Tropical Tycoon: The Good Life

CryEngine tech demos make me want to go on holiday. Beautiful, lovingly crafted locations deserve to be explored with a cocktail in one hand and a camera in the other. To those who were annoyed when alien-mutant-monsters showed up in Far Cry, I say that you should have been annoyed when men with guns showed up. They ruined the laidback adventure of a lifetime. The trailer for The Good Life promises a tourism tycoon game about escaping the nine-to-five, which is far more desirable than being stuck in a war. Despite having typos and 94% less graphics than Far Cry, at least everything in it doesn't keep exploding. Watch.

So close. Still, the 'time to explosion' rating is high. Unfortunately the pirates aren't the only source of explosions and therefore aren't the only mark against The Good Life's idyllic facade. Natural disasters are nature's attempt to make explosions, even if they don't involve fire and shrapnel. Just as a process of ocular and cerebral evolution invented the first-person perspective, nature's angry wrath set the tone for every Michael Bay film and graceless warshooter that man has ever made when it chose to kill our feathered friends the dinosaurs with a massive grenade.

Of course, no triple-A studios were around to see that because the only humans to co-exist with dinosaurs were bearded indie developers, but you can bet your last penny that Pliny scribbled the concept for 'a hyperviolent multiplayer man-stabber with epic explosions' on the back of a cigarette packet when he saw Vesuvius blow its top. The game was never released because Atari's adaptation of Plautus' Epidicus was so poorly received that it caused the burgeoning interactive entertainment market to crash so hard that it didn't recover until the 1980s.

The Good Life is out on November 2nd.