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.

Frank Bilders is Dead

The water was cool and refreshing on my hot skin. I was dirty and sweaty, my clothes stained with grime and blood, some my own, some other peoples. It felt bad to be this clean and refreshed after what I'd just done, and to add to my feeling of guilt it was all premeditated.

Frank Bilders is now dead. I killed him with his own sidearm – a somewhat tarnished .50 caliber desert eagle pistol. I tell you this detail not because it’s important (although the image of that weapon will be forever stamped in my mind) but to distract from the painful sense of culpability I feel for his murder.

I mean, I knew Frank stood a good chance of getting hurt but I had hoped that something with the missions execution would go lethally awry, saving me from having to get any more blood on my hands. Every time we work together the man seemed to take another bullet wound. ‘Heh, just another scar to add to the collection’, he would say. Always focused on the job at hand, was Frank. ‘There’s some bugger out there who cut me out of a deal, and I want him dead’, he’d say in his Northern Irish swagger. No need for a reason, or context - Frank wanted something done, and you were going to do it for him.

When the time came, and he was lying on the ground writhing in pain, the situation hadn’t really forced my hand. I had plenty of syrettes, there was time and I could have saved him, but I wanted him out of the way. So instead of his healing his wounds with medicine I took out his own gun and shot him in the mouth. I hesitated, mind you– I very nearly couldn’t pull it off. But I did, and his body is now lying on a road somewhere in Sefapane, gathering flies and a layer of the all pervasive red dust. And I’m swimming up the river. Getting clean. Getting refreshed. There is no music, no victory anthem. Just the water and the noise my body makes as I move through it.

And Frank Bilders is dead.

It is dark, you are likely to be eaten by a Zombie

Cory Dotorow in his book Down and out in the Magic Kingdom introduced a fictional system of currency called ‘Whuffie’. In his novel, set in the distant future where ‘scarcity economics’ no longer rules, whuffie is based around personal reputation, and is accrued when other people attribute something like ‘coolness’ to you, and add whuffie to your account. It’s also not a zero sum system, so a person with zero whuffie could give and take away from other people, exactly as much as someone with a million whuffie could. A quote from the book, to help explain:

"Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn't starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented — your personal capital with your friends and neighbors — you more accurately gauged your success".[1]

What’s this got to do with Left 4 Dead? Well, L4D embodies perfectly a real world Whuffie system. In L4D you will be hated, hated, if you don’t work with your team. In one game of vs. mode in which I was participating, a fellow survivor (the humans) was evidently an inexperience player or deliberately stuffing around and jumped off a building, killing himself. Rather than just accept this act, someone initiated a vote to kick the player, and it passed (I’ll admit, I voted him out too). You just cannot tolerate incompetence, or worse, a deliberate gung-ho attitude. You will die horribly and quickly, even horribly quickly, as there will be no one there to knock that pouncing hunter off you when he gets you from behind. Your team-mates save you from your helplessness, and in return you just cannot help but like them for it. Speaking only for myself, of course, but I think a degree of this applies across the board, it makes me want to save them just as much in return. This is the essence of good cooperative play – the encouragement to work together with little to no incentive to abandon people to a grisly fate. After all, if they’re dead then they can’t help you.

I’ve been pretty quiet on the blogging front lately, and it’s all because of Left 4 Dead. The game is really quite hard to stop playing, and largely because it facilitates a strange, temporary bond between a small group of players. Like war veterans, by the finale we are in a groove and all know to when to duck or when to avoid moving, so we don’t cross each others line of fire. Conversely, you can usually tell before the finale if you’re going to make it or not as a team. I can almost not count the number of times I’ve stalled on the third act.

I do have a small criticism, perhaps, for Valve if they ever drop by my blog, and it’s that they didn’t give us more! Sadly, until Valve playtest further and make the necessary tweaks and changes, you can only play versus mode on 2 of the 4 campaigns. That seems an unfortunate limitation. Still, if the modding scene is any good (and all early indications are that it is) then I’m sure we’ll see more than a few custom campaigns before too long.

---

[1] Corey Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, p.10

Hocking's Masterpiece

I went to bed last night thinking about the ending of Far Cry 2. My response, entirely subjective, was a mix of dismay and real, genuine sadness. The feeling was comparable to the one I get at the very conclusion of the Harry Potter series – a kind of melancholy sadness at having to say goodbye to this mind-blowing world, compounded by the tragic events of the closing pages. Similarly, I know there are many people who don’t like the Harry Potter series, or the ending, and can’t help but think that some people will react similarly to Far Cry 2. The ending is imperfect. It’s flawed. But for those few of us who now care about this game, it’s also deeply emotional.

I can forgive the flaws of the ending, however, and now rate it as one of my all time favourite videogame conclusions ever. Partly it's because it is going to be somewhat unpopular, and I don’t want it written off or forgotten. But in it’s depths I can see the glimmer of the potential that it was trying to achieve. Hocking’s Masterpiece.

Far Cry 2 is about the individual; death; nihilism. The contentious design decisions, even the whole game, only starts to make sense when viewed through this lens. Like a David Lean epic from the golden era of cinema it deals with many concepts and issues all viewed through the prism of a central concern. Doctor Zhivago’s conceit was viewing the Russian revolution through the personal story of one man. Similarly Lawrence of Arabia also possessed the same focus on viewing history as it orbited around an individual. Far Cry 2 is about you and death. Of course every single person you meet wants to kill you. Of course you spend about as much time fighting the environment as other persons. Of course you are clinging to the barest scrap of health and well-being; Even the malaria is trying to kill you.

Some people will probably want to throw around that clichéd phrase “You’re a survivor” and the sentiment that goes with it, but the truth is, you’re not. Take from that what you will, but Far Cry 2 reminds at every possible opportunity that life is fatal. No one gets out of this place alive. It makes for what I believe to be truly the first game that goes beyond, or outright rejects, the mental switch-off performed by pathological mass-murderers and videogame players. That switch you flick in your brain when playing a shooter - the small part up the back that empathises with your victims, and which is incompatible with what most games narcissistically tell us – that you should survive, you deserve it, you’re the hero. Here instead, nihilism is the name of the game.

As the man you have been trying to kill says, “No one is going to die today that didn’t have it coming.” Far Cry 2 screams that we all have it coming.