I know that Summer Games 2005 is all about catching up, but I can’t help but feel dated after feeding the bomb to Farcry: a game which I feel has been played out long before I write this entry. In order to assuage my guilt over writing an evaluation of games from two years ago, I thought I’d take a moment to discuss cliche rather than the game as a whole.

I started this game with fresh enthusiasm, hoping beyond hope that Ubisoft had something new and exciting to offer me. The game pleased me with its bright tropical graphics, its satisfying gunplay, and the breadth of tactical options it offered in any given situation. I drove cars, boats, hang-gliders, and the occasional semi-truck. I sniped, I snuck, I went in with guns blazing, and I ambushed baddies from concealed foxholes. All in all it was a pleasant yet bloodthirsty island excursion with enormous freedom to experiment. Then it all went south.

I don’t know what I was expecting the game to be, but when the game stopped being a battle of commandos vs. mercenaries and started becoming a game of commandos vs. horribly mutated psycopathic experimental yadda yadda yaddas, I kind of lost interest. I couldn’t help but feel robbed and I viewed the bug hunt levels as trials to suffer through before getting back to killing mercs. Maybe bug hunting is just getting played out. Or maybe I just hate mercenaries that much. This is one of those problems that make me hesitant to buy FPS games: the games all feel the same after a certain point. Does anyone have any proposals to freshen up FPS opponents?

The other thing that sparked me during Farcry were the “bosses”. There are two schools of thought regarding boss difficulty: 1) bosses should be monstrous behemoths who are really hard to kill, and 2) bosses should be just like other creatures but in a place where they’re really hard to kill by dint of terrain or minions. I suppose there’s also the “Nintendo model” (bosses have one weakness that you must discover), but this is another place where I feel FPS games could use a breath of fresh air. Have we really run out of ideas for shooters? I think it’s really difficult to create an FPS that feels new and fresh when there seems to be a creative constraint on how the game plays out.

As Teddy KGB once said, “I feel so unsyatisfied.”

One last thing: on a scale of Washington to Bush, I give this game a James K. Polk.