Permanent Death, Episode 5 - This Idiotic War

I woke up in a safe house and went outside, heading west to Pala. I passed a guard post along the way and got into to bit of a scrap, losing my vehicle to enough stray weapons fire to put it out of action. I picked up a new one at a safehouse, also picking up some more diamonds and a tape recording of Reuben’s interview with the Jackal before I make my way back to Pala.

In town, I go to pick up the only mission available to me. It’s for the UFLL, as apparently the APR has given up on me. Gakumba meets with me alone – which is strange considering he’s always had some other mercenary there as a witness before. It’s unsettling, but his diamonds are good and I’ve still got no other leads on The Jackal.

His mission is a dangerous one as the UFLL leader wants me to assassinate his counterpart in the APR and further destabilize the conflict. It would appear that he is feeling the strain from my work for the UFLL and is retreating to a house above the Goka falls. If I take him out then the other side can consolidate power here in the north and maybe I can finally make a start on tracking down the Jackal once and for all. As it is now I can’t hardly drive 100 metres up the road without some mob of trigger-happy yahoo’s deciding to shoot first and ask questions later. Maybe if the UFLL actually gains control I will be able to more around a bit more freely. The guard on the way out looks at me with shifty eyes. I know something is up.

Before I head out of town, however, I visit Father Maliya for a third time. I’m running a little bit low on pills, but I’m not quite dry yet. I accept the fake passports he gives me, figuring if I get a chance I’ll drop them off in exchange for some malaria meds. But I’m not going to go out of my way – not unless I get desperate. I check my map on the way out. Unfortunately for these civilians, it doesn’t look like they’re exactly on the way. I’ll probably wait till I’m out in the desert somewhere and toss the papers.

Arriving at the north-eastern most bus-station, I get in a car and, eschewing the roads for fear of running into a patrol, drive through the fringes of the desert until I reach the fort, where I rejoin the road. Passing through a checkpoint with a minimum of fuss, I reach the small foot-track leading to Goka falls. There is a sign in the middle of the scrub. An odd spot for it, to say the least.

I started up the track, crouching low and staying underneath the waist-high palm fronds to stay out of view. I had no idea how well many guards would be protecting Tambossa so I kept my silenced MP5 at the ready. Reaching the point where the track doubled back, I could hear a guard whistling as he stood overlooking the path I’d just come up. I cut short his whistling and the body rolled away, becoming hidden in the long grass. I continued on and, pausing at the crest of the hill, noticed just how bright an evening it was. The full moon was bright enough to be casting shadows from the trees overhead and in this light I wouldn’t be able to remain hidden for long.

I had gone all of 10 metres when I had to make a mad dive for cover off to one side - a guard was walking up the path towards me and had I been a second slower would have spotted me instantly. Thankfully, he wasn’t paying much attention and his body dropped to the ground with a dull thud, laying smack-bang in the middle of the path with no cover between it and my position. I ground my teeth and skirted off the right, taking up position behind a large moss covered rock.

I could now see both the dead guard on the path and what I presumed to be the building that contained Tambossa inside it. The chatter of the guards increased, betraying a note of tension and I surmised that the body on the path had been discovered. Ignoring it for the moment, I whipped out my monocle and peered towards the hut. To my great surprise, I spotted Tambossa staring back out at me from an open window! It was too great an opportunity to pass up and, with his guards rushing about in a panic now, I took aim and fired.

Suddenly, soldiers were all around me shouting and firing in my direction. Shards of the rock I was crouched behind sprayed my face and chest. The sound of weapons fire behind meant that, with a sinking feeling like a punch in the gut, the penny dropped. My attack was just meant to be a feint – the spearhead of the major UFLL push – and I was now caught in the middle between the APR in front and the UFLL behind. I turned and ran, desperate to punch a hole through the advancing UFLL troops.

I took out three of four soldiers in quick succession, abandoning my stealthy MP5 for my PKM machine gun with its reassuring weight. Somewhat miraculously, I managed to take out most of the UFLL soldiers with my desperate attack. Behind their lines now, I spied a lone soldier guarding the track from behind and eliminated him.

I made it back to the Goka falls signpost, my mind still reeling from the betrayal. It took me a second to realise that it was my phone ringing that was causing my pockets to vibrate and I answered to hear Reuben the reporter’s voice on the other end. He said he needed to meet with me right away. Lacking a better plan, I agreed.

When I got to the lumber mill, Reuben told me that the UFLL was making their push and consolidating power in the north, just as I’d suspected. They were also, however, rounding up all the civilians and foreign nationals for goodness knows what reason. Reuben seemed to think that it wasn’t anything good, and I was inclined to agree. He gave me a choice – to meet with Michelle and Warren at Mike’s Bar and try to hold out there, or to hot-foot it to the church in Pala and help the civilians (including Father Maliya) escape. Pala sounded like a death-trap to me, knowing how many soldiers would be in the town already and if the APR was truly coming apart in the north, then I’ll bet they could count on a whole lot of defections.

In hindsight, the choice was an easy one to make. When I’d tossed out the civilian papers I’d already written them off in my mind as a lost cause, but I pretended to consider the other option. When I got to Mikes and heard the gunfire I wasted no time in attacking them from behind. As the last one went down from a long range shot he pulled out a flare gun and launched a flare high into the air above the bar.

Inside the bar, Michelle was visibly distressed and Warren and Nasreen had already taken up positions at boarded up windows around the bar. I helped Michelle push a heavy, 1950’s style Icebox in front of the door. No sooner had we done so than all the windows in the bar blew open as the soldiers now surrounding the bar opened fire. The withering force of the opening volley took down Michelle and Warren, but dust obscured Nasreen. I couldn’t tell how much longer she survived for but it couldn’t have been long. I crouched in a corner next to the bar. I tried valiantly to take some of them with us, throwing grenade after grenade and emptying a plethora of slugs and then shells out the open windows.

I don’t remember what it was that eventually brought me down, but the next thing I knew I was on the back of a truck, having been mistaken for dead. The next thing I remember after that was the pavement rushing up at me as I fell off the back of the truck, reopening fresh wounds. The sand and wind was howling and the best I could do was turn my back to the brunt of it and try to get off the road and die in peace. I blacked out again.

When I woke up it was because the pain was so intense, manifesting as a crimson sheen over my vision. I heard a voice say something like “stop squirming” and with a wrench the pain flared once more and subdued. To my intense surprise it was the Jackal to whom I now owed my continued survival. He sat next to me for a few minutes and gave me an update on the situation with the UFLL but at the sound of some jeeps pulling up outside he took off out a window.

Greeves came inside and told me the same stuff as the Jackal, the UFLL was consolidating its hold and everyone was getting out and heading south. He said he’d leave me a jeep if I promised to go back up north and murder the bastard that turned on me and my merc friends. He said Tambossa would be easy to find as he was giving a speech somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Weird place to hold a speech. I wonder if Greeves had anything to do with it.

Either way, it was only too easy to spot him when I reached a hill to the west of the convoy. It looked like they’d stopped on the road because of a broken down car or truck or something. It gave me an opportunity I was only too happy to take advantage of.

After spotting him with my monocle I only needed one shot.

And that was it – I was done with this whole mess and it was time to move on. The Jackal was obviously also heading south and I now felt a strange pull towards him - it wasn’t the same as before where I just wanted to find him and kill him. Now when I next met him it wouldn’t be enough to just end his life I wanted something more. I wanted to get understand – to get inside his head and see the world through his eyes. On the way south I passed the hut he had dragged me into and saved my life.

I had to fight my way south, as Greeves had told me to meet him in the small town of Sefapane once I’d sorted out Tambossa. As I drove into the town I couldn’t shake a slight feeling of déjà vu. Another crummy town and another shaky attempt at peace.

As I walked into the room to meet Greaves he was on the phone. I overhear him say something like “problem solved” as he sees me and hangs up. He then proceeds to explain what he wants me to do – help someone sail a ship of guns into Port Soleo under a UFLL flag and basically drop the match into the gas tank that is this conflict. “We’ll be back fighting this idiotic war in no time”, he tells me.

I believe him.

Permanent Death, Episode 4 - Chekhov's Diamonds

If you are just tuning in, I’m currently in the middle of an attempt to complete the 2008 game Far Cry 2 without getting killed and examining how the new found permanence of my characters death changes the experience.

Last we saw our intrepid hero, Qurbani Singh was somewhere in the deep, deep south where he had just avenged the death of his good friend Andre Hipolite (who wasn’t actually dead in his own universe so much as in Nels’ Anderson’s).

Since then, on his way to an assassinate mission Qurbani unlocked a safe house at dawn; ran over his first zebra and picked up a briefcase full of diamonds on the side of a cliff next to a burnt out car.

I must admit that the fear of dying has more or less completely disappeared by this point. The worry and hesitancy with which I approached the earlier missions has atrophied to the point where I am confident enough to take out an assassination target head on, using explosives. I’m regularly flirting with danger now, and it remains to be seen whether I will get burnt.

I was in a bit of an exploratory mood, so after swimming around and under a submerged house in the middle of the lake I wandered off down river and, passing through a checkpoint, spied a bridge overhead. I realised that in all the times I’d played the game, in quite possibly every game I had played, I’d seen the bridge but never actually visited it.

I went up and explored the bride as well as three other checkpoints along the ridge, all of which I had never even seen before. At one of these checkpoints a jeep charged through the jungle at me and ended up having a car accident. You just can’t scrip for the surreal.

Under the bridge I spotted some diamonds and in the process of their retrieval got myself stuck half-way up a cliff with no immediately visible safe route down. Escaping any real ill effects by sliding down the space between two walls, I pretended that Qurbani Singh had lost the seat of his pants in his daring escapade and therefore had to put up with the shame until he reached the next safe house and was able to change his pants. The safe house was conveniently located near another scenic water fall and it amazed me that I’d been able to spend so much time with this game and still not ever have traversed this particular, admittedly quite large, patch of jungle. I thought I’d been everywhere.

On my way back to Pala I spotted a hang-glider and wondered whether I could get all the way to Pala in one flight. It didn’t look that far on the map…

…but my short lived trip was ended by this tree branch and I ditched into the river.

After slogging back to Pala, I stumbled into the hotel, purely out of curiosity. Nothing much had changed and no one had yet bothered to clean up any of the mess. Admittedly, they all probably have better things to do than rebuilt a hotel while there’s a war raging. On the upside, my one time room has a lovely new skylight now.

I got patted down by a guard with a huge scar on his lip and headed upstairs to a meeting with the UFLL and Carbonell. This time I’m sent off to locate some buried treasure and send an SMS with its location. I take my diamond filled dossier and go.

Barely out the door, I stop for a second having noticed the green flashing light indicating a nearby briefcase of diamonds. On second thoughts, notice is not entirely accurate; perhaps ‘comprehend the possibility of its acquisition’ is a better description. I’ve known that particular briefcase has been there since my first play-through of the game as it shows up clearly on your diamond detector any time you are near the UFLL building, however given my new found brazen attitude I was suddenly very aware of how much more obtainable they now seemed.

Thinking back over it later, it made me consider the difficult time developers have in employing traditional narrative tricks and techniques to game narratives. Specifically, in all of my previous games I had for various reasons never once picked up this particular briefcase before. Why is that important? Well, in drama there is an axiom known as Chekhov’s Gun which says that "One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it." (A suitably violent axiom for a game like Far Cry 2, wouldn’t you say?) In all of my previous games on varying difficulties, I had never even considered taking the diamonds because I didn’t want to break the peace treaty. 1-3 diamonds just never seemed worth the risk of getting shot to pieces before.

Why then, in all those earlier games, did the Diamonds exist? Chekhov’s Gun says that if no one is ever going to fire it, don’t put it ‘on stage’ since it is not necessary for the narrative. It’s clear, however, that a game designer has absolutely no way of knowing if a certain player is going to want to take the diamonds or not and so has no choice but to place them in the world and let whatever happens happen. If they were to remove the diamonds, then the player would be denied even the possibility of taking them.

I should also add that after I decided for the first time that I didn’t want to collect those diamonds in my very first game (having been effectively deterred by warnings from soldiers, etc) that until this most recent game I didn’t even consider taking the diamonds. I didn’t even decide each time to deliberately not collect them; I just didn’t even consider it as an option. According to Chekhov’s Gun, those diamonds should not even exist!

If all of the previous games where I ignored the diamonds were written as a story similar to the one you are now reading, the diamonds wouldn’t get a mention and you, the reader, would have no way of know they even existed – even though they clearly existed in the game each time.

So obviously games have a distinct disadvantage in storytelling when it comes to the ‘Chekhov’s Gun’ rule. The game, by having to show/render/populate the world with this diamond case, was resisting my own attempts to organise and tell a good story and obey the rule of Chekhov’s Gun.

Perhaps Chekhov’s gun simply doesn’t apply to games, I will freely acknowledge that I have no practical solution to this problem, and indeed, you might disagree with me that it even is a problem.

I think that, were Chekhov still around today, he would either be an obsessive, completionist player or he would stop believing his own rule. I can just imagine him saying about all 200+ briefcases that, “If they put it in the game, it needs to be collected!” But the problem as I see it is that when we as the player are forced into acting in a specific way like this (or face compromising the narrative integrity) then we are dominated by ‘the story’ and must obey it – even if it that ‘story’ makes for a really, really boring narrative! (Who after all really wants to read about a guy collecting 200-odd briefcases of diamonds? Where’s the story in that?)

Moving right along – Qurbani went to go meet Michelle at someplace called ‘lakeside’ which didn’t seem upon arrival to be in close proximity to any lakes. Taking a boat, I reached my stop (don’t worry – the soldier is just sleeping).

In the Safehouse, Michelle tells me to go and kill the king who’s gold the UFLL are after and to collect his signet ring so that the King’s son can skip the country and get access to the swiss bank accounts. I decide to take a slightly subtle approach to the fort where the king is hiding and slink up under the cover of darkness. I scout some snipers on the ramparts and take them out first, continuing my journey up to the fort along a track that brings my up to a back entrance to the fort.

On my way, I alert the guards and it’s on for young and old. Crouching at the corner of a wall, I wait for a soldier to appear, hearing his footsteps approaching. Even though I knew he was coming my reaction time was not quick enough to prevent him getting off a shotgun blast, the brunt of which slammed into the wall beside my head.

Inside the walls of the fort I made a dash for the tower in which the King was residing. Upon reaching him, I finished him off with a shot from my flare gun – leaving a trail of burnt corpses is becoming a bit of a trademark of mine.

I also noticed that he is a very fair skinned King compared to his son, a fact that I noticed when I gave his son the ring. Maybe his mother had a darker complexion? Or maybe he wasn’t really the king’s son! We may never know. I handed the ring over anyway.

Then it was time to go save Michelle and find the buried treasure. I took the sturdier of the two Jeeps the son-formerly-known-as-Prince left as a gift for me. I ended up parking it next to the hole down which I had to climb to reach the treasure to use as cover.

It came quite in handy and I had to revive Michelle after the fight. Tempting, so very, very tempting…

Back to Pala I went to start the second last mission for the UFLL, continuing my inexorably march to the scary part of the game where I would be without a buddy – the inter chapter section. For this mission, Greeves sent me into the jungle to blow up some pumps on a farm the APR were protecting so some multinational corporation could “mess with the ecosystem” as he put it.

When I caught up with Michelle, she sent me into a chemical plant and retrieve some super-defoliant. I started a lot of fires to get it.

I dropped the big canister off with Michelle at the airport – she had some harebrained scheme where she was going to spray the stuff all over the farm to deny the soldiers their cover. I couldn’t see how this could possibly work. I took a circuitous route from the airport in the south up to the farm in the central-east section of the map, stopping off to see this crashed Cesna 150.

I also had another minor car accident…

Followed by another…

I picked up some silenced weaponry at the armoury on the way and crept into the farm with a silenced MP5, Flare Gun and RPG. In hindsight, not exactly a super sensible load out but I wanted to try and destroy the pump from far, far away with an RPG. Unfortunately I had to get rather close to the pump before I landed a direct hit enough to disable it, just in time to hear Michelle’s light aircraft go flying overhead, defoliant streaming out the back.

I could practically taste the carcinogens and I wanted to hold my breath. The stuff must have been super-strong because it worked fast. As Michelle’s plane disappeared into the distance I heard the sound of far off anti-aircraft fire and hoped she was okay.

I quickly ran out of ammunition, my weapon load out coming back to bite me in the butt. I couldn’t find any loose on the ground even as the guards kept coming, so I swapped my MP5 for a rusty old Homeland shotgun (as you can see above). Thankfully, the thing was practically unstoppable.

Michelle called to let me know she had been shot down and that soldiers were closing in. I hurried to her and came upon her crashed plane first, with the sound of machine gun fire coming from a small depression to the south-west.

There looked to be just one soldier nearby and he had her in his sights. I fired a flare gun hoping to either distract him or perhaps score a lucky direct hit. I misjudged my aim and it bounced off the trunk of a fallen tree and landed in the grass, starting a fire perilously close to Michelle. I swapped to my grimy, mud-encrusted shotgun and prayed the slugs would fire. They did, and he went down.

Tired of being the Knight in Shining armour for the N-th time, I headed off to a safehouse for a nap.

That was Episode 4 of Permanent Death – thanks for sticking with it. I should mention that in the space between my last episode and this one another blogger has started a Perma-Death game and reached it’s conclusion. Elliott Richard’s tale can be read here. Also, if you somehow missed it, Far Cry 2’s lead creative director Clint Hocking wrote some lovely things about Permanent Death and you should absolutely go read it – that man is the future of gaming or I’ll eat my hat.

Permanent Death, Interstitial - Evolution of an Explosion

Permanent Death, Episode 3 - An Illustrated Guide To Explosions.

"Just keep staring mate and see what happens." - Soldier in Pala.

I went a little stir crazy after Episode 2 and decided to speed things up. So I did a bunch of missions and consequently blew a lot of stuff up. Here’s the first such explosion – a convoy of arms that was conveniently circling a bus station down south. I ran out of grenades and so I discovered that enough bullets will eventually stop a convoy in it’s tracks. Who woulda though it? When the engine died and started spewing thick black smoke I knew it was time to back off and it wasn't long before it blew sky high.


My second mission, to ambush another weapons convoy, went much smoother thanks in no small part to the liberal application of explosives. Here’s where I was camped in the bushes, with my jeep parked in the middle of the road, rigged and ready to blow.

But when my jeep exploded, rather than take the convoy with it, it just destroyed my means of transportation and left the target in tact! No way!


Some grenades soon relieved the driver and his payload of their atomic cohesion, prividing a much more acceptable level of destruction.


After that happy incident, I quickly made my way over to a cell phone tower and answered a call where the person on the other end was apparently the killer from the movie Scream. He wanted me to off some merc who just so happened to be standing in the middle of Pala’s cease fire zone. I chopped him a new face-hole and scampered for the border, soaking up my fair share of lead in the process. It was worth it though – 15 easy diamonds were all mine.


Later, after the heat had cooled I went in to see the APR boss. Apparently, thanks to me “APR is the shit now”. Alright mate, whatever you say.


His mission for me was to go and blow up a train carrying liquid petroleum or natural gas. I never found out which. Suffice to say, it went off with another acceptably large bang.


I went off on another mission, this time playing the field - the UFLL wanted me to blow up some compressor in a junkyard owned by the APR. On the way, I was harassed by this jeep – a perfect opportunity to try out my new RPG.


When I got to the junk yard I initially tried a stealth approach, using my silenced Makarov to take down lone guards. Once I left the cover of the long grass however, I was quickly spotted and chased by multiple soldiers from multiple directions. Having only my pistol, my trusty rifle and the aforementioned RPG, I alternated between emptying clips of my pistol into enemies and running to a safe distance to utilise my rifle’s scope. Beating a path to the middle of the junkyard, I finally put my RPG to a last final good use.


Back in Pala, a guard told me that the bosses were busy but that someone was being held captive at the old place used for cockfighting. I went there and rescued Flora Guillen.


Theoretically I could now take Michelle out of the picture, if I desired, but I hardly ever saw her anymore anyway since I was breezing through and ignoring her phone calls. I took another convoy ambush mission and this was the result.


Having unlocked a number of cool new weapons, I was still strapped for diamonds to actually buy them with, so I took another assassinate mission and, surprise, surprise; this guy was also hiding out in the middle of Pala. This time I would remember to pack my silenced Makarov.

Entering Pala it seemed quiet, there was one solitary guard on the whole street as I approached. It smelt like an ambush. It was also the dead of the night, so I brushed it off as merely being a naturally quiet night. I approached my target from behind, took aim… and square missed the mans head. He ran off, screaming into the night and a horde of soldiers poured into the streets. Cocky, I chased him down and unloaded a clip into his retreating form, only to expose myself to half-a-dozen soldiers. I rapidly retreated, finding my escape rapidly being cut off by yet more soldiers. It was going bad and fast. I was getting overwhelmed and I started getting distracted by the though that 'This was it'. I could be about to die. My faculties failed me and I collapsed, blood pooling the dirt.

Warren Clyde, was my saviour. He charged in, desert eagle and AK-47 blazing. He must have known I was going to pull something stupid, as he was obviously hanging around nearby. I’ll bet he came running as soon as the shooting started. How else can I explain away the almost divine timing that saw him turn up right at that very moment? A second later and it would have been lights out for Qurbani Singh.

Talking to him later in the safe house, I barely remembered the rest of the journey. Apparently he picked me up, dragged me out from the middle of Pala by himself and put me back on my feet at the jetty on the north-western side of town. He even covered my retreat as I got in a boat and puttered downstream to collapse on the camp bed of the nearest safe-house. When I asked him about it, thanking him profusely, he simply gave me a thumbs up and said “Don’t mention it, man”.


But then I told him some bad news – my malaria condition was getting worse and I was all out of pills. I needed to see the priest back in town and get him to fix me up. I won’t soon forget the look Warren gave me as I walked out the door. He wanted to say something, but he held his tongue. Perhaps that itself took more bravery.


The Priest was actually out of pills (again!) but he knew of a family that had some and sent me to courier them some fake passports so they could skip the country. That was fine by me – as far as I’m concerned, the less civilians around the better. I started a fire outside the house the civvies were hiding in to flush out the nearby troops. Looked like I arrived just in time too.


After handing over the passports, I stumped off to a nearby cell phone tower to try and get some reception. Another call, another target. I deicided to play it smart and try and take the guy out from a distance. He was hiding in the shanty town of Mokuba (you will remember it from Episode 2) so how hard could it be to hit him in there? Turns out; rather hard, and I had to abandon my vantage point to get close enough to score a kill. In a surreal turn of events, I scored the killing blow with my newest favourite toy – the flare pistol. The man catches fire as the burning flare thuds into his chest and he falls to the ground, expired.


The flare goes off, sending my target into the next life with a fitting bang.


Speaking of bangs – I heard recently that my good friend from another life, Andre Hyppolite, was recently killed in the bush out here. I set out to track him down, taking the bus to the South Eastern bus depot. His last known whereabouts were near a guard post and under the cover of darkness I approached. I drew my grenade launcher and took out the first two guards in one explosion. Another jeep roared up and I switched to my rifle to dispatch both the gunner and driver in quick succession. One last guard was done away with and my revenge for Andre was all but complete.



Climbing atop a rocky outcropping behind the guardpost, I surveyed the scene. To my delight, I spotted it. The very same jeep that reports say claimed Andre’s life. I took aim and blew that bastard away. It was a small and perhaps petty memorial - a strange choice of method to mark the passing of a life. Maybe it is a little perverse to declare that one person’s death is meaningful in the face of so many nameless, faceless others, but it meant something to me, however little.


That was Episode 3 of Permanent Death. Thanks for reading and if you too are playing along at home, feel free to keep us updated on how you’re going.

Just so there’s no confusion, my co-experimenter Nels Anderson’s in-game character died this week. He said to me via twitter, “I got kinda punked”. I hate to say this Nels, but Andre knew what he was getting into when he chose this life, and so did you. There is no getting punked, in Permanent Death - only Life and the promise of a swift end.

Permanent Death, Episode 2: From Here to the Hearafter

A couple of other bloggers have been inspired by this ‘Permanent Death’ experiment, so I’ll mention them here. Michel McBride is playing along as Xianyong Bai. Catch up with his progress here. Nels Anderson is playing as Andre Hyppolite, and his excellent first entry is here. If you are playing along at home, leave a comment and let me how you’re finding it.

“He doesn’t need to know!” – Prosper Kouassi.

I started this episode inside the UFLL headquarters in Pala. The warlord’s mission was to eliminate some commando’s who were parachuting into the desert somewhere. Mission accepted, I went back outside to check my map and stand with my back to the setting sun.

My new buddy Michelle rang and asked to meet somewhere north-east of Mokuba, I drove east. Coming to the first of many manned checkpoints I overestimated the distance from myself to the soldiers ahead. I was still stepping out of the car when the first bullets started pinging off the bonnet. I remember thinking ‘this is it – my first firefight’ and the feeling of danger threatened to overwhelm me. Certainly, the mixture of exhilaration and jitters proved to pose more of a threat to my survival than did the enemy soldiers. I spent most of the fight crouched here.

It was almost a let-down how easy it was. Dispatching them all safely, I scouted the camp, picking up some grenades from the stockpile to replace the ones I’d frantically lobbed into the scrub. I hopped into a nearby UNIMOG (a vehicle that looks like the love child of a tank and a dune buggy) and continued on my journey east through the dense jungle, spying and capturing a safe-house just off the main road. The fight was short and dangerous and I got flanked from behind by a patrolling jeep. This is normal difficulty however so I only lost ½ my health.

While I slept in the safe-house, I was shown a view outside and spied two soldiers approaching under the cover of darkness. They didn’t really stand much of a chance since it appeared the soldiers default to crouching and waiting in the dark once night falls.

Back again in my trusty UNIMOG I approached a second checkpoint further down the road and, still in complete darkness, dismounted a safe distance away. I crept up to well within earshot of the checkpoint and took out enemies while squatting in this lovely fern.

All clear, I commandeered a jeep from the camp and made the last leg of the journey to my meeting place with Michelle. On the way I couldn’t resist snapping this picture of a beautiful waterfall. One of the things I like best about Far Cry 2 is the stark contrast between the natural beauty and the purposefully ugly humanity.

I hung out with Michelle inside the safe house for a few minutes while she told me that the soldiers who I was tasked with killing were actually here to get back at her for stealing some supplies. Another of the great things about Far Cry 2 is that it doesn’t beat you over the head with morality like many other videogames – it’s up to you to determine the morality of your actions. If you think about it for a second, it is really okay to kill that Michelle wants you to kill these soldiers? It’s very easy to slip into videogame thinking and just go ahead with everything you are presented with the option of doing.

Working with Michelle would, however, upgrade my safe house effectively keeping me safer and better stocked with health and ammunition. So I accept Michelle’s secondary mission and after a quick nap head to The Gun Shop. A bolt-action sniper rifle is within my budget thanks to the UFLL’s generous upfront payment scheme and with my shiny new rifle in hand I headed back west and north. I reach the border of what is marked as “private property” on my map.

I prowled on up the path towards the villa where my target lay and peered through my rifle scope. It appeared that the checkpoint some ways up the road was deserted, however I knew better from experience. I skirted around the side and crouch-walked through a building, looking for hostiles. Peering out the open front door I spied a guard, crouched cannily behind the front wall. If I’d have walked up the main driveway I would have been ambushed! As it was, he was unaware that I was now about to ambush him.

I’ve heard that ‘concentration’ can be described as like ‘a flashlight’, illuminating certain things while keeping others in the dark. You may have heard of the experiment where a person is told to count how many times an object is passed around a circle. The person concentrating routinely fails to notice that a conspicuously dressed person (sometimes in a gorilla suit even) walks through – they were simply concentrating too hard on one thing to notice another. In this case, I was concentrating so hard on the soldier on the right that I neglected to see the fellow on the left, sitting motionless in the bushes across the drive. As Robert Muldoon would say – Clever girl.

If this were anything harder than normal, I could be dead, machete in hand. As it was, I only lost a single bar of health before I took out the other soldier and continued unimpeded along the path to the villa. On the way, I spotted a briefcase full of diamonds.

Creping up to the villa, I scouted the area from a slightly raised position in the south-west corner – spotting a prowling sniper and dispatching him easily, thankful for the telescopic lens of my rifle. The shot drew attention to me, however, and I had to scoot back from my position as the bullets ricocheted around me. Enemies swarmed around like ants, and I used my rifle and pistol like an ant-squashing boot, putting them down easily. I ducked inside a small hut to reload and tend to some superficial wounds. Peering out through the only window, I was suddenly sprayed with fragments of wood as the boards covering the window were shot to pieces. In the middle of dispatching this fresh wave of attackers, one of them launches a flare high into the sky over my head.

I had plenty of warning before the “reinforcements” showed up – the jeep had its lights on and in the darkness stood out like a sore thumb. I took out the gunner in one, ducking behind a slanting piece of wall and sliding back the bolt to ready a second shot, popping up to take out the driver. I was now free to take on the house. I grabbed another briefcase full of diamonds and headed up stairs.

Inside the single lit room, hunched over some papers and a wireless was The Belgian. Looking straight out of the 1950’s with his thick-rimmed, jet black glasses he raised himself from his chair as I approached, jamming my machete against his throat. He spoke good English and understood my intentions, giving the commandos the new coordinates that Michelle had specified. Upon leaving, I paused to deliberate as to whether he needed to be eliminated to prevent him from calling them back and warning of the ambush. Michelle hadn’t specified, but I didn’t see the need to shed any more blood than necessary, so I shot up his radio instead. A futile, but symbolic gesture, as the radio was indestructible. I pretend otherwise.

Next thing I know, my phone is ringing and it’s Michelle on the other end. She tells me that the soldiers were moving into place and that I should go and destroy the evidence of the theft. It was in the back of a truck at a location one map south of the villa. Instead of going there directly, I went north until I hit the small river and grabbed a boat from the dock. There were some guards but they were no threat to my continued survival. I rounded a bend and picked off three soldiers guarding a safe house and, picking up another briefcase of diamonds on the way, moved inside and to have a nice safe nap.

Upon awakening, I re-entered my boat and headed east until I reached land, with another safe house in the distance. On the way, however, I discovered a deserted jeep sitting in the middle of the road. As I approached, I noticed a fellow walking away from the jeep, through the long grass towards a group of soldiers guarding the safe-house. It looked like he had gotten out of his jeep to stretch his legs before deciding to go and chat with the nearby soldiers. I stood dumbstruck for a moment at the normalness of the situation before shooting him in the back of the head.

I engaged the guards at close range and took them out easily, interrupted briefly by a bout of unexpected malaria. Seeing his opening, one soldier decided to forgoe his cover for a better shot at me, rushing out from behind a rusty car. Back to full health I proceeded to shoot him to death with my pistol and in his death throes, he knocked over a barrel of burning pieces of wood, starting a lovely fire that spreads quickly to where the other soldier lies in wait. I use some bullets to help him along into the next world and head inside and to have another nap. It’s nearly dawn.

I pack my bags and leave the Hotel de Safehouse, stepping outside into – THIS! The glorious rays of the rising sun.

If the path of my trip so far has seemed oddly circuitous, it’s only because I know that in Far Cry 2 the most direct route is often also the most dangerous. It’s also usually quicker to avoid checkpoints and guard posts when you can, and if you spend a few minutes planning it’s often possible to plot a reasonably safe and unimpeded course to your destination. Such are the lengths to which I will go just to stay alive. Here’s a rough map of my current journey so far:

Taking the bus from the nearby far-east bus stop meant that I could travel directly to the bus-stop in the south-east corner of the map, bypassing a number of checkpoints. Someone had left another briefcase of diamonds at this bus station and after dealing with another jeep patrol I travelled on up to the gun shop to pick up a fresh new rifle. From that same store that I had visited twice now, I proceeded west to come around at my target from the north and passed the same waterfall from earlier, this time in the daylight. While trying to take yet another beautiful screenshot I failed to watch where I was going and had a bit of a car accident. I wasn't even going that fast officer, I swear!

No sooner had I given up on righting my now useless Unimog than I was assaulted by soldiers. I forgot to mention that I picked up a new machine gun for my special weapon slot back at the gun shop, which I put to good use. Here is a man who met the business end of the weapon and ended up in the river.

Finally, I neared the location of my primary target – Mokuba, a shanty town with a mass of hazardously placed explosives just waiting to devastate living flesh. Here’s some exploding impressively while I coolly reload.

I cleared the camp and, upon reaching my target, fire a bullet into a conveniently placed propane tank, blowing the whole thing sky high.

My phone rings again it’s Michelle telling asking for some help. Not willing to lose my buddy so early, I wander on down the road to the checkpoint where she is holed up. I spot some soldiers crossing the road (to get to the other side, probably) and take aim with my rifle.

They return fire, their AK47’s pinging ineffectually off the rocks around me. This is why I advocate long distance engagements in my original “How To Kill People More Effectively in Far Cry 2” post. I take out the last stragglers see and head in closer. On the way, a solitary burst of AK fire and the words “mission accomplished” inform me that Michelle can take care of herself. She tells me that she’s okay for now that I can go on my merry way. Stopping only to pick up another briefcase of diamonds, I head to back to the bus-stop and take a bus back to Pala, completing a giant, lopsided circle and the first of many missions in Far Cry 2.

A few things I learnt from that episode: Number one – Far Cry 2 is a long game but writing about it takes even longer. This was (if you’ll believe it!) the condensed version of Episode two and still clocked in at 2,000 words. I’ll definitely be making these shorter in the future. With Far Cry 2 containing around 30 or so missions, going at the current rate I would end up writing around 60,000 words by the time I got to the end (assuming I made it that far). That’s enough for a decent sized novel! Suffice to say, I’m going to have to skim a bit in the future.

Number two: On normal, it’s still far too easy for me. I’m going play some more and hopefully as the enemies get better weapons it will become harder, but I’m still considering doing something along the lines of purposefully avoiding working with my buddy or limiting myself to only using shotguns (which is, quite frankly, the quickest way to get yourself killed in this game).

For the moment, I’m going to try and breeze through a couple missions and condense them all down into an episode. Maybe when it gets hard again I can go into greater detail about my trials and triumphs. As Justin Keverne has pointed out, the best moments in the game happen when it all goes horribly wrong.

Permanent Death, Episode 1: An Inauspicious Beginning

Death in games is often very… temporary. I want to find out what happens to me as a player if I make my videogame death much more permanent. This is the story of one game of Far Cry 2 – one single narrative that one way or the other will end in my death. Whether it is at the hands of my enemies, the harsh environment, or my own ineptitude, I am not going to survive the telling of this tale.

The rules: Normal difficulty; fortunes DLC installed. When I die, that’s it. Game over.

Let’s see how far Qurbani Singh can get.

I used the introductory car ride to adjust my visual settings; I figure that if I’m going to be fighting for my life I probably want the best frame rate I can get. I take everything down a notch, and while I normally play with most settings on “Very High” I take them down to just “High”. I also change from 2x to 4x anti-aliasing – if Charlie’s going to be crouching in the jungle waiting for me, I want as 'accurate' a picture of him as I can get. My life is depending on this now.

The taxi ride ends and I come down with malaria. I black out… and wake up in the room where the Jackal tells me about some Neitchze he read and nearly chops my head off. I black out again. So far, it’s all scripted cut scene.

I wake up again to the sound of gunfire and one wall of my room explodes – hit by a scripted RPG. At least I’m playing the game now and from here on in the risk of dying increases greatly.

I get up out of the bed, picking up the sidearm and machete that the Jackal left. I scrabble out of the room and make my way to the central stairwell. From previous experience, I know I don’t want to go out the front door as it’s obvious that would lead me right into where the fighting is worst. Instead I cross to another room, scooping up a dropped machine gun on the way. Anything is better than this pop-gun of a sidearm, I’ve got to be able to defend myself now and a pistol just isn’t going to cut it.

I find the open window and leap out of it – no one is in sight (it is normal difficulty, after all) but as I creep down the back alley I spy some soldiers down a side-street. I turn the other direction and sprint up the hill away from town. I get as far from town as I can before I have to stop sprinting, my breathing getting ragged and my vision blurring. The malaria virus clouds the edges of the screen as I stumble across a bridge out of town. In one of the last scripted sequences before I reach the main game, I collapse onto the wooden decking of the bridge. As my vision goes dim, I hear a jeep pulling up and men jumping out of it. I slip into unconsciousness.

Let me take a second here to mention that, up until now it has all been very scripted. Very safe. No matter what you choose to do in the town to try and get out you end up blacking out and being picked up. Even if you get shot, you black out and get picked up. I have a feeling that where you are when you go down affects which faction you get ‘rescued’ by since every time I've gone down on that bridge I get stuck with the following guy…

When I awoke, I’m greeted by this friendly looking guy who is slouched across the doorway. The shady looking fellow goes by the name of Joakim Carbonell and he works for the UFLL.

Carbonell tells me to fix my wounds, get some guns and go out and repair a car that’s letting off steam outside. Apparently I’m indebted to him because he saved my life and got some of his soldiers killed back in town. He’s got some monkey work for me to do and I'm happy to oblige, since he also promises to introduce me to Gakumba, the regional boss of the UFLL, if I do this work for him. Gotta start somewhere.

Fixed up the car; Carbonell can’t be bothered coming outside of his hut even thought I'm standing right outside so he calls me on the phone instead. Tells me about an enemy safe-house that he’d like to see get roughed up. I take my guns and my new car and head on up. They don’t really pose much of a threat and Carbonell calls me back when I’m done.

For this fight I was for the first time faced with the possibility of dying, as I had no buddy to rescue me had I stuffed up and gotten myself killed. There was a little bit of tension, but it was still incredibly easy seeing as it is on the normal difficulty. After playing on 'Infamous' (the absolute hardest difficulty) for so long I think the temptation might be for me to not take it seriously enough, which is kind of good and dangerous. I imagine that it shares a kind of verisimilitude with real war, of which there is the saying that it is “long stretches of boredom punctuated by brief moments of sheer terror”. It means that I’ll have to work to maintain concentration and focus.

Carbonell didn’t want me to fall asleep on my feet, so he told me to go inside and rest. I decided to sleep till the early evening. It had been a long day, after all. I awoke at 8pm and stepped outside to answer a phone call. Carbonell wanted me to go up to some lumber camp just up the road. I got there and scout around a bit. Apparently there was someone being held captive in one of the buildings and I was to go and rescue them.

I snuck up nice and close and easily pulled off a headshot on the first of two soldiers in my sights. They were unsuspecting and went down fast. One of their number, however, managed to get a flare off before I dispatched him; no one came to help him though. When it was clear, I entered the building and freed a woman held captive named Michelle who was to become my best buddy. Knowing the kind of things I'm going to do in this game, and the kinds of tactics I'm going employ to make absolutely sure I stay alive, who would want to be my buddy? They must be pretty messed up themselves...

I drove back up to ‘Fresh Fish’ where Carbonell gave me my reward in diamonds, if I could find them stashed somewhere in the camp. And find them I did, since I’d already done this about 4 or 5 times when I'd played the game before. At least the later missions will be a bit more interesting as I can start to explore the freedom the geography of the world affords.

I headed on down to Mike’s bar and the gun shop next door to buy myself a new gun, or more accurately an unlimited supply of one particular gun. I also bought an accuracy upgrade for it which I hope will help me save ammo and stay alive better. By being able to bring down enemies quicker I’ll stop them from being able to bring me down. It’s this kind of strategic thinking that I’m going to need to do to make sure I never, ever lose the upper hand in this game of Far Cry 2.

Inside Mike’s bar I met up with Michelle as well as Warren Clyde who will one day provide me with a second chance if I get almost-dead. Hopefully I won’t ever need him, but I honestly don't want to risk it. You never know what dumb things might happen. I could fall off a cliff – it’s happened before – and I’d be mighty glad to have my ‘get out of death free’ card handy. I also met Reuben who will be of next to no use to me in this game, as I’m just trying to stay alive and, frankly, he’s got nothing to offer me. Michelle kinda creeps me out by mentioning something about knowing what the "price of a child" is in the country. Was she encouraging me to paedophillia?! Creepy lady is creepy. If I didn't really, really not want to lose my backup rescue buddy I'd totally find a way to kill off Michelle. I seem to recall CLINT HOCKING mentioning that eventually she annoyed him enough to provoke him to murder.

On my way back up to Pala (the town where the fighting broke out and the place that I can get malaria medicine and missions from) I break into a shack and recover some diamonds. In town I visit the church and the priest gives me some medicine in exchange for delivering a tape that Reuben gave me. Malaria can pop up at any time, so I’ll need to stay stocked up on pills. The last thing I want is to be on my last legs and then have a malaria attack render me defenceless. Something like that could get me killed very quickly.

As I stepped outside the church, a dialogue told me that I’d finished the tutorial. The gloves are off. I felt very much on my own, but at least I now have my rescue buddy ready. I walked on over to the headquarters of the UFLL, the guard patting me down for concealed weapons before admitting me in to see Gakumba. I stepped inside the dimly lit building, ready for danger.

_____

Well that took far longer than expected. At least I’m onto the meat of the game, and I 'm exposed to death proper now. I could die at any moment! The danger! The excitement! The Permanent Death! This is what it's all about folks.

One part of the motivation for this project was Manveer Heir’s talk on ‘Designing Ethical Dilemmas’ and the back-and-forth between him and Clint Hocking. It was suggested by someone that having decisions be irreversible would add weight to our in-game actions. I’m only at the start of this journey, but I’m beginning to see how that could potentially be both true and false, depending on the circumstances. If I get killed in the second episode, and that’s permanent, I’m not really going to be mourning my own death - I'll probably just write this experiment off as a bit of a failure. I’m more likely to just be annoyed at not having gotten anywhere. If, however, I get myself killed at one of the many points later in the game where you don't have a rescue buddy, I can certainly imagine being consumed with rage at the unfairness of the premature ending – which itself somewhat mirrors feelings and reactions to death in the real world.

So even if I die tomorrow (and in the game!) I’ll still have gotten some new insight into games that I feel makes it worthwhile. Here’s to hoping that trend continues.

For the RSS readers: SLRC Does Pinball

Because I know there are some readers of SLRC that don't catch all I mention on Twitter, I wanted to let you know of a piece I wrote for Kotaku Australia on the first Annual Pinball Expo in Sydney. I wrote about it from a videogame angle because I expected there to be more "gamers" at the expo than there were - in hindsight, of course, Pinball was most popular with a generation older than my own, but I somehow overlooked that going in.

Anyway, there were too many videogame parallels to pass up commenting on and the editor-at-large of Kotaku AU, David Wildgoose, was kind enough to give me a place to talk about them. It starts out like this,

I guess the website should have tipped me off about the expo in advance – it was done in crude HTML and featured the kind of layout scheme that would have been the height of excellence on a Geocities site circa 1999. That is, it had fluoro coloured text and a visitor counter at the bottom currently sitting pretty at around 7,000 visitors.

And continues on in a fashion that even my mother found compelling enough to read. Head on over for the full text and some better pictures (but not much better).