Permanent Death, Episode 9: Bridges, Bombs and Broadcasters

I’m back with the UFLL. Voorhees and his boss want me to kill an arms dealer called Yabek. Voorhees tells me, “I hear that’s a speciality of yours”. Andre calls me up and asks to meet near Sepoko.

On the way out of town, I stop in to see the doctor and pick up some passports to swap with for some malaria pills. After catching the bus up north, I get in a car and am promptly attacked by a bunch of soldiers in jeeps.

I swap my jalopy for one up with a grenade launcher on the turret. It is a silly move and I later end up nearly blowing myself up with it.

Further up the road, I get attacked by an RPG from a nearby hill and swerve off the road to avoid it. I look back over my shoulder in time to see the explosion.

I reach the safe-house and go inside to meet Andre, who wants me to go get a fuse for a 1000 pound bomb he plans to use to drop a bridge on Yabek the arms dealer. As one does.

I picked up a clean new rifle from the weapons crate inside the house, trading it for my dirty and soon to become prone to jamming AR16. Some of soldiers had followed me to the safe-house and had set up an ambush at the front door. As in literally at the front door.

To get to the crash site and the detonator for Andre’s bomb I had to pass through the checkpoint that had previously fired an RPG at me and after sniping the Rocketeer and checkpoint guards, I took down some more soldiers at another safehouse.

Creeping up to the crash-site, I took out one sniper from distance and used my flare gun to start a pair of fires on both sides of a group of soldiers.

Swapping to my SAW for closer combat, I lobbed two grenades into the group. Two distinct explosions followed by two distinct cries of pain were heard, but I’d seen three in the initial group. Peering over the lip of the rocky-outcropping, I spot the last of the trio standing surrounded by flame and destruction.

I put him down with a quick burst, but he’s not done yet and, getting up he limps away, the flames lapping at his heels.

I stand transfixed in horror as I watch the poor injured man’s fate initially believing that the fire would eventually claim him. However he made it to a burnt patch where the fire was dying down and I had to finish him off with anther quick burst.

The thought of the unknown soldier dying from the flames really shook me up and I wondered why. Really, why should it, and why now? I’ve killed men by fire before. Yet it remained a strange and affecting moment, perhaps a result of some combination of visual verisimilitude and emergent situation. It is exciting to be affected like this by a game.

I picked up the warhead from the middle of the crash site and got a call from Andre – it was time to meet him on the bridge. On the way I picked up a number of Reuben’s recordings with The Jackal.

The quickest way to the bridge was to pass back through the RPG checkpoint from before. I blew up a whole bunch of cars and the enemies using them as cover by putting a grenade under one of them.

I took a bus back to Pala and arrived in the dead of the night. I then drove to the arms dealer and picked up some stealth weaponry to make the most of working in the dark. Taking a boat up the eastern tributary, I made good progress.

On the way, I passed close enough to reach out and touch another patrol boat heading in the opposite direction. It couldn’t identify me as either friend or foe in the gloom and I was past them before they could call out. They followed me a ways down river but by the time they caught up to where I’d beached my swamp boat I was safely hidden in long grass up the bank.

They did a few lazy circles scanning the bushes for me, but eventually gave up and went back to patrolling. It was another moment of intoxicating, unexpected verisimilitude to real-world behaviour.

After watching the boat retreat up the river, I walked up the road to a safe-house on the track to the bridge pausing to stare at two water buffalo by the side of the road.

Spotting two soldiers up ahead I crept up to the edge of the clearing around the safe-house and opened fire with my silenced MP5.

One soldier on the opposing side of the campfire from me wasn’t killed by my initial burst and in the time it took to take down his friends had pulled himself up onto his knees and had drawn his side-arm.

I shot him again and he went down, falling half-into the fire. There’s no predicting which kills are in Far Cry 2 are going to leave a mark in your memory, but this was another one. Perhaps it was the way he collapsed into the fire looked unsettlingly real. It’s certainly been one for affecting moments.

I reached the bridge at the end of the road and spotted Andre down the far end, a truck with the bomb in the back parked over barge below.

I delicately hand over the warhead/fuse. “No sudden moves” he adds, quite unnecessarily I feel. He then tells me to run for it and I realise that he’s armed it – just like that, and no warning. I’m too busy sprinting for my life to get a good look at the best of the fireworks and it kind of annoys me actually – it was a lot of hard work getting that fuse and I expect to be able to enjoy the show.

APR goons swarm towards us like we’ve just stepped on an ant’s nest, since we’ve just put their favourite arms dealer out of action, but they’re easily put down. Kind of suspicious how quickly they arrived – did they let us blow up Yabek’s barge? Was he becoming too greedy even for the APR?

I take a hang-glide and a boat ride to end up back in Pala, searching for more clues.

Tambossa is the only one who will even see me now. I’ve used up all my usefulness to the UFLL with the last job apparently. The APR commander’s formal army attitude puts me on edge and he tells me he knows I’ve been ‘working with the enemy’. Of course he knows, however he must still have some use for me or he’d have had me shot as soon as I stepped into Pala.

This time he and Greaves want me to stop a DJ from speaking anti-APR propaganda on the radio. The problem until now has been that his transmitter was portable and as soon as they could pin him down he’d pack up and leave again. They’ve just spotted him again, however, and now it’s my job to shut him up.

Andre calls me about the job and asks to meet near Sepoko and since it’s near the drop-off for the passports Doctor Obua gave me the day before (and which have since been in the water with me and possibly ruined; I haven’t checked) I decide to detour to meet him. Taking a boat down the western river, I didn’t get far before I felt a wave of illness pass over me and as I tossed back a pill I noticed it was the last in the container. Good thing I’m on my way to get some more.

I’m met with little to no resistance and find Andre in the safe house. I don’t quite know how he got there so fast – he must have gone direct from where I’d left him near the bridge. But as for how he knew where I’d be doing next, I’ll never know. I guess there’s a reason he’s the near-mythical Andre Hypollite.

Andre tells me that, better than just kicking the DJ off the air, I should get him to read something that will incite the local militia into attacking some official that’s in the country. Before I can get the DJ’s altered message on-air, however, I need to get some UFLL censor’s finger off the button that kills the signal. So off to the ranger station it is, and still in the early hours of the morning, I approach and quietly take out a number of guards. I manage to sneak my way underneath the target’s building and shoot him in the head from below. His body goes limp, sliding out of the chair he was sitting in and onto the floor.

I start some fires to act as a diversion while I extricate myself from the ranger station.

Heading over to the phone card shop (as Doctor Obua described it to me) I’m finally delivering the passports. I take out the soldiers peppering the façade of the building and another soldier ends up wounded on the ground, crawling away to lean against a rock. What is it with me and wounded soldiers today? I hate leaving survivors (particularly when they still have a sidearm) and I equally hate killing these soft targets. Like the man in the fire earlier, it kind of wrenches at me as I pull the trigger.

Wanting to put some distance between myself and this latest fight, I quickly hand over the passports, the civilian giving me a look as he gets up.

I leave for my new target – the DJ Lord Haw-Haw. What a stupid name. I’m looking forward to getting a chance to shut this guy up as I’ve been hearing him talk over and over on the radio ever since I came to this country. The sun comes up on the way and I change my load-out, opting for a shiny new super powerful, super automatic shotgun.

To get to the DJ I have to go through a small cluster of buildings pock-marked with soldiers. I charge into the place with my fat Land Rover and charge up the front stairs, blowing up something flammable in the process.

Soon, everything is on fire and obscured by the smoke.

It quickly clears, and it is plain that most soldiers were unfazed by the blaze and are already pressing the attack. To top it off, a jeep appears behind and two or more soldiers begin shooting into my back. I’m now surrounded, and only by popping three syrettes in a row can I stay on my feet. I make it over to a rock formation to the west and take a breather.

With a full magazine and a lungful of air (as opposed to lead) I take down soldiers one at a time from a position of relative safety behind a large rock. I even manage to catch one with my flare gun at 100 paces!

Heading south towards the DJ and his transmitter, a RPG-wielding lookout launches a rocket toward me. I get a dart off but miss and I notice as the rocket is coming in that I’m surrounded by potent explosives.

I high-tail it, sure that I’m not going to make it far enough away, but luckily the rocket ‘packs it in on the surface’ and doesn't hit near enough to do more than singe my eyebrows.

I steady for my second shot and score a hit as he launches off another rocket still aimed at me – however it goes haywire, presumably from the guidance system, as it does a few loops around the hut from which it was fired.

The DJ is no problem once I show him my machete and he spits an ineffectual “Fuck you!” after me as I strode out of his bush-studio.

I threw a grenade under his transmitter to shut him up.

Andre calls and I go to his aid, driving a jeep over three soldiers as they stand in the road shooting. More turn up but I was by then getting the hang of my shotgun so it was no hassle.

I clear out another safe-house on the way to the bus-station and what should happen but more wounded soldiers I fail to kill in my initial shots. Two wounded soldiers survive my attack to get up onto their knees.

Whether it’s from the visceral joy of firing my new toy or I’m just getting inured to euthanizing wounded soldiers, I fail to hesitate on these two.

Back on the road, about 100 metres from the bus station I come across this grisly scene.

There appear to be no survivors.

Permanent Death, Episode 8: Finding Frank & Assisting Andre

FOREWARD to Episode 8: For those in the know – that is, anyone who has played Far Cry 2 to the end at least once – the section of the game I am in middle of is very, very time consuming. It feels like it stretched out for hours. Which is probably accurate because I takes hours to get beyond just doing more and more missions for the two factions.

I couldn’t find where I read it, but Clint Hocking, Creative Director for the game has mentioned that some portions of the game were at least three times as long as intended. I am fairly sure this portion of the game is one of those sections, as it drags on forever with mission after mission leading you seemingly never closer to The Jackal. Even the war itself hardly seems to move.

Along with the plodding pace comes a certain endurance race approach to playing the game and with that so does the story. The Permanent Death story between the first few missions after arriving in Port Soleo and the eventual final faction mission adopts a kind of holding pattern. I do missions, I kill people, I see the sights, but nothing really changes and I don’t really take any serious risks. I wondered whether to even bother with conveying the details of this chunk of the game; it certainly doesn’t reflect the sense that death is an ever present threat, although I suppose it still is. It just doesn’t feel like it.

Long story short, I’m getting bored and worn down by the game and I think a lot of players are by this point. However, for the sake of the tale, I press on.

---

I’m sick of this waiting. I’m tired of getting nowhere in my search for The Jackal, so I decide to bust straight into the UFLL and demand to see Mbantuwe for some answers.

As I approach, however, I notice that the familiar guard on the door is talking on the phone and doesn’t seem all that keen on letting me in. My hand hovers uneasily near the holster of his sidearm and I wait for him to finish his call. After putting away his phone, the nameless guard tells me that the UFLL bosses are too busy for me right now and I consider just shooting my way in.

But I resist temptation, knowing that in town and surrounded by several dozen soldiers I would probably not escape with my life. I really do want to finish this. So I temper my annoyance and listen to him tell me about some foreigner, some expat mercenary, who the APR has captive at the small hut-village of Sediko.

It turns out that the foreigner is one Frank Bilders and reports of his demise, it would seem, have been exaggerated. I knew him by reputation and I fought hard the urge to address him with a “Frank Bilders, I presume” but he beat me to it, telling me to get out separately and to meet up later at what passes for a bar in this country.

Checking my map back on the road, I hurry back to Pala, hoping my little detour had given the UFLL bosses time to un-busy themselves. The guard – the same one as before – lets me in to see the bosses. Voorhees slides a manila folder across the table at me and menaces like a gorilla. I’ll be honest; I wasn’t really paying attention and I only remember that I was to go kill a guy at the Polytechnic research station.

Andre, however, had other plans. He wanted that guy to instruct a pilot via radio to drop some cargo in an easy to collect location, and I was going to force him to do that at gunpoint. Or machete point, as it may have been. Before he could do that, I had to go get some map to specify where to drop the cargo.

So I took a drive up to the border-town of Sepoko, and on the way I crossed the notorious unnamed bridge north-east of the airfield, losing my transportation to a vigilant rocketeer with a clear shot.

I stopped at a safe-house on the way to my destination and then blew through a couple of checkpoints. Upon reaching the outskirts of Sepoko I started taking some long distance fire from the East but I didn’t figure they would be close enough to actually hit me and I thought even less that they’d be crazy enough to follow me.

It was a dangerous assumption because a short while later, after having to bail out of my vehicle under the withering fire of close-to-medium range AK47 fire and sporadic but deadly accurate sniper rounds from the town, I was also being fired upon from behind. Add to that a crazy jeep driver roaring up beside me and jamming his truck between a tree and the cliff-face and I’m juggling quite a few plates.

I start a few fires, put down some soldiers and thank my lucky stars the soldier firing an RPG at me from inside the complex can’t aim to save his own life and instead managed to keep firing into the junk and detritus between us. The scope on my Assault Rifle made it easy to take him out from a safe distance and I approach the complex using what little cover the fire has left.

Inside I swap to my SAW and do quite a bit of spraying and praying, making my way to the building containing the map Andre wanted. It doesn’t really seem all that different from the map I use to get around – couldn’t I have just lent him my copy? I resign myself for the time being to the task at hand and take my frustrations out on the nameless soldiers that seem intent on announcing their position and movements to me while I creep around behind them.

Andre calls to check up on my progress, and I inform him that I have his precious map. He sounds pleased on the phone and tells me to head to Polytechnic and persuade the radio operator to notify the pilot where to drop his cargo. I hot-foot it to the Polytechnic compound, parking my jeep under a shady tree.

I spy with my little eye, some soldiers lounging out the front. I decide to light a fire under them. When it burns down I move in closer, picking them off one at a time using gaps between buildings and the open windows until there doesn’t appear to be anybody left. I hear the radio operator calling out to anyone still alive.

Inside the building is incredibly gloomy for such a bright day outside, and as he spots me I rush him with my machete, thrusting it against his neck before he has a chance to draw his fat, gleaming side arm. I hand him the instructions to give the pilot and taps out the message and pushes send.

Now I’m stuck with a living, breathing dude who I have no use for, and who has a large and deadly pistol on his belt. A large and deadly pistol that he is probably itching to turn on me the second I give him a chance. Then I remember that the original mandate was essentially the assassination of this bloke, and his services were just for André’s, and hopefully by inference, my benefit too.

However I’m mentally unprepared for this kill and it throws my game, I forget to use my flare pistol – what has been my calling card for a while now – and I instead put a SAW round into his skull at high velocity. I track his limp body as it flops to the ground, mesmerised. Andre calls and tells me the plane is on its way.

I go outside and watch its lumbering progress across the sky and only later notice the detail that it already had its landing gear out. I consider how short the air-strip is and hope it doesn’t run out of runway.

The quickest way to the airport is a swim across the river, up the other side and past the safe-house. A small gap between the otherwise impassable mountains exists on the north-eastern face but it’s time saving nature is offset by having to run a notoriously dangerous roadblock. I get lucky, however, and skirt round behind some buildings and, oh joy of joys, I get far enough away that they don’t give a proper chase.

Well, except for a patrol jeep, but he was coming from the opposite direction.

I end up in a position with a view looking west across the runway to where I can see the fight between Andre and some assorted soldiers.

I don’t know where he stashed the cargo from the plane, but I assume it’s nearby and after beating off the soldiers Andre tells me to go.

Back to Pala I go and the same UFLL doorman is there to greet me. I go inside, still no closer to The Jackal.

Post Script: Justin Keverne recently interviewed me about the Permanent Death story, asking some really great questions. You can read it here.

Permanent Death: An Announcement

So today is the 23^rd of September, 11 months on from the day that Far Cry 2 was released upon an unsuspecting Australia and the world. It’s fitting then that I have an announcement to make about the Permanent Death saga.

On the 23^rd of October, one year to the day that Far Cry 2 was unleashed, I will be making available the entire Permanent Death story in beautiful, full-colour PDF for your reading and perusing pleasure. For a good idea of the quality of the end product, here is a short teaser containing the first couple of pages up to the end of the first chapter (around about Episode 3 on the blog). The overall effect is something akin to a graphic novel, but is also quite obviously influenced by machinima.

The PDF will be completely free, however if you find that its multiple hundred pages of full size screenshots and artfully arranged text are worth something to you I only ask that you please consider donating something. There will be absolutely no obligation to donate, or any recommended amount - just whatever you can afford and whatever you think it's worth. It will be licensed under a creative commons, non-commercial, attribution license, so you will be free to share it with any others that may appreciate it.

While there haven’t been any new episodes posted to the blog, I’ve been charging ahead in the story and am up to Episode 10 (and still alive, to boot). I will begin posting again later this week, and will hopefully finish the game/story in time to reach the end by the planned date. Mark October 23^rd in your calendars.

As an aside; sometime within the next day or two, the SLRC lifetime page views will tick over to a staggering 40,000. A sincere Thank You to everyone who’s read, commented and linked to SLRC in the nearly 2 years it's been around. Here’s to plenty more.

SLRC Does Midnight Launches

Every so often I get the urge to go outside. Most of the time, however, I ignore it and go back to working at my PC, but other times I just can't shake that wanderlust and so I need to go somewhere.

On Monday night I certainly went somewhere. Specifically, I went to the official Australian midnight launch of Halo 3: ODST at my own local Westfield. Umm... because Penrith is the Australian Hub of Halo game playing, I can only assume.

I thought my experience at the event was worth some kind of retelling so I wrote it up as a piece for Kotaku AU. If you can stand the wonky back-and-forth between present and past tense I think it's a pretty cool story, and I really did get the feeling of camaraderie with some of the other gamers in line.

I see it like this - if us massive, unrepentant gamer nerds can't be ourselves when we're standing in line with 200 other excitable dudes (and a couple lasses) just like us, then where can we be? I'm totally rockin' for more midnight launches from this experience, if only to meet other strange and wonderful gamers like I did on Monday night.

Gamers are Good People.

Assassins Creed Official Soundtrack - A Review

If you’ve only recently joined SLRC, since the start of the Permanent Death story perhaps, you might not know that SLRC started life as a music and videogame blog. We don’t do reviews very often here at SLRC (conveniently, if you ever wish to see that change, feel free to commission me) but today sees a reprisal of an earlier trend in reviewing the music for a videogames – this time it’s Ubisoft’s 2007 title Assassins Creed that gets a thorough once-over.

As a brief aside, this will be my last post for a few weeks as I’m taking a break and dropping off the grid for a few days. I’ll probably be back in late September or early October and will hopefully be recharged and ready to take on the rest of the Permanent Death saga. Enjoy!

The album sets the tone at the opening, introducing in the first track solo voices singing in Arabic over arab-esque scales, as well as chanting monks drenched in reverb evoking cavernous Middle Ages cathedrals. Vocals are an important part of the sonic palette of the Assassins Creed soundtrack and provide a sonic element that aims to capture the unique historical period of the game.

The listener is treated to sparing splashes of flutes and piano melodies underpinned by Arabic style light drum percussion. The major feature of the track ‘Flight through Jerusalem’ is a lament sung almost operatically, and placed in a middle distance giving the sense of being heard from across a city – perhaps the singer is crying out over the rooftops at dawn or dusk. A Middle Eastern guitar-type instrument and a string section carry much of the underlying harmonic content of the song.

The following few tracks on this admittedly rather short album – totaling up to around 40 minutes of music – re-introduce more traditional orchestral instruments to contrast with their ethnic co-players; timpani, drums, tambourines, string and brass section stabs, all make appearances in the first third of the album.

The aptly named ‘Spirit of Damascus’ piece uses what sounds like a background of giant steel-works percussion and the metallic timbre works is stark contrast to the fore-grounded Middle Eastern guitar. The mix and meeting of uncommonly related instruments as heard here mirrors musically what would have been a ‘cultural melting pot’ in the particular area of the middle east Assassins Creed is set in. The meeting of Christian and Islam; West and East, would have produced both clashes and unique opportunities for art and expression. That, and a lot of fighting, obviously.

The piece trails off, and ends far too quickly for such a beautiful track, with a synth bed that evokes the monkish chants on previous tunes. The following track, ‘Trouble in Jerusalem’ (a much longer piece at 4minutes) reprises the steel-percussion of ‘Damascus’ and adds Bootmen-style stompy percussion. A synthetic almost sub-audible bass acts as a powerful counterpoint to the breathy, cloistered monk-ish whisperings in (presumably) Latin on the track ‘Acre Underworld’. The use of harsh-cuts and sample loops that remind one of a broken record at the beginning gives the track a uniquely ‘electronic’ feel, utilizing an effect that cannot be easily replicated without modern technology. It is also possibly the first most prominent artificial sound on the album, or at the least, the fist piece that leans more towards using artificial and created sounds than organic or acoustic ones.

The composer, Jesper Kyd, is a great employer of non-acoustic instrumentation, and electronic instruments and synths alternately shimmer and glisten and stutter throughout the album. The most stand-out use is on the track ‘Access the Animus’, a supremely long piece clocking in at nine minutes and which contains a plethora of razor sharp glass-like samples. Additionally, some kind of synth or sample has been manipulated to sound unnervingly like a leopard or jaguar's roar – appropriate imagery for a piece entitled ‘Access the Animus’ with its title a homonym for “Animism”, a philosophical, religious or spiritual belief common in many non-urbanised, non-westernised civilizations, often accompanied by a reverence for animals (particularly large and powerful ones such as big cats). Admittedly it’s a tenuous connection, but it’s also one I can’t help to make – it really sounds like a jaguar or other big cat to my ear. In addition to being one of the longest pieces, ‘Access the Animus’ also marks the mid-point of the album.

The short piece ‘Dunes of Death’ makes use of metallic percussion and flute or pan-pie sound-alike instruments and also brings back a few splashes of melody on the piano.

A big feature of this album is that many of the towns have specific themes or sound-palettes. For example, Jerusalem-themed tracks almost always employ monks and male choirs, appropriate imagery for the cities strong religious significance to both Christianity and Islam. Compare and contrast with the piece ‘Masyaf in Danger’ which uses none of the same vocal elements, using only a light sprinkling of female synth voices.

The third from last track, ‘Mediation Begins’, has at it’s core Arabic percussion, a steel-stringed Arabic guitar-like instrument, and a melody played on a pipe-flute instrument all sounding so much like a group of street performers. The band fades in and at first the scene could be any of a thousand street corners in the Middle East, however a bed of synth and reverb-soaked synthetic sounds soon appears to underpin the group. The effect, and it is one that is used in many of the pieces, is the juxtaposition of normal surface appearances with underlying tensions and fears – another musical metaphor perhaps for the cultural tensions of the historical period.

‘Meditation of the Assassin’ has almost no organic or instrument sounds. The return of the nearly sub-audible bass from earlier in the album along with ominous whispers and out-of-place, non-harmonic dissonant electronic noises gives the piece a strong sinister feel. The brief appearance of wind chimes is far from reassuring and only further adds to the eeriness of the piece. A quiet Arabic guitar struggles vainly against the overpowering bass towards the middle and end. The final song ‘The Bureau’ is a bit of an anti-climax for an album sprinkled with such a number of great moments.

Overall, the album hangs together quite well, however it is dominated somewhat unflattering by the 9-minute long track ‘Access the Animus’ which, despite covering a variety of rhythmic and instrumental feels throughout its duration, still feels like it drags too long. Add to this the fact that some of the more intriguing pieces are overly short and the album is left feeling lopsided and uneven. It does, thankfully, avoid the common pitfall of other videogame soundtracks and avoids any awkward song transitions or strange stops and starts.

Ultimately, however, if the listener does not have the same level of positive associations with the music generated through playing the actual game of Assassins Creed as I acknowledge I have, I think it would ultimately prove a largely unsatisfying listening experience.

The Assassins Creed Official Soundtrack, is composed by Jesper Kyd and has a running time of 40:37.

Permanent Death, Episode 7: A Mysterious Packet

CIA Special Analyst Perry Gerling was part of the African Attaché, and as such regularly received reports from a number of field operatives. One particular operative was late in reporting and he grew anxious waiting.

After several days of silence, he was about to consider reporting the field agent as missing when a package arrived on his desk in a yellowed envelope. It looked like it had travelled half-way round the world in someone’s back pocket. Inside was a long telegram (2 pages) from his field agent and a series of surveillance photographs.

Gerling pulled out the surveillance photographs and leafed through them.

It was clear that Singh was regularly getting his hands dirty, but as to whether he was still on-the-job was another matter. He grabbed a pen and a pad from his top drawer and scribbled a note for a return message. "Maintain distance and surveillance. END OF TELEGRAM." He wondered whether Washington would notice the expenses being racked up by his special surveillance project but he Gerling thought it was worth the risk. Washington still didn't know that Singh had - potentially, he was quick to add to no one in particular - gone rogue. He looked over a few more of the photos.

Yes it was going to be worth the extra hassle of justifying the diverted resources if it mean he could give a definitive answer to Washington. Singh would show his hand sooner or later, he knew that much from experience.

"This just won't do." He said, tossing aside the photographs and rocking back in his chair. At this rate, he considered, he was likely to get a posting back Stateside some time around the turn of the next decade.

At least one agent was still taking orders.

Permanent Death, Interstitial: Suicide

I have a confession to make. I’m considering suicide.

No, not in real life, don’t be ridiculous, I have everything to live for. But I must admit that after however many times through Far Cry 2 that it’s been I’m struggling to come up with the will to keep playing, much less to feverishly muster the kind of creative energy necessary to whip an oddly paced and narratively boring experience into something worthy of your attention. (Because you’re worth it)

It’s weird, though, to think about killing oneself. How does one go about doing so? I’ll admit that my mind on occasion wandered, somewhat morbidly, to considering what would happen if I jumped in front of that rapidly approaching train. Or if I climbed over that railing and began the lengthy plunge to the ground from a great height. Or if I just let my car drift across the lane and into the path of that oncoming truck.

It’s a kind of morbid fascination that I think we all share – and one that sees its most common outworking in the rubbernecking we do when we drive past that fatal accident on the highway. We drive slow and stare because we are imagining that it is out body lying twisted and crushed in the metal, bleeding to death. We wonder what that would feel like. What it will look like when it’s all over – does it really go dark and quiet like Hollywood would have us believe?

In Far Cry 2, I know exactly how it will look – The Face of Death is a menu screen. I have the benefit of knowing what it look’s like in advance, and that it is a real let down. I sincerely hope with all my might that the real thing is much more eventful.

One way in which Far Cry 2 actually is like real life is that I have no idea how it will happen, however in contemplating my virtual ‘suicide’ it has made me realise that it is entirely within my power to avoid the same fate as Nels. By deliberately choosing to make it an awesomely spectacular moment of singular glory and brio I could avoid the ignoble end of death-via-automobile. I’m not sure I could bear that ending after investing as much of my time as I have in this strange exercise. But unless I want to off myself I guess I’m stuck leaving myself open to the possibility.

Okay, you can relax now. I’m not going to kill off Qurbani Singh without reason. Even if that would suit the story better.