Far Cry 3 Review

Cool Jungle, Bro

One of the beautiful sights of Rook Island

I must say that I've developed quite a fondness for sandbox games. Whereas some people are paralyzed by the ton of things to do, I become obsessed with trying to do all of them. Far Cry 3, developed by Ubisoft, was honestly not on my radar, but I was given the opportunity to try it out. Let me tell you, this game is a lot of fun, and if you're looking for yet another game to scratch that sandbox itch, there is really no way to go wrong with this game.

I'll start with what is the weakest element of the game so far, which is the story. The main narrative begins with with a group of friends vacation in the Pacific islands somewhere, and they end up skydiving over Rook Island. It seems their landing was rockier than normal because it landed them in the grips of a drug and human trafficking ring of pirates somehow, managed by the intense Vaas Montenegro. After a bungled stealthy escape attempt, the game's hero, Jason Brody, manages to run for his life through the jungle before he passes out. A man residing with the local Rakyat rebels, Dennis, saves you from certain death and tries to empower you to save your friends and support the local cause. He simply sets Jason off on his quest into the dangerous jungle. As Jason points out to him, he's never even shot a gun in his life, but so goes the story of a bro who becomes a hero. (Hebro?)

After finishing some introductory steps, the whole of Rook Island becomes Jason's oyster to crack. Along with following the story, there are a number of side activities to follow. First, in similar fashion to the Assassin's Creed series, climbing to the top of radio towers reveals portions of the map to better navigate the terrain and find secrets, and there are many secrets. Chests containing ammo and money, ancient relics, memory cards with pirate logs, and letters from WWII are littered all over the island. Next, there are outposts in every square area of the map; by overtaking these areas for the rebels, the amount of enemies reduces making the majority of that section relatively safe for passage.

There is nothing creepy about this scene.

The game even rewards Jason with more XP based on how stealthily these outposts are claimed. As much as I enjoy this, given my preference for stealth, I can't help but feel bad for the players who prefer to waltz in with guns blazing. The game even rewards you for stealthy takedowns better than normal shooting. Still, taking over these areas are fun, and when you're done, they become fast travel points replete with a locker that acts as a mini-shop and extra sidequests including assassination missions and rare animal hunting. What remains baffling still is that when you're done, the local rebels drive in with a handful of guys holding machine guns. Almost all the rebels hold machine guns. Why can't they take over these places themselves? Better yet, why can't you recruit them to help you? The connection is so obvious there.

Personal progression through the game is represented by a strange tattoo involuntarily given to Jason early in the game. Utilizing a skill tree system with three branching paths, as you learn skills, the tattoo grows down your forearm, a symbol of your growing skill as a warrior. Great games have great skill trees, and this one is no exception with unique abilities like kicking an enemy away from you as you pull his grenade clip or taking down a guard stealthily and using his knife to kill another one. However, those great skill trees don't always need great backstories, and this tattoo, which grows on its own without ink, only has a ridiculous explanation. Circling back to the story, this ultimately makes Jason's story of a simple partying twenty-something turned guerilla warrior seem like it could only possibly appeal to the already empowered single heterosexual white male audience that most video games are already marketed towards. It's a rather shameless plea for their rapt attention. You can already imagine Jason's friends after the end game going, "Cool tat, bro!" For a game that is enough fun to appeal to anyone, it is sad to have a sellout protagonist geared towards a niche demographic. That said, to Jason's credit, he is not silent in a story that demands he speak up, one of my gripes with Dishonored before.

Back to the good, though, Rook Island bears one of the most fascinating terrains I've explored in video games. The designers really went through a lot of trouble to create a huge area that is actually believable as a setting. With only endless waters surround Rook Island as a hidden wall around the whole setting, the environment  of Far Cry 3 is really yours to travel and have fun with. The terrain has many elevations ranging from tall mountains to underground caves. Every time I found a waterway that led to the middle of the land via a winding cave system, I was in awe. However, getting lost is not really an option. The map allows you to set way points to any objective, outpost, or mission, and the minimap is handy enough to help you navigate the local terrain without popping open the main map too often. I think it could afford to have mulitple zoom options (like the one in Grand Theft Auto IV), though, which would help with fast driving segments over and around hills where you can't see the road ahead too well.

Seriously, look at this.

Along with the varied topography, Rook Island features equally varied wildlife populating the area. As I said, you are given missions to hunt some of these animals, but otherwise, they are roaming free waiting to be picked off. Although you are not rewarded with any XP for the endeavor, the game features a crafting system that utilizes the hides from the deer, boars, tigers, and whatnot wandering in the wild. At the beginning of the game, Jason's ability to carry ammo and money is limited until he can craft larger carriers for all his stuff. Each time you craft an item, the next size up usually requires the hide of an animal in a completely different section of the island, which encourages more exploration and risk taking.

Also in each area are different color classes of flora, which Jason can use to craft syringes that enhance his performance (ahem) and abilities. I won't deny that all of these systems are useful and provide more fun to have in this well-developed game, but once again, the writers ask me to suspend a lot of disbelief. Jason is immediately knowledgeable in the art of hunting and skinning an animal, though his grunts of disgust never dissipate regardless of how often he does it. Slicing leaves off of plants is an easier skill for me to believe he can figure out on his own, but his willingness to shove syringes in his arm repeatedly tells me that he should've been in rehab instead of traveling the world. Oh, and this is all without going into his divinely conceived recipes and crafting diagrams for this stuff. And can anyone explain why he needs two deer hides to make a so-so wallet, but he can't craft a larger wallet with either more deer hides or better utilization of large hides? How does he know he needs a tapir? Has he ever seen one before?

Far Cry 3 features a plethora of weaponry to fit your killing desires. On top of covering essentially every class of firearm you could desire, it also feature multiple types of each, including a bow and arrow to make you feel like Rambo. (Rambro?) Then, if that doesn't sate you, you can purchase attachments to modify almost each gun to your liking, such as better sights and silencers. I have never played a game carrying an arsenal of bow and arrow, silenced sniper rifle, and silenced assault rifle before, but it makes me feel awesome. If the price for any high class weapon seems prohibitive, climbing the aforementioned radio towers and reestablishing radio access to the locals opens up higher classes of weapons for free. With all the XP and money you can earn from sniping random pirate camps and the like, this game is practically giving you more power away for little effort. It could probably afford to be a little more restrictive with the weapons, but I can't complain while I'm having fun accomplishing my tasks with deadly accuracy. The only problem is the backstory with the skills designates that until you reach a certain point in the main narrative, you will be stuck a limited set of skills to unlock and a surplus of skill points waiting to be spent. I personally recommend breezing through the story at a quicker pace to make the skill tree more accessible sooner.

To accompany the continuously fun gameplay, the graphics are really gorgeous. Not simply a console port, the settings allow players to really ramp it up and make it look quite lush. Admittedly, since The Witcher 2, this is the first game in a while that I couldn't run on max settings without sacrificing playability, but even on lowered settings, the game looks really good. An additional bonus is that human and animal character models all look good and animate believably, though the game suffers from the common trope of giving the most discernible details to the main characters, leaving the citizens of Rook Island to live with doppelgangers meandering about.

The majority of textures look good and are fairly passable up close, i.e., I did not focus on muddiness like I do in other games. The plants are all gorgeous from afar, too, but hiding in a bush does reveal the cracks in the rendering work. I should also mention that I experienced zero texture pop-in. The soundtrack varies from tribal to techno, which is all fitting without any one song standing out from the rest. Voice acting is all handled well and words generally match lip movements on all characters and NPCs. What is confusing is that the locals and rebels all speak Malay convincingly  but when it comes to English, they vary between a Pacific Islander accent and a Kiwi accent, going so far as to occasionally say, "Kia ora," when Jason passes by. I don't get it, but it's a detail the majority of gamers won't be bothered to notice.

Your digital camera acts as a way to tag and track enemies. Also, you can just look at the graphics better.

Control in Far Cry 3 is fairly comfortable with a typical mouse and keyboard setup on the PC. Most elements react well to input. The worst offender seems to be driving vehicles, where using a keyboard clearly lacks the nuance afforded by a controller with thumbsticks and pressure-sensitive trigger buttons. There is essentially one gear, and it's pedal to the metal. Also, the game allows you to maneuver the camera while driving, which I don't suggest doing ever because you'll drive off a cliff and not know why. In that regard, the game is a lot like real life! Another navigation gripe is the game's sensitivity to walking over small edges. I complained about something similar in Borderlands 2, but here it rears its ugly head in the silliest areas, requiring you to literally jump through doorways to proceed inside a house. Jason's ability to climb ledges is restricted to ones with overhanging ropes or vines that he doesn't actually use as grips despite their presence. Coming off of Dishonored, with the best first-person platforming ever, I found it jarring.

Finally, the game is a little too particular about the exact angle and distance at which you can interact with objects, such as found money and bodies to be looted. You have to be the in a precise position before it'll prompt you to do anything. This also emulates real life but in an unpleasant way. With all the money to steal and bodies to loot, you just want to grab and go. The worst culmination of all these came when I wanted to open a chest on a porch. I could not walk right onto the porch, of course, but the roof over it was too low for me to jump onto the porch. However, the extra foot the edge of the porch set me away from the chest prevented me from opening it. I had to climb nearby stairs on the other side of the house, jump onto and over a lounge chair placed at the corner, and maneuver myself to the chest that way. Imagining this scenario in real life yields only puzzlement.

Regardless of all these meaningless faults, I must reiterate that Far Cry 3 is a ridiculous amount of fun. The narrative notwithstanding, you will just have so much fun actually playing the game. The sandbox style is remarkably rewarding, and it affords you to have a very meaningful time doing nothing important. There is just the right amount of things to do written into the gameplay, and there are enough enemies, animals, and caves to pursue in between these moments. Combat is fun and provides a silly amount of options to play the way you want. Even as frustrating as it is to hear a tiger growling right behind you while you are picking off a pirate base one guard at a time, it's these unique moments that separate the game from others. I don't know what else I can tell you. Go play it!

Images obtained by playing the games through Uplay through Steam. It's like video game launch Inception.

Music: I Love Video Game Soundtracks, Part II

Where the writer realizes his folly in trying to fit his passion into one blog post.

Yesterday, I went on quite a yarn about my love for video game soundtracks, and I managed to name some of my top picks for composers. But the sad truth is I just wasn't done. I simply felt bad for you, the reader, who would be forced to endure a year-long blog post, so I split it into two for your convenience. Without further ado, here are my remaining notable video game soundtrack composers.

Nobuo Uematsu
What I have heard: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy IX, Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children

"Prelude." One could make an argument for many of his songs as iconic, but "Prelude," a repeated theme throughout the Final Fantasy series (most of which, I have not played), not only acts as an introduction to some of the iterations, but hearing it invokes the spirit and memories of every Final Fantasy game you've ever played. There are several versions of it, but oddly, my favorite it the live version, as performed by the Distant Worlds orchestra. If you ever get a chance to see them perform, it's amazing, and Nobuo is usually not far. Aside from the larger game themes, such as "Liberi Fatali" and "The Place I'll Return to Someday," many fans remember the smaller pieces clear as day. Some of my favorites include the latter portion of "The Planet's Crisis" (FFVII) and "You're Not Alone" (FFIX). Often, the best way to describe his work is very JRPG and very fantasy, but there's a reason he's famous. It may have something to do with the memorable tunes.



Michael McCann
What I have heard: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Even if you have not played the game, you probably watched the first epic trailer that came out for the game, which revealed the main story arc. The background music is the vocally lush sci-fi piece called, "Icarus." This and the remainder of the soundtrack really make the case for orchestral music standing alongside electronic music. You are never taken out of the futuristic setting of the game as you peruse the tracks composed by McCann. Notable tracks include the exciting "First and Last" and "Return to Hengsha," which layer the action elements of the game successfully into the sounds you hear.





Andrew Hale
What I have heard: L.A. Noire

If you listened to the L.A. Noire soundtrack without knowing what it's from, you'd think you were listening to an old movie soundtrack. Emulating a time period without grotesquely mimicking it can sometimes be a challenge, but every track in this album is a trip to another era. You can feel the mystery and tension build with each track, and the navigation from sweeping orchestras to soft jazz successfully root the listener in the spirit of the late 40s crime dramas. What I also enjoy about this soundtrack is Hale's suites of songs, which serve as the background to specific chapters in the game. Although they waver through highs and lows, their tones are usually fitting for the moments in the story they represent.



Bill Elm & Woody Jackson
What I have heard: Red Dead Redemption

This soundtrack is one of utmost quality. Like Andrew Hale's L.A. Noire, it successfully invokes the era of the game's setting, but where it stands apart is in how it modernizes it. You'll hear authentically Western-sounding guitar arrangements and string movements, but they will be layered on top of drum-and-bass beats and jarring arrangements. The build of the drums and orchestra in "El Club de los Cuerpos" hook me every time I hear it, especially one the herd of trumpets chime in. I also adore the percussion-navigated trip of "Triggernometry," whose main brass melody served as my phone's ringtone for a number of months recently. All the tracks serve the Rockstar pulp fittingly.




Mike Morasky
What I have heard: Portal, Portal 2

Although most of us only recall Ellen McLain's singing on "Still Alive" from the original Portal soundtrack, there is so much more to take notice of with Mike Morasky's compositions in Portal 2. There are obvious star songs like "Science Is Fun" and "You Will Be Perfect" to enjoy, but many of the tracks on the 3-disc score were procedurally generated in the game, meaning everyone's first experience with these songs was unique. Still, the composer, under the pseudonym, Aperture Science Psychoacoustics Laboratory, managed to bring all his samples together for an intriguing journey through the rundown puzzle gauntlet of the game. "Love as a Construct" and "You are Not Part of the Control Group" are two good examples of songs culled from these moments in the levels, and they ultimately add to the atmosphere of awe and wonder the player feels while trying hard not to die. Of the soundtracks I've mentioned thus far, it's worth noting that the orchestral work takes a back seat to seriously creative and compelling electronic musical structures. They typically return during larger story moments, but it is hard to miss them with all this good music being offered.

And the honorable mentions...

Without pumping out the theatrical writing for every soundtrack I own, I did want to mention additional selections from my library worth owning and listening to. (Also in no particular order.)

Tim Larkin

Soundtracks: Myst: Uru, Myst V: End of Ages

Songs of Note: "Villa," "Great Shaft"

Vincent Diamante

Soundtracks: Flower

Songs of Note: "Sailing on the Wind," "Purification of the City"

Solar Fields

Soundtracks: Mirror's Edge

Songs of Note: "Heat," "Pirandello Kruger"

Akira Yamaoka

Soundtracks: Silent Hill 3, Silent Hill 4

Songs of Note: "Breeze - In Monochrome Night," "Room of Angel"

Adam Skorupa & Krzystof Wierzynkiewicz

Soundtracks: The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

Songs of Note: "The Path of a Kingslayer," "For a Higher Cause"

Tomas Dvorak

Soundtracks: Machinarium

Songs of Note: "Mr. Handagote," "Gameboy Tune"

Normand Corbeil

Soundtracks: Heavy Rain

Songs of Note: "Lauren Winter's Main Theme," "Before the Storm"

Jami Sieber

Soundtracks: Braid

Songs of Note: "Maenam," "Tell It By Heart"

Thank you for indulging me in this journey through one of my many loves. Please let me know what soundtracks you love!

Images taken from Amazon, iTunes, and other Googled sources.

Fallout 3 Review

A lot to do translates to a lot of ambivalence.

The Capital Wasteland. There is a lot more where this came from.

Most recently, I browsed all those games I bought on sale around the holidays, and I chose to play Fallout 3, a rather well-acclaimed game that a number of my friends had wholeheartedly recommended to me. Right before that, though, I had played The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, so this provided an almost jarring foray into older territory. Fallout 3 promised me a rich landscape of exploration and unconventional role-playing game fun, and while I will admit I got a lot of the former, the fun was questionable.

The game takes place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland located in the Metro area in and around Washington DC. However, it becomes immediately obvious that this world is not our own; the 50's aesthetic behind the "World of Tomorrow" rings through all the technology and product advertising despite literally taking place in the future. The land is ravaged by a nuclear attack brought on by the Chinese 200 years before, and the "lucky" citizens were shielded from it by hiding in Vault-Tec brand underground vaults. You are born in one of these vaults, and the game uses your childhood as an innovative way to introduce character customization. Sadly, even at birth, things look grim when the character model designer can only yield a high percentage of ridiculous-looking human beings. I managed to scrape the barrel and make The Lone Wanderer look passable, but those looking to rummage through The Capital Wasteland with their eyes extending to wild proportions will find no trouble realizing those dreams. On the other hand, it is worth noting that the landscape, especially around sunrise and sundown, has some awe-inspiring visuals to complement your experience.

Trust me. He is about to hug you.

A series of events cause you to leave your Vault, and from there the game opens up its entire world to you. To its credit and its downfall, Fallout 3 allows you to travel unfettered across the landscape limited only by your ability to fight off the enemies you encounter. I don't believe I have encountered any other open-world game that was this accessible from the get-go, allowing the player to abandon the main storyline in pursuit of all the gameplay he or she could desire. This may be a dissenting opinion, but the fact that the game does not encourage you to return to the story about why you left the vault is a little disappointing, especially because the events that unfold are reasonably well-written. In fact, they culminate in two memorable final quests, which make all the sidequests offered by the game seem way bland in comparison.

Delving into the emptiness of the wasteland will certainly net you some intriguing meetings with peculiar characters. Every person who manages to survive in the irradiated land is completely odd, but in their eccentricities, the writers of the game convey many relatable themes by pushing wild human archetypes. What quickly becomes apparent, though, is that every character has a foil, and the game's karma system is laid out for you – nearly every quest you finish can be completed with a good or evil action. Each path has its own rewards (and achievements), but it is apparent that these choices you make could have been so much more given that life is not so binary.

The VATS mechanic at work. Or a super mutant with questionable accessories. You choose.

The mechanics that ultimately put you face-to-face with these people and situations are a satisfying mix of unique and status quo. The game plays like a first-person shooter in many regards, though the result of any gunshot is still a statistics game.Weapons come in multiple classes – small guns, big guns, melee, unarmed, and energy – and you have the ability to increase your proclivity with your favorite weapon type each time you level up. The game's most useful battle feature, to me, ended up being the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System (VATS), which will pause the action and let you attempt to shoot specific body parts on enemies of your choosing. Fueled by a modicum of action points, the VATS definitely helps the lesser players to level the playing field, and perks you receive at each level up your chances of making successful shots and even recharging your action points after a kill. If you're into firefights, though, don't expect to rely on VATS beyond an occasional open window to take a clear shot.

Alongside the weapons and targeting system are two approaches to doing your dirty work. The game sets up scenarios for and rewards both aggressive and sneaky tactics, of which I chose the latter. There are ways to improve how well you do with both, and if you poke around and level enough, many of your encounters will become a breeze. I will note, though, that sneaking around takes a significantly larger amount of time, but the payoff is saving tons of ammo and headache. The difference between attacking an enemy when you're hidden and when you've been detected is equivalent to the difference between smashing an egg or a rock with your bare hand. In order to manage your inventory, the game forgoes a typical menu interface for the PIP-Boy 3000, a wrist-worn computer system given to all vault citizens. It serves the same purpose, but it is hard to complain about adding gravitas to your inventory and quest-tracking system, something few games bother to make sense of.

The game itself is not so linear.

Despite all these refreshing systems and interfaces, the fact is that straying from the main path yields the player an uneven level of reward. Yes, you will find money (Nuka-Cola bottle caps), loot, and weapons a plenty, and you will level rather quickly in the process, but these itemized rewards do not drive the player to persist like a game with more focus or encouragement. For every unique person you'll meet or hamlet you'll save/destroy, there are five other locations on the map, be them buildings or Metro stations, where you'll kill everything and gain nothing fulfilling from the experience. Although the slow-motion portrayal of an enemy's head exploding with a well-placed gunshot never got old, the amount of them I performed to inevitably meet no one and accomplish nothing wore heavily on my will. I ended up focusing on the main storyline when I could not find it in me any more to explore the wasteland. Even the awe from seeing the war-torn famous US landmarks was diminished as soon as I had to explore them. If the game craftily compelled you to return to the story on occasion and offered a handful more scripted events, I think the game would have felt more rewarding and captivating throughout.

Marring an already shoddy presentation are Bethesda Software's all-too-famous glitches. You will witness it all – people and enemies slipping below the ground, enemies walking endlessly into each other without realizing it, invisible objects and NPCs, fallen enemies that just bounce around ad infinitum, models collapsing in on themselves, and even an irritating glitch that prevents you from obtaining a storyline achievement if you walked into the wrong building beforehand. The games also froze on me many times, but admittedly, it is not optimized for Windows 7, my current OS. Although many of these glitches are almost comically characteristic of a Bethesda game, they prevent total immersion. You will always be aware that you are playing with software, and the borders of your monitor never dissolve.

I'm sure someone in the bride's party can explain why she is holding a butcher knife.

The question of whether Fallout 3 is equivalent to the sum of its parts depends on the mathematician. Although the game gives you so much to do, it is tantamount to eating an entire box of cookies. It is a bloated experience, and doing so much over the course of it lessens its sweetness. If you are in it for the killing and the loot, you will ultimately love Fallout 3. If you'd like the writers of a game to reward your time with significantly more unique situations, characters, events, and environments, you are better off looking elsewhere.

Note: Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition is currently on sale for $14.99 on Steam until August 6th.

Fallout 3 images taken from Steam's store page and my own screenshots taken through Steam.

Never catching up with the present

Welcome to my gaming blog, From the Backlog. As the title should suggest, the video games I'll be focusing on are typically older, some of them by a few months and others by years. A while ago, I committed to playing only one major game at a time, which means awesome games come out, but I ignore them until I am finished with what I'm doing. (If someone wants to send me a review copy of a new game, I'm all ears.) Some people may be better adept to playing a few games at once, but I know that if I truly want to finish a game, I have to focus on it solely. Another reason I am behind the times is because I bought a Playstation 3 a few years after it came out, which means there were all kinds of games for me to play excluding new releases. Unless I quit my full-time job, I have games and will have games to play continuously for years. I also try to be frugal, so if I am only sort of interested in a new game, I will typically wait until it goes on sale for a price that meets my interest. (I will confess, I am a sucker for Steam sales.)

Beyond: Two Souls - One of those games I wouldn't mind receiving a review copy for.

Moving on, I'd like to note the kind of posts you should be expecting. Given that I will be playing games behind the times, I am not sure how relevant reviews will be by the time they go up. Instead, I'd like to offer up something possible more engaging: episodic blogging about my games, a subject discussed in this blog, which goes into why it is harder to review games in the same way one reviews movies. I often have a lot of insights into the games I'm playing, but I am not continuously taking notes. It would actually be easier for me to talk about the last couple hours of gaming as if I'm talking about my day. However, depending on how short a game is, I may still post reviews or post-mortems at the very least.

There are some games, which get me hot enough to buy them new and play them right when they come out. This year, I picked up The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings: Enhanced Edition, which was just amazing. Seriously, it is one of the best RPGs I've ever played, and compared to a lot of games you see in this HD era, the absolutely gorgeous graphics were the icing on the gameplay cake. More recently relevant, I played Quantum Conundrum, developed by Kim Swift, who developed Narbacular Drop, which laid the groundwork for the amazing Portal. The game was certainly entertaining, though it invites comparisons to Portal that end up becoming unfair; it's possible the game was marred by being shoehorned into a smaller digital download production, but I still would not play down its entertainment value. Games still to come that I am looking forward to playing upon release are Borderlands 2, Dishonored, Assassin's Creed III, Bioshock Infinite, and many others.

Seriously, The Witcher 2 is gorgeous.

Aside from just talking about games I am or will be playing, I'd love to blog about my opinions about the video game industry and journalism. I am also planning some dissections of video games themselves, looking into the mechanics to make the industry successful and how they hit our id. (Not to be confused with id Software.) Whether they will interest this blog's likely tens of readers is yet to be seen, but I hope my rambling hits home with some of you. Back to games for the moment, you will most likely see me talking about RPGs and adventure games. I lean on those genres the most, though the original Bioshock showed me that I can attempt first-person shooters with my PC on super easy mode. My only gaming consoles are a PS3 and a PC. I have nothing against the 360; I just didn't choose one in the store. (If you'd like to buy me one, I'll play on it!) In the past, I've owned a PS2, Gamecube, Saturn, Genesis, and Gameboy.

Hopefully, they didn't just up the ante in the graphics department.

So thank you for taking the time to read this long-winded introduction. I do hope you return as I will try to post often or die trying. In the meantime, you can hit me up on the Twitter: @gilmeansjoy.

Beyond: Two Souls screenshot taken without permission from GameInformer.com.
The Witcher 2 screenshot taken myself via Steam.
Borderlands 2 screenshot taken without permission from the official website linked above.