Sydney: Where Reality Surpasses Gaming Fiction

Sydneysiders awoke this morning to find the entire city blanketed in a red haze. Turns out a dust storm was the culprit. But it reminded us of a couple of games we’d played recently.

My twitter feed was full of comments comparing Sydney’s “red dawn” to either Mars or a post-apocalyptic wasteland. So I figured I’d try to track down a few appropriate screenshots of Red Faction: Guerrilla and Fallout 3 to see how accurate the comparison actually is.

So up there is the Sydney CBD skyline, as snapped by Kate Geraghty for the Sydney Morning Herald. Below is another shot looking out over the harbour, taken by Shaun Brewer for News.com.au.

Now here’s Mars, as depicted in Red Faction: Guerrilla.

And here’s Fallout 3′s DC wasteland, post-nuking of Megaton, as captured by Kotaku friend Ben Abraham.

Clearly, neither game conveys the full extent of what we woke up to this morning. Red Faction fails to do justice to the sheer impenetrability of the Sydney dust storm, while Fallout simply isn’t red enough.

So, there you go, this morning Sydneysiders are living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland… on Mars.