You'll have to wait a little longer to trip out with Ubisoft's drug-addled first-person shooter. The publisher's just announced that Far Cry 3—previously scheduled for September 4th and 6th in the U.S. and Europe—will be delayed to December 4th and November 29th, respectively. Here's an in-depth look at the game in action.

It's starting to look as though game developers have moved their cinematic ambitions beyond the story of Charles Foster Kane and on to something a good deal more violent and possibly more attainable. To put it glibly: Apocalypse Now is the new Citizen Kane.

As we saw at E3, mainstream video games are in a particularly violent stage of their artistic evolution. As a result, most big-budget games feel much better-suited to tell the sort of violence-as-narrative put forth in Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam film than they are to perform a character study like Welles' Kane. But when a video game story concerns itself primarily with chaos and murder, is it truly born of a desire to tell a specific story, or is that merely a focus born of convenience?

In an interview feature published today at Kill Screen titled "Are Military Shooters Finally Getting Their Apocalypse Now?", Spec Ops: The Line lead designer Cory Davis makes a surprisingly unfiltered, if not entirely convincing, case that when it comes to his game, the answer to the article's title may well be "Yes."

Spec Ops: The Line tells the story of rogue soldiers fighting one another in desert-buried Dubai. It isn't just a ripping yarn, Davis implies—without invoking Coppola's film directly, it seems clear that he feels his the game has something similar to say about violence, war, chaos, and possibly even America's role on the global stage.

I think gamers today are going through a lot of the same evolutions that occurred in film. You remember the old John Wayne war movies? There's always going to be a place for those. But when people are shocked and horrified and angry about what we do, that's also an interesting response. We want you to think about the bloodlust that you might have naturally, as you approach this game after playing so many other games. We wanted to put it right in your face.

Here we have a game developer saying that he wants players to have a reaction to the violence on screen, that he wants to subvert our natural video game inclination to kill into something more interesting. "We didn't want to just give you violence for violence's sake," he says later in the interview.

That may well be true, and regardless of my doubts am looking forward to playing Spec Ops: The Line for myself. But all the same, the Apocalypse Now thing smells like an easy way to slap an air of legitimacy onto an experience that is primarily about gunning down human beings. There's a dubious distinction between "killing for killing's sake" and "killing because it's art," and video games have, by and large stayed firmly on the former side.

2008's Far Cry 2 may be the closest thing we've got to the Apocalypse Now of video games. It cast players as one of an interchangeable group of mercenaries and set them about working both sides of an African civil war for profit. It was a splendidly hostile, misanthropic game, and effectively channeled the dread and eventual dark epiphanies of both Apocalypse Now and of its inspiration, Joseph Conrad's turn of the century novel Heart of Darkness.

Ostensibly sent to find and kill an arms dealer known as The Jackal, players wind up falling deeper and deeper into the ruthless anarchy of a nation infested with violence. The Jackal is never the villain of the story. If anything, he's revealed over the course of the story to be the hero, and it's the player who is revealed to be the true villain; the man who has no loyalties and believes in nothing. The perfect killing machine.

But if Far Cry 2 already did the Apocalypse Now/Heart of Darkness thing, what of its sequel, this year's Far Cry 3? That game looks nothing like its bleak, hostile predecessor. The protagonist is a single character named Jason Brody, with a penchant for muttering to himself like Uncharted's Nathan Drake. In every demo I've seen, he's using a vast arsenal to clear out huge set-piece-like arenas of enemies, blasting and exploding to his heart's content.

In other words, it looks a lot like a polished but fairly typical video game. A couple weeks ago at E3, I spoke with Far Cry 3 lead designer Jamie Keen and lead writer Jeffery Yohalem about the game and found myself intrigued by their responses to my questions. It would seem that on top of their desire to make a fun, hooky mainstream action game, they too are interested in using violence to tell a specific, sophisticated story.

"The whole game is about subverting video game cliches," Yohalem told me. "It's a psychological adventure. We're definitely trying to question what a game is, and I think that's what Far Cry 2 did as well, where they tried to explore the limits of video games. And our game is about video games to a huge degree, and about what you expect from video games, and how we change things up."

Well hey, that sounds pretty interesting! I voiced my skepticism: Based on what I'd seen of the game, I was having a hard time believing that it will truly have something new to say. Every demonstration I've seen involves the player blasting through enemy compounds with huge, powerful weapons and taking down dozens of soldiers, just like any other shooter. How is this a commentary on video games?

Keen, the lead designer, was quick to sing that now-familiar E3 tune: What they showed doesn't really demonstrate the heart of the game. For example, the E3 demo takes place halfway to two-thirds of the way into the story, and Brody has become quite powerful. But that's not always the case.

"When you start off," Keen said, "when you get dropped into the beginning of it, you're fucked." He laughed. "I mean, you really are. You don't know what's going on, there's guys that are coming to get you, animals are jumping in your face all the time…"

"But at the same time," Yohalem picked up, "for me, it's about how Jason is a character, and the player is a character, and they're different."

I asked him to elaborate on that. "If the player's good a headshots, Jason's good at headshots," he said. "The player pulls Jason in certain directions, and that dialogue [between player and character], I find it really interesting. You have this everyman who's lost on an island, who's never shot a gun before, and you have a player who has played first-person shooters before. And the player shows Jason what's what about first-person shooters, but that will come back to haunt the player later. That's the kind of stuff that you saw in Far Cry 2."

If Far Cry 2 approached the ideas behind Apocalypse Now directly, Far Cry 3 seems to be going about it in a more roundabout, psychological fashion. I'm intrigued. Few games play with the relationship between the player and his or her avatar without overtly breaking the fourth wall. Metal Gear's Psycho Mantis battles are the most famous example, wherein the villain forces you to relocate your Playstation controller and taunts you about which games you've played in the past. Deadly Premonition also did something along these lines, with the player occupying the role of the protagonist's imaginary friend and advisor.

But will Far Cry 3 take this idea into the dark and surprising places it deserves to be taken, or is all this talk of genre subversion just another arty excuse to give players a gun and set them loose in a vast and violent playground? I'm not sure. Far Cry 2 always felt like an art-game dressed up as a AAA shooter, and given that it was a financial disappointment for Ubisoft, I doubt that the publisher is going to take a risk like that again. But after speaking with Keen and Yohalem, I did come away with the impression that Far Cry 3 will be a darn sight more interesting than your average shooter.

Games are more violent than ever, and so game designers are looking into that violence for ways to tell interesting stories. And why not? Game-makers have spent decades developing and perfecting the technology required to accurately render bullet trajectories, locational damage and realistically recreated explosions. Artists work with what they've got, and as E3 so effectively demonstrated, what most artists making AAA games today have got are guns, bullets, and death. That could still result in some provocative, stimulating work—plenty of great art has been created by makers working with a limited toolset.

All the same, I have my doubts. Far Cry 2 dared to be different and was branded a failure, and four years later, most AAA game developers seem to be playing it safer than ever. I have to wonder whether either Far Cry 3 and Spec Ops: The Line will truly explore the heart of darkness, or if they'll take the easier route, content to simply exploit the darkness in our hearts. We'll find out soon enough.

Apologies if you've seen too much of Far Cry 3 this week, what with it being the most over-exposed title at the press conferences (I'm surprised it wasn't at EA's just for kicks), but you can hopefully spare room for one more clip. Because it's a co-op trailer.

While we know the game supports up to four players in the mode, this trailer introduces us to the four characters you'll be able to take control of.

I like that one of them is Scottish. There aren't nearly enough characters in games that are literally branded "Scottish Thug".

Far Cry 3 will offer four-player co-operative multiplayer when it releases, Ubisoft said at Sony's E3 keynote address. A live gameplay demonstration then followed. "We were working on two games," Ubisoft Montreal's Dan Hay told the audience.

The multiplayer suite will include a map editor, Hay added. The PlayStation 3 version will include free exclusive DLC.

Weapons don't rust and enemies killed at checkpoints stay dead, but that's not what makes early September's Far Cry 3 so different from Far Cry 2.

Nah, what makes it different is that this year's Far Cry is about maybe losing your mind on a remote jungle island, where a brother and sister pull you in two very different directions, both of which appear to converge into a conflagration of sex and violence.

I played a demo of Far Cry 3 a couple of weeks ago and will have a lot more coverage about the game in the days to come. But for now, I must confess that the thing that lingers most vividly from that demo isn't that the game brings back the wild flame propagation gameplay of the last one nor that your character seems as lethal as he seems mad.

What lingers most is that the single-player demo I played began with a first-person view from our hero's eyes of a topless woman straddling him. You'll see it in the trailer below. The developer-narrated walkthrough skips it, but is just as not safe for work. More importantly, things get ever wilder from there.

This game is about going crazy in decadent ways.

You were warned.

The game will be out for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC on September 4.

Okay. Oh-kay. Let's put aside the fact that the Far Cry 3 gameplay we've seen thus far has more in common with Uncharted than it does with the misunderstood-by-many, beloved-by-me Far Cry 2.

Let's overlook the fact that the protagonist's name is "Jason Brody." Even though there is a "bro" right there in his frickin name… no. Sigh. No. We are moving forward. Serenity now.

Because I have to say, after watching the videos in the run-up to E3, it seems clear that while Far Cry 3 won't be much like Far Cry 2, it sure does look like a pretty kickass video game. (And yes, I acknowledge that there are many out there who would say that the less Far Cry 3 is like Far Cry 2, the better.) Here is Ubisoft's latest teaser. I do believe I see a flamethrower? And a tiger. Okay, cool. I can get with this tiger thing.

I'll be Kotaku's designated Far Cry 3 checker-outer next week at E3, so I will report from the show with detailed impressions.

Look, I'm not gonna lie: this is just a trailer for a collector's edition of Ubisoft's tropical first-person-shooter. By rights, it should be an incredibly, dull piece of marketing hype. But, damn if it isn't pretty brilliant.

Per Ubisoft, the Insane Edition of Far Cry 3 includes the following:

• A 12cm Vaas Wahine with bobble head!
• Monkey Business - Discover Hurk, a new memorable character and quest giver, and his four unique missions (1 hour additional gameplay)
• The Lost Expeditions -Two suspenseful action packed missions totalling over 40 minutes of additional gameplay and an exclusive weapon (The Japanese gun)
• The Hunter Pack - The M700 hunting rifle and its three collector's skins.
• The Warrior Pack - A handcrafted dagger and two exclusive tribal tattoos.
• The Predator Pack - Four exclusive rare predators and a multiplayer bow.
• An 'Insanity Guide' containing hints and tips to help you survive the island

UK residents can pre-order it here. Now, the Insane Edition hasn't been announced for North America. But, surely, they wouldn't withhold it from the States. That'd be crazy.

For two weeks this summer, Ubisoft will invite select PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 gamers to a virtual tropical island to choose one of six character classes to shoot each other with in the Far Cry 3 multiplayer beta test. How to be involved? Let me count the ways.

1. Buy Ghost Recon: Future Soldier next week. Specifically, buy Ghost Recon: Future Soldier from GameStop and be a member of their PowerUp Rewards program. You'll be given a code that can be entered at a special website, which will lead directly to Ubisoft mailing you a code for the beta proper once it's about ready to go live.

2. Like the Far Cry 3 closed multiplayer beta Facebook page. You'll be entered for a chance to win access to the beta. What a wondrous way to use the world's largest social network!

3. Keep an eye on Ubisoft social channels. That means the Far Cry 3 website, Twitter, Facebook, and people just standing around outside Ubisoft Montreal, shouting out codes.

4. Sleep with someone at Ubisoft. I have several recommendations.

Other than that, just hunt around for an invitation. You know how these things go. At first it's closed, and then suddenly VideoGameBunny.com winds up with 20,000 keys just sitting around.

Too late, I just registered it.