Shooters protagonist Terry Glass isn’t that different from the kind of character you’d play in a Medal of Honor, Battlefield or Call of Duty game. He’s a fictional American soldier fighting in the geopolitical hotspots where America’s armed forces face off against disparate, tough-to-pin-down threats.
As a PC gamer that enjoys getting my hands on the latest hardware, the most exciting feature of MSi’s new GT70 laptop should be the 2.3GHz Core i7-3610QM quad-core Ivy Bridge CPU or its ridiculously speedy storage solution, a combination of a 7200RPM 750GB hard drive and a pair of Samsung 64GB solid state drives.
Let me tell you about a dream I had. I was walking through a forest filled with butterflies and horseflies. Before me was a tree with the face of a man. I tore away at the bark, to find a pick axe. Suddenly I was on a frozen lake. I looked down, wiped away an inch of snow and saw a girl dying under the ice. Desperately, I hacked away at the frozen surface with the pickaxe as fast as I could to save her, but the ice cracked underneath me and suddenly I was drowning, sinking, dying.
Fable video games are supposed to operate around a promise. The three role-playing games spearheaded by former Lionhead boss Peter Molyneux dangled themes of changeable appearance, persistent consequence and pledge-keeping to pique players’ interest. And, yeah, the knock on the Fable games is that they tend to overpromise and under-deliver. However, to my mind, it’s always been better that they reached for something.
In very few games have I truly inhabited the persona of a goddam-right-I-am badass, whose demonstrations of power were as personal as Prototype 2‘s. And it’s not because I’ve imagined any of the superpowers you wield in this game, or how I’d perform with them. It’s because of the very normal, very pissed-off man in charge of them.
My time with Trials Evolution got me thinking a lot about human perfectibility. It’s essentially the principle that no matter how good a person is at something, given enough will and effort, there’s still ostensibly room for them to get even better. That idea seems to be one that developer RedLynx banks on with. “Yeah, you did great that time,” the Trials games smirk, “but bet you can’t shave off two more seconds off that time…” And so back you go.
