still flopping around in the gun turret.
• Whoops. Now I’m dead after running into two other cars that both had live gunners manning their guns instead of floppy corpses. Well played, enemy soldiers.
• Note to self: figure out which button lets me jump into the gun position.
• Okay, starting the level over again. I will be more careful this time. I will not mess around with cars. Wait. That seems like it’s wrong.
• You know what, here’s some thoughts on what’s wrong with a checkpoint-only save system in Crysis 2:
• The checkpoint saves are completely discouraging me from experimenting/exploring. I’d love to mess around with some new tactics and take some silly chances and, in general, goof around more. I’d love to get back in that car and tear around the city and try to run over soldiers and smash up my car, but to get to the car again I have to redo the entire first part of the level and take out all of those guys (and collect my new weapons upgrades again) before I can steal the car. And I just don’t feel like going through that only to die stupidly and go through all that again.
• Checkpoint saves are bad. Quicksaves are good. Quicksaves means you can try stupid shit all you want, experiment, explore more, whatever.
• Hm. Let me amend that a little, because I just had a really great, long, drawn-out firefight with a bunch of soldiers that was more tense than it would have been if I wasn’t so worried about dying, and I was more worried about dying because I knew I’d have to redo everything if I did. So. There is a benefit to checkpoint saves — it means you’ve got a stake in surviving, just like in real life when you get into shootouts with soldiers.
• I guess for me, it boils down to this: I’d sacrifice some of the tension for less frustration and more experimenting. PC games should always both have auto and manual saves.
• Found the crash site. Very low on ammo, so I’m sneaking up behind dudes and killing them with my hands.
• When I kill dudes, melee style, it looks like sometimes I break their necks and sometimes maybe I stab them with a knife? It’s hard to tell. It’s also sort of weird to not know how I’m about to kill someone. I guess my nanosuit makes the decision for me. My nanosuit is pretty smart.
• Scientist had me examine the crash site and, I dunno, he said something about something. Now I have to go back outside again.
• Chopper! Attacking me! I immediately look around for a rocket launcher because I know how games work.
• Here it is, lying three feet away from me. I wish life was like that. The DVD drive on my laptop is always getting stuck closed, but there’s never a paperclip lying conveniently three feet away. Or a rocket launcher, for that matter.

• Killed the helicopter.
• Heh. Literally seconds after I take out the chopper with a rocket, a soldier pops his head out on a ledge above me and says “I think I heard something!” It makes me laugh. That soldier is funny. (He’s dead now.)

• Whoah! An alien! It is very fast and cool looking and sounding.
• Oh shit! Hah, I thought the game was going to tease me with the alien for a bit. Sometimes games show you a new enemy from a distance a few times, and then it doesn’t attack you right off (like the Hunter in HL2: Ep 2). But no, this fucker ran right up and started kicking the shit out of me.

• This is where it becomes apparent that I’m not very good at games. The alien is fast and jumps around and I empty clip after clip and miss a lot. This is why I stink at multiplayer shooters.
• He came in close and I beat him to death. Welcome to earth!
• Oh, neat. I took some alien DNA (or whatever) and my nanosuit slurped it up and now I can upgrade. So, there are some RPG elements here. I’m down with that.

• I can’t wait to stealth-enhance my pinkie.
• Wait. Didn’t Prophet become infected with alien glop? And now I’m just smearing it willy-nilly all over my nanosuit? Seems like a bad idea. Maybe my nanosuit isn’t that smart after all.
• Sneaking around, now. Aliens are pretty tough. Watching them kill soldiers is fun.
• Cloaking, sneaking up on aliens, shooting them while they’re standing still. Running out of ammo since I can’t get ammo off the dead aliens. Could be a problem. Collecting more DNA for my suit, but I don’t want to spend it yet.
• Got to a checkpoint, stopping here.

Review Score, Part 3: This was a really fun night of playing! Got into a nice long fight with some soldiers, took down a chopper, fought some aliens, got some cool upgrades for my guns, and learned that I can upgrade my fingers. If it weren’t for the annoyances of the checkpoint saves, I’d be an A+ but it’s only an  A

Picking up where I left off: there’s an alien virus in Manhattan, which somehow causes aliens to invade, and there’s a bunch of enemy soldiers, and I still don’t really get the plot because I was too busy kicking things to pay attention.

Reading the Wikipedia page helps a little. The enemy soldiers are military contractors who want to kill me because they think I’m Prophet, who they were trying to kill because he was infected with the alien virus. So, it’s just a wacky case of mistaken identity that could be cleared up by me telling everyone that I’m not Prophet. Or, you know, I could just keep killing them. I think I’ll do that!

CRYSIS 2, PART 2

• I’m in a new area where there are many more yelling soldiers.
• My strategy is, shoot at them until I start taking damage, turn invisible, flank them, shoot at them again. It’s fun, but it’s starting to feel a little same-y.
• I found a new machine gun, but to take it I have to give up my pistol. I miss the days when you could carry every single weapon you found. I don’t like being without a pistol. Doesn’t this $300 million nanosuit have a holster?
• I was going to give some points to Crysis 2 because it hasn’t crashed and there haven’t been any graphical glitches. But that’s kind of weird. That’s like buying a Prius and saying “Well, it didn’t explode when I used the turn signal and the airbags didn’t go off in my face when I turned on the radio, so it’s a good car.” PC gamers just have such low expectations for games, I guess. I need to break that habit of awarding points for simply working properly.
• Still… it hasn’t crashed!
• Grenades! I have grenades now. I immediately throw four of them and completely miss everyone I’m throwing them at. I’ve never been good at throwing grenades.
• Also I’m not good that those grenade launcher weapons, where you sort of have a distance-based iron sight thing? And your grenade flies in an arc? And you sort of have to aim using the correct notch on the distance sight thing? I’m not explaining it well, but do you know the ones I mean? I’m terrible with those.
• My friend Joe told me I’m probably talking about an M203.
• The enemy in Crysis 2 are pretty good at throwing their grenades.
• I think I miss the jungle from the first game. Half-destroyed cities are cool, but jungles are cooler.
• I remember in the first game, I could shoot a tree until it fell down, then shoot the trunk into smaller pieces, then pick up the smaller pieces and throw them at people. That was fun.

• I’m in a subway. There’s a bunch of people who I guess are infected with the virus. I try to punch them and shoot them and the game won’t let me. I know it’s weird to complain that I can’t punch or kill innocent sick people, but come on. I’m not saying it’s a GOOD thing to kill civilians, but there’s no explanation why I can’t.
• Some helicopters just shot down an alien spaceship, which crashed through a building. That looked like fun, shooting down alien spaceships. I don’t like when NPCs in games are doing cooler things than I’m doing. I’m the player so I should be having all the fun, not some stupid NPCs.
• Like Alyx in the HL2 Episodes. She could climb buildings and kick zombies in the face and whack them with the butt of her shotgun and use sniper rifles. And I’m just standing there with a stupid crowbar going DUHHHHHHH.

• The scientist calls me. He’s very excited about the crashed spaceship, and wants me to find it and bring him samples. I will do it for him! If I can’t find the spaceship parts, I will just bring him some old junk I find and see if he can tell the difference using science.
• I’m in a parking garage, which is definitely not as cool as a jungle. Tired of the cloak-and-shoot plan, I decide to try power-kicking a car into a couple soldiers. I kick the car and it explodes in my face. I guess it’s not a Prius.
• I can slide! If I run and then crouch it turns into a slide! It reminds me of Mirror’s Edge. I am going to slide all over this goddamn city now. That scientist is going to be calling me on the radio going “Prophet! Where’s my exploded spaceship parts!” and I’m gonna be all “Not now. Sliding.”
• So, the deal is, the nanosuit was tied into Prophet’s DNA, and now that I’m wearing it, it’s slowly beginning to integrate my DNA, giving me access to more abilities one at a time, I guess. Like sliding. I think the idea is, the developers wanted to slowly give you more power as you play, which is pretty common for games. The original game, if I remember correctly,  just gave you the suit and said, “You’re a badass, have fun,” and I don’t remember that being overwhelming or a problem, so this new approach is maybe a little unnecessary. This is probably something everyone but me has already realized.
• Picked up some lasers sights for my machine guns. Cool! No, wait, they suck. I take them off immediately and stick with iron sights.
• I just died after trying to take a close-up screenshot of me killing a soldier. Now I have to do this level over. I hate checkpoint saves.
• I don’t feel like re-doing this whole level right now, so I’m stopping here.
• Sorry there aren’t more screenshots. I took a ton of them but they’re all of really stupid, boring things and none of them have anything to do with any of the bullet points.

Review Score, Part 2: Pros: I can slide, and shooting is still fun but I hope there’s some new types of fights to have coming up. Cons: I’m missing the jungle and checkpoint saves are annoying me. B

Video game reviews are tricky for non-professional (or, in my case, unprofessional) game writers. Unlike career game journalists, the hobby gamer doesn’t get an early look at most games. We have to buy them ourselves, which can get expensive. And, when a game contains ten or twenty or more hours of playtime, it may take us weeks to play through them, trying to find time to play among our other obligations, such as our real paying jobs and visits to our parole officers. Even if we do finish a game in a timely manner, there are already dozens of reviews already online, rendering our thoughts a bit moot.

There’s also the fact that I don’t finish playing every game, or even most games, I buy. Sometimes they’re just not fun, sometimes they’re too hard, and sometimes they start out okay but get boring. Should I even be reviewing a game that I’ve only played partially, weeks after it’s been released?

Yes, because I want to. (See the “unprofessional” note above.) So, I’m gonna tackle game reviews the same way one might tackle a television series review. If you want to review Parks and Recreation, you probably wouldn’t wait for the entire season to be complete before you put pen to paper; you’d review it episode by episode, knowing full well that each chunk you review is just a bit of the whole. I’m gonna sit down, play as much of a game as I can manage, consider that an “episode”, and write about it, saving the rest for the next session. Okay? Okay.

CRYSIS 2, PART 1

• After a bunch of logos I can’t skip past, it’s intro movie time! The movie tells me there’s an alien virus in Manhattan, and some company denies it, and gas is expensive. They use real footage of riots, which I kinda wish they wouldn’t. You shouldn’t put video of real people getting hurt into your video game about aliens.

• Now I’m sitting in a submarine with a bunch of other soldiers, who are trash-talking and ribbing each other. Where have I seen this before? Oh, right, every video game ever made. Let me guess, we’re going to get attacked and there will be explosions and we’ll all try to escape and we’ll get separated and I’ll wind up alone.
• Everything I just said would happen is now happening. I mean, it’s still a neat sequence, it’s just been done to death by now.
• My name is Alcatraz. I just learned how to crouch, which means I’m now pretty much fully qualified to save the world from aliens.
• I kind of don’t like these in-game sequences where I can’t move my body but I can look around a little. Either give me full control, or just show me a movie.
• A guy in a nanosuit pulled me out of the water, and now they’re showing me a movie. I guess I just asked for it. This movie is showing me all the cool stuff I’ll be able to do in the game, like shoot people and jump around and be invisible. It appears I will be kicking a lot of ass. They may call me Alcatraz, but my real name is Jake Asskicker.

• Man, this is like a fetish video. Hot nanosuit upskirts! Have to admit, though, the nanosuit is really cool looking.
• Okay, the movie is over and the guy who pulled me out of the ocean apparently stuffed me into the nanosuit he was wearing. I wonder if he took off my pants first and saw all my business. Either way, it’s a little creepy to take an unconscious soldier and play dress-up with him.
• The guy who put me in his suit, named Prophet, was infected with the alien virus. It’s kinda unsettling that he’s been infected with alien germs and now I’m wearing his suit, including his face mask. Doesn’t seem entirely hygienic. I bet it smells all gross.
• I got a gun! Hooray. I swear it’s been about twenty minutes since I sat down to play and I finally have something I can shoot at somebody. There’s nobody around to shoot, though, so I pick up some random objects and throw them around. I miss the turtles from the first game.
• Every time I come close to a big crate, the game suggests I give it a “Power Kick”, and every time it suggests I do that, I do that. The game could show me a puddle of rancid milk and rat droppings and if it suggested “Lick Puddle” I bet I would do that, too. I do whatever video games tell me to do. I am such a sucker.
• I activate a laptop, which starts talking, telling me everything that’s happening. I get bored and wander off looking for someone to shoot, throwing and kicking things as I go. Apparently, I’m supposed to find and rescue some scientist. Tired: damsels in distress. Wired: scientists in distress.
• The scientist calls me on the radio. He keeps calling me Prophet, even though my name is Alcatraz. I don’t bother correcting him for some reason. That seems weird of me. Why am I so weird? In real life, I’d be all, “Hey, scientist? FYI: I’m not Prophet. I’m just a guy Prophet undressed while I was asleep.”

• This game is pretty.
• The aliens bombed the Statue of Liberty, because aliens, like natural disasters, hate our national landmarks.
• My first fight! I shoot some enemy soldiers in the head and it’s fun. Despite the long introduction, I’m not sure who the enemy soldiers are or what their deal is. Maybe the laptop tried to tell me before I walked away. It’s the sign of an elite soldier that when someone starts laying out the details of the mission he wanders off and starts kicking boxes and throwing things around.
• It’d be weird to do that in real life. Say you get a new job. You’re sitting through your orientation with the human resources person. You get bored so you start jumping on top of desks, throwing chairs, kicking stuff around, looking down at your legs as if you’ve never seen them before, examining your shadow on the wall and seeing if it jumps at the same time you do (it does!).
• Something else to not do at a new job: lick rancid puddles.
• I learned how to turn invisible. Cloaking is an easy way to completely kill everyone without getting hurt. Too easy? Yeah, probably.
• See, the title of this feature is called “Bullet Points” and these entries are all arranged into bullet points and video games have bullets in them. And I am making some points about the game. I just wanted to make sure you realized how clever I am.
• Oh, enemy soldiers. You’re adorable. That’s it, keep yelling things about me to each other so I know exactly where you are at all times.
• One of them just yelled “He’s cloaked!” Yeah, that means I’m invisible, doofus. That means I might be standing right beside your giant loud yelling mouth. And I AM! Hah-HA! And now you’re dead from me killing you.
• Hm. Having killed a couple soldiers to death, there’s no one else around in this enormous section of the war-torn city. It’s all very lovely, but there’s seemingly nothing to do here but look at it and then find the exit.

• Entered a new area with a bunch more guys in it, killed them. Fun!
• Entered another new area, and some alien ship flew by a couple blocks away, and the video game didn’t want me to miss it, so it told me to press ‘E’ to look at it. I wonder if that was originally how they planned it, or they found during play-testing that no one was looking in the right direction, so they added that. Probably the latter. I still can’t really see the thing I’m supposed to be looking at.
• I want to stop playing now but I don’t see a ‘save game’ option anywhere. Checkpoint saves only? Bleah.

That’s as far as I got.

Review Score, Part 1: I am mostly enjoying Crysis 2 so far! Once they stop showing you movies, the combat is fun, the nanosuit is neat, and the game is very smooth and pretty. If it did feature a puddle of rancid milk and rat droppings I’m sure it would be beautifully rendered and I would enjoy licking it. A-