An Island In The Fun
The Far Cry 2 teaser site is up and running. You can click on the trees and birds fly off! Man, I'm sold. I haven't been this excited about a semi-interactive picture of an African vista since I don't know when.
Yeah, this site is a 'teaser' in the sense that it's really not offering us anything, while at the same time making furtive suggestions about things it might want to reveal later on. Filthy creature! No real information, nothing concrete to go on, and elsewhere all we can dig up is some press release info containing random warble about AI or something. Oh, it also mentions this is a Ubisoft Montreal production, rather than a Crytek (original Far Cry studio) game. They're busy, you see.
"Far Cry marked the beginning of a new era for shooters. An era of gorgeous graphics and of advanced artificial intelligence,” declared Tony Key, vice president of marketing at Ubisoft. "We are confident that Far Cry 2 will have the same impact again on the FPS genre landscape.”
A debatable declaration, Tony. Far Cry ushered in an era of overly-hard end-of-game enemies and smoky Doom 3 interiors and, arguably, that was yet another part of the old era. What it should have marked was an era of hang-gliders, blue skies and large islands – by which standards Just Cause is the only genuine successor to Far Cry.
But now there is Far Cry 2. The vague connotations in the site's imagery suggest it could be a savannah-based shooter? Miles and miles of grassland and the odd mutant wildebeest? Is that cool? And there was me thinking that EA-published Crysis was going to be the true successor to the island-based shooter. How naïve I can be.
Ah, beautiful Crysis. Pumped up tech-soldier violence, punching trucks to death, giant alien bosses, and it's even set on a tropical island. It's almost like a new era for shooters, or something. If it has a hang-glider in, I'll marry it. Yeah, that's more like it. Men married to games, games with blue skies and alien invasions. Let's have a Crysis screenshot to finish. Actually, this entire post was going to be based around the recently released gameplay screenshots, but they're all rubbish. So here's a seemingly mocked up motion-blurred picture of that supercommando protagonist instead.
Oh and Far Cry 2 is supposed to be about in Spring 2008. Ubisoft seem pretty good with guessing when their games will come out, so fingers crossed.