The year is 2007. It is the future.
And it is. As a child of the late 80s, all early memories of video games begin in two dimensions and end in an 8-bit, side scrolling, chiptune phantasmagoria. Today, no playlist of mine is complete without something by Machinae Supremacy, and my cousin’s old Sega Gensis doesn’t go untouched for longer than three months at a time before I feel the need to relive my glory days as a two-dimensional hedgehog.
With Far Cry 3 a staple entry in any Best of 2012 list, everyone expected that Ubisoft would sooner or later announce a DLC release so that the murder and mayhem could continue. No one expected that ‘sooner or later’ would mean the beginning of April, and that the DLC in question would be the standalone love child of Terminator and Jurassic Park in the style of TRON.
If Far Cry 3 compared to present-day 2013 is like walking into a world that never discovered bacon (that is, just that little bit off from reality), Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is like walking into a world populated by a master race of bunny rabbits. Once you strip away the game mechanics, the two are apples to oranges. Set in a retro-futuristic open world island where helicopters get into laser beam fights with bio-luminescent dinosaurs (sorry, “dragons”), the player assumes the role of eye-patch-wearing cyborg Man of Badassery, Sergeant Rex ‘Power’ Colt, whose primary goals in life include walking into occupied garrisons and liberating them (read: murdering everyone).
Like the Terminator hand I imagined shooting out from under my bed every night, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is the dystopian 2007 future James Cameron firmly implanted in my childhood brain, liberally mixed with the fantasy computer innards of TRON’s stylistic digital world. It is what I first imagined a first person shooter would look like when my only experiences were a combination of Space Invaders and Duck Hunt. This is the future—the one my childhood self expected but never actually got.
Slated for release on May 1st, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon comes out on PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360.
