Ubisoft really like their Far Cry villains. At this evening's Ubisoft Foward, we got another cutscene featuring the big bad of Far Cry 6, Castillo, played by Giancarlo Esposito. They then showed the game's post-launch plans, which includes new story missions in which you play as Far Cry 3's Vaas, Far Cry 4's Pagan Min and Far Cry 5's Joseph Seed.
]]>Netflix are hot for video games lately, with their number of animated and live-action adaptations now into double digits. Their E3 stream today brought news of even more, including announcements of a Far Cry: Blood Dragon cartoon and casting for their live-action Resident Evil. It has Lance Reddick! But by and large, their stream was a weird shrug with so little information that all they had on one show was a logo. But hey, here's what they had on Cuphead, Castlevania, Splinter Cell, League Of Legends, and others.
]]>Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon [official site], Ubisoft's wacky '80s parody FPS, is free this month. Trot off this-a-way and you can get it for keepsies through Uplay. Blood Dragon is a smaller spin-off from the sandbox FPS series, with all the trappings of What Is Broadly Accepted By Modern Pop Culture To Be What All Eighties Movies Were Like Even Though They, Y'Know, Weren't. It's silly and colourful, it has bad one-liners and honking great dragons who scream lasers, and it's free.
]]>Eagle-eyed database watchers have spotted traces of an Ubisoft game named Trials of the Blood Dragon listed by the Taiwanese software rating board. The listings have been pulled, but did reveal a logo and single screenshot which seemed to show, yep, a Trials game with the neon lighting of Far Cry 3's expandalone Blood Dragon. That's it. If it's real and happening, I'd expect more tricky Trials physics-based motorbike stunting but with neon lights. That's the news. If you want news, no need to read on.
Now let's gasbag about Turbo Kid and this fake '80s aesthetic we see so much of.
]]>Ubisoft attempted to announce Far Cry Primal [official site] with a tantalising livestream, which was rather spoiled by a brief leak of the game's name and basic details. Now we know more, including proper trailers, screenshots, and a release date... which will see the game land on PC the month after it'll arrive on console.
]]>Update: There's now proper trailers and everything, embedded below, or hop to this post for Far Cry Primal's release date, screenshots, trailers and more.
Viral marketing isn't entirely going Ubisoft's way lately, but at least having their own promotional rug for the next Far Cry pulled from under them by a loose-lipped IGN Turkey means exciting news rather than quizzical looks. Yep, the next Far Cry is, it appears, to be named Far Cry Primal and is set during the Ice Age.
]]>So Far Cry 4 is a thing. It was pretty inevitable, given that Far Cry 3 sold like hotcakes stuffed with pornography. The next question, then, is obvious: will there be another Far Cry: Blood Dragon? Nothing's set in stone yet, but it sounds quite likely that Far Cry will take another turn for the weird. Just maybe don't expect another '80s spoof this time.
]]>Do you remember that there were decades previously to this one? Far Cry 3 seems to think it does, with the appearance of an expandalone spoof of the 1980s, Blood Dragon. How does this mini-adventure hold up? Here's wot I think:
]]>Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, wherefore art thou Blood Dragon? Well - and this is just a hunch - I'm gonna go ahead and say it's because of all the blood dragons. Thing is, our peeks at the neon-drowned shurikensplosion of a game have thus far been confined by story, (somewhat oddly) removing said retro-future laser reptiles from the spotlight. Now, though, it's time for a tour of the expandalone's open world, and the dragons are done tip-toeing about. They are real, they are pissed, and they want cyber hearts for some reason. Watch them frolic, romp, stomp, and shoot helicopters out of the sky using only their eyeballs and their wits after the break.
]]>And by "dumb," I mean wonderful. Maybe even brilliant, in the sense that Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon seems on track to be a neon-emblazoned clown who secretly conceals both a high-powered laser rifle and an Ivy League college degree. That also fires lasers. The bits we've been shown lovingly satirize everything - '80s action flicks, shooters, modern games, old games - with a surgically deft robo hand. Far Cry 3, eat your heart out. Otherwise, the blood dragons (which are actual things) will do it for you. This live-action mini-epic is no different, combining low-budget special effects, terrible costuming, and glorious over-acting to make... something. I can't do it justice with these words of mine. They're incapable of producing a synth-dirge soundtrack, and without that, I am lost. See the movie for yourself after the break.
]]>Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is stupid. It has a terrible story, one-dimensional characters, and there's no emotional value in playing it whatsoever. I can't even criticise it for all those things, because that's everything Ubisoft wants the game to be. They think they've found a loophole in any criticism by deliberately aiming low. Hah! The joke's on them! Blood Dragon is pretty good.
]]>Edit - bah, videos removed. If anyone's found another source please say so below. Edit2 - A new source for one of the vids is now in this post, but presumably it won't hang around for long.
This half hour of purported footage from Far Cry 3 expandalone Blood Dragon is obviously fake. You can tell by the way the shader polarity is reversed at 11m07s in the first video, and the vertex flux lacks external consistency at 03m40s in the second video. Don't even et me started on how unconvincing the e-dough modulation is. If you're naive enough to want to watch thirty minutes of fabricated video from a pastiche sci-fi shooter, I can only wave you at the supposedly leaked videos below. They might have gone by the time you get there, as Ubisoft will doubtlessly feel the blatantly counterfeit muzzle occlusion diodes will give the real version of their game a bad rep.
]]>I still can't quite believe that Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon exists but as of this weekend, the standalone title not only has a release date, it also has Michael Biehn's voice. Actually, the Xbox Marketplace listing which reveals the May 1st release date doesn't specify 'voice', it says 'a VHS era vision of a nuclear future, where cyborgs, blood dragons, mutants, and Michael Biehn collide'. Is it possible that the man in possession of the only true Reese's Pieces has been transformed into binary code and inserted into the game? We'll find out soon enough.
]]>On April 1st, a peculiar thing happened: a game company debuted a seemingly implausible spin-off that wasn't a gigantic, painfully obvious hoax. Now, notice I said "hoax," not "joke." Reason being, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon still seems incredibly, absurdly silly. The advantage it has over its smoke-and-mirrors peers, however, is that it's actually, you know, real. What began with a schlocky (though impressively elaborate) '80s-style B-movie adver-site now has a series of neon-soaked screenshots, and - in a fun twist - they look almost nothing like Far Cry 3. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, well, I guess by that metric Far Cry's dev team has some pretty darn sterling mental health. All other indicators, however, would seem to suggest otherwise. In a very, very good way.
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