There’s a scene in the new Far Cry Primal [official site] trailer in which the player character instructs his pet owl to eat someone’s face. It’s amazing how inconsequential the lack of vehicles and rocket launchers seems now that the full extent of the animal-taming can be seen. Feed wild beasts and they can be tamed, which leads to big cat snuggling, guard bears and tiger ridin’. Given that sniping the locks off animal cages was my favourite way to take out a baseload of baddies in Far Cry 3, Primal suddenly looks very tasty indeed.

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Clint Hocking has been cursed by a witch and is now doomed to travel the games industry, joining new developers and then leaving before releasing a single game. In the last five years, the Far Cry 2 designer has joined and left LucasArts, joined and left Valve, and as of yesterday, joined and left Amazon Games Studios.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

I don’t have a single favourite FPS and find such conversation boring but if someone asks and I want to test their mettle, I’ll tell them it’s Far Cry 2. If they say they prefer Far Cry 3, I know they – as a person – are wrong. Far Cry 2 is a game about plans and contingency plans, then desperate makeshift plans when those both go wrong, then finally, after a crucial grenade rolls back down a hill towards you, hoping that your buddy will come pull you out the fire – and that you can cover them. “Far Cry 3 is for babies,” I’d probably declare, because I’m like that.

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Gathering together the best shooters is no easy task, but if you’re looking for a new PC FPS to play, look no further.

Your favourite game is at number 51.

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Psssst! You wanna hear some gossip? WELL! So, Eurogamer told me that some friends of theirs told THEM that a marketing research survey told them the friends not Eurogamer that they wanted to talk future Far Cry game settings. I *know*, right?

Apparently the talk came in the form of a survey which asked players to make their preferences regarding potential settings such as Alaska, zombies, dinosaurs and Vietnam known.

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You shouldn t always give people what they want. This is focus testing s fatal flaw. It s also the reason that Far Cry 2 – a game which doesn t give you what you want and slaps you for asking – is the best game in the series by far.

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I Am Alive was never coming to PC. Then it came to PC. You can get it now from Ubi’s shop and Steam, for around £13. It’s the dark, gloomy tale of one man’s attempt to climb his way to his wife and daughter, and I’ve been playing it for ages. So now I can tell you Wot I Think.>

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The good thing about always online DRM is, well, nothing. The problem with always online DRM is, well, everything. Perhaps the silver lining to the cloud that is Ubisoft’s UPlay system – the infrastructure for its DRM, DLC and other faintly sinister words which begin with D – being offline for a large chunk of the weekend is that it might> cause important people to worry, no matter what their paranoid personal philosophy of IP protection might be, that singleplayer games having a total dependency on remote servers is inescapably flawed in a practical sense. (more…)

Yesterday, I noted that I haven’t played many god games lately, so I suppose it only makes sense that some RPS-reading deity would start flinging the things at me. “Know my burden>,” it seemingly bellows from on high. “With great power… you know the rest>.” And hey, remember that neato whizz-bang pow space streaming technology that allowed Bastion to run in your browser – as if by teleporter from Mars and also the future? Well, it’s back to from said future, this time with Ubisoft’s once-DRMed, still poorly ported From Dust in tow. So maybe it could’ve brought a better god game, but still, I can’t entirely knock something of this fidelity when it’s playable in my browser almost instantly.

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Research at the RPS news desk means someone asks a question in chat and the others ignorantly speculate. Google is right there, but you don’t get good responses to keen, incisive questioning, in this case about the newly announced Anno 2070 Deep Ocean expansion pack: “Anno 2070: I’m trying to find out if the main game has water, or if the additions bring watery goodness to it? I mean to live under?”

John: I’m fairly sure old screenshots had wet bits.Adam: I think the new expansion just has a new even deeper watery bit

Adam is correct, and it allows Ubisoft to legitimately claim that it makes it “A deeper game experience”, which makes marketing copywriters froth like a windy sea. The main game is a rather watery real-time management game, where you raise a happy empire in a world ravaged by global warming. What will the expansion bring? Does it have hidden depths? (more…)