Its basically doing chores, when I realized I had to do even more pointless missions for the side businesses, I had to quit. I got 50% through

Any mission where it involved time and having to manually aim, good luck.

Two positives are the dumb AI (being chased by 5 star police just to enter a mission is hilarious) and obviously the music

I've always wanted to like the original Resident Evil trilogy. I've heard of these games as a kid and even got my hands on RE2 at one point, though I never got too far in it. At the time the appeal to me was that this was a game about zombies back when there were practically no other decent zombie games (at least none that I knew of). As time went by, I've played and become a fan of many games that it inspired, such as Silent Hill and Devil May Cry, as well as games that followed it, such as Resident Evil 4 and 5. Many times have I tried to go back to the roots and play through the original three games, but time and again I would abandon them without really questioning what exactly made me do so.

In my previous attempt (I think this was sometime in 2013) to play through the original RE, I remember getting very frustrated and forming quite a negative opinion of the game. So today I decided to give it the last try at my wise age of 28. Well, my opinion of the game hasn't changed much, and I don't think it's gonna change going forward.

First of all, this game is just not scary. At all. It may have been by the gaming standards of 1996, but it sure as hell isn't now. Environments are well-lit, and zombies, snakes and spiders aren't exactly nightmare fuel. A lot of people have said over the years that making the player feel vulnerable by depriving them of ammo makes the game scarier. Well, no, it doesn't, and I wish people would stop saying that. There is a clear difference between horror and survival instinct. The latter is present in virtually any game. I don't want to die playing Tekken 5 either, but that doesn't make me wake up in cold sweat in the middle of the night shouting "don't kill me, Panda!" Because I know the difference between real life and video games, plus it's not like I'm afraid of death in real life, nor do I think any adult person should be. I don't think true horror has anything to do with the loss of life. Horror is something beyond material. Beyond our understanding. Horror is the fear of the unknown. It's 2022 and there are countless games about killing zombies, in each of which you could die. Some give you more ammo than others, but that's completely irrelevant. Having less ammo just increases the difficulty. Why should I fear zombies in Resident Evil and not in, say, Left 4 Dead? One is a survival horror game and the other is an action game, but essentially they have a similar depiction of zombies. I think zombies are scary as a social phenomenon, not as a boogeyman. But it is precisely as the latter that the game treats them as.

Having an insanely small inventory and limited saves also doesn't make the game scary. It just makes it anxiety-inducing. Which is quite the opposite of what I want to feel when playing a game (any game). The backtracking you have to do because you've decided to leave a quest item in the chest and now require it to open a door is not scary either. It's also not fun. It's boring and annoying. The alternative is that you could leave some ammo or herbs in the chest only to die on your way to the door and have to replay this section of the game again, which is basically the same as backtracking. I don't necessarily mind the tank controls, but in this game they feel very clunky. In particular the aiming. You can take out most of the regular zombies easily, but when the game throws dogs or crows at you, you're likely to waste all your ammo because they're nigh-impossible to hit. I think with 2D backgrounds and the inability to move while aiming, it's just hard to maintain the coordination.

Last but not least, the story in this game is atrocious. I could maybe overcome all the flaws of the game and force myself to complete it, but what for? It's not like each cutscene makes you curious to see the next one. It's not like there's a great atmosphere or soundtrack to keep you wanna stay in the game. I don't really see any motivation to keep going forward. I suppose, if you're into puzzles, that might motivate you, but personally, I don't care about the puzzles.

Just three years later, in Silent Hill, literally all these drawbacks were fixed. The inventory had infinite space, the saves were unlimited, the backtracking was minimized (and made more fun due to the interactive map), the locations and enemies were actually scary, the controls and aiming were improved, the story, the music, the atmosphere were all amazing. I think, in a lot of ways, Silent Hill has proven that you in fact DON'T need to feel physically vulnerable to experience horror. You can play Silent Hill on the easiest difficulty, where you know the entire time that you couldn't die, and yet it's still ten times scarier than Resident Evil. It's also not frustrating or anxiety-inducing.

I honestly don't think this game is worth playing. I've not played the remake, but it seems to have fixed at least some of the issues I mentioned, though it still appears to have a small inventory and probably limited saves. I obviously recognize the influence the original RE made on the entire industry, and especially Capcom themselves, as they kept using the template of RE for years to come. But I think this game didn't age well and has been outdone by many of its competitors and successors.

In a way, Far Cry 2 feels somewhat like the first film of a famous filmmaker that you only ever watch out of curiosity. If it weren't for Moonrise Kingdom, I wouldn't have any interest in watching Bottle Rocket and so on. Outside of attempts to ape the success of the original Far Cry on the original Xbox and then later to the 360 and Wii, Far Cry 2 is the first proper game that Ubisoft made with the brand name, and it shows. It's almost shocking that the game that came after this was Far Cry 3. Case in point, there isn't a mini-map here. Your character has to be physically holding the map in their hands for you to read it, and if you're playing on PC, the key you press to access the map is next to all of the ones you use to pull out guns. The general impression here isn't that Ubisoft was attempting to push ambition through a giant world map. Through your experience within much smaller and more detailed spaces, you're given the idea that technology was at the forefront of the experience. While the phrase "tech demo" might cross your mind, it belies the rest of the experience. Looking beyond what must have wowed people in 2008, there's a solid game in here with lots of tension that often gets overlooked in terms of discussions surrounding enemy camps, character upgrades, and all of the water-cooler talk that later games in this series embraced. There's still a lot of fun to be had here, even if it isn't driving a car with C4 on its side into a fortress you're trying to conquer. That might make this game seem less interesting, and it almost is. But it's this absence of bombast that sets it apart as the most unique game in the series. Had Far Cry followed in the footsteps of this instead of throwing a lot of its bullet points out for more emergent systems, I'm certain we would talk about the series differently nowadays.

What ultimately holds this experience back, even with those expectations, is that its narrative is about as dry as its color palette. Aside from its imposing world, there isn't much to pull you in. The introduction does you no favors, either, and made me realize how much I've taken Skyrim's opening cart ride for granted over the years. You can see the bones of what would end up being Vaas in Far Cry 3 through the opening scene with The Jackal, but the set-up for meeting him and the actual voice performance feel cookie-cutter at best. And then you step out into the world, and it's... eh. Oh, sure, there's artistic intent. It makes the world feel less welcoming and more hostile to the player. But so did Shadow of Chernobyl, and that game had some fucking color in it. I'm unashamed to admit that I installed an ENB as soon as I decided to start replaying this again because I just really don't find grey and brown to be that pleasing to the eyes. Combined with an upscaled texture pack, it looks slightly better; although all ENBs tend to have the issue that character model mods in Bethesda games have where their improvements can start to feel artificial past a certain threshold. Still, it works for what it is and has helped me to appreciate Far Cry 2 for what it is a little more. Whether or not that's the recommended experience depends on how much you mind the threshold I mentioned. If you believe post-processing takes away from the experience, by all means, skip it. I do recommend the texture pack, though. It's not a massive, 4K, "night and day" improvement, but it's only about two gigs in total and gives the world a little more clarity.

My impressions so far are this: this is the kind of game that would benefit from a remake the most. Not because my mini-map-obsessed gamer-brain needs constant UI pop-ups to be satisfied, but because the envelope could absolutely be pushed further with newer technology. And also because it would mean the narrative could be given another chance to be interesting, I dunno. Sadly, a proper remake would mean the project would have to be handed to a studio that doesn't tell its employees that "women don't sell" and fixate over seedy trenchcoat monetization practices that wouldn't be out of place behind the barren dentist's office you frequented as a youngling. If it ever does happen, Bloober Team better not be behind it.

I'll say that, in terms of first attempts, Far Cry 2 is more reminiscent of Reservoir Dogs than Bottle Rocket. It still holds up without knowing that its developers would go on to develop bigger, more interesting projects. All of the trademarks that you would later see in those projects are here in small and subtle ways, so you're not missing much, and a lot of what isn't carried over is genuinely fascinating to mull over. Is it the black sheep of its series? Do I care? It's unique, and I don't love it, but I also kind of do. It deserves slightly more recognition than it's gotten over the years, but anyone who tells me that they've bounced off of it for all of the things that could be addressed with hindsight has understandable reasons to do so.

TOREE

- is a friend
- has a hat
- is on such an adventure
- is trans
- says "a" and that is so important
- is dating shadow the hedgehog
- has seventy alternative accounts
- has a number of world record speedruns under their deadname that they don't want to claim anymore
- didn't vote in the 2017 general election and despite their skepticism for electoralism they still feel culpable for the election of boris johnson as prime minister
- has two alternative costumes
- was ride or die on #ReleaseTheSnyderCut but thought the snyder cut itself was kinda mid
- killed a man just to watch him die

haters will try and tell you different but real toreeheads know...real toreeheads know...

I was enjoying the challenge, and about the halfway point I just couldn't be bothered playing any more. Not a clue why. Like a switch flipped in my mind and went "You're done with this".

I've noticed this happening to me more and more, and I'm fine with it. I used to push on with games I was clearly going cold on, because in my mind I NEEDED to finish what I'd started. But since I hit my 30s, it's like I've managed to stop lying to myself, and allow me permission to just drop stuff if I'm not feeling it. It's very liberating. Try it sometime!