A rueful look back at E3, Part 5: Far Cry 3: Cry, Cry Again

New first-person shooter. At first I was underwhelmed; it was gorgeous, to be sure, but I'd been playing quite a bit of Crysis 2 around the time I first saw this. After I'd  just finished several weeks worth of Crytek's game where you're a nanotech-augmented superhuman in the ruins of an alien-ravaged New York who can jog down the street while carrying a belt-fed machine gun, leap from ground level to the rooftops in one jump, and turn invisible like the Predator, it was hard at first to get excited about a sequel to a Crytek game with a guy skulking around the jungle with a rifle and a knife.

Then it got to the stealth kill where the player snuck up on a guy, grabbed him, snatched the knife out of his belt, gutted him with his own knife, and then hurled the knife at another guy and killed him too.

And then, like a cold, grim, unfeeling miser who'd been taught the true meaning of Christmas by a kind-hearted child's simply innocence, but with Christmas replaced by video games and the kind-hearted child's simple innocence replaced with two guys being brutally stabbed to death, I remembered something very important. In the end, my love of games like this isn't about frills like nanosuits or futuristic human-alien hybrid technology or even being able to turn invisible like the Predator. It's about killing motherfuckers. I'd become so caught up in fancy, high-tech gimmicks and methods for doing this that I'd nearly lost track of what truly brings me joy in the first place.

Bless us, every one!