#best campaign bungie has made in the last 20 years

[thelvadams]

15 YEARS OF HALO 3: ODST • September 22nd 2009

Prepare to drop.

[zombiescantfly]

Halo and the Burden of the Extended Universe

Halo, as in the initial trilogy of games one through three, has been about one man, known only by his rank, traveling to exotic alien superstructures hanging in deep space, traversing their surfaces on foot and in a variety of human and alien military vehicles, and mowing down literally hundreds of enemies per level. Throughout that trilogy, we’re supposed to believe that these aliens, the Covenant, pose a great risk to all of humanity. We’re told, by way of the instruction manuals and some NPC chatter, that these aliens have pushed our own species, at the time a massive space-faring empire, back to the singular planet of our birth. 

In all three games, we just barely make our way to the latest superstructure, clawing our way there against what's said to be insurmountable odds. We're constantly told that we're low on resources, low on time, we barely have a foot in the door while the Covenant have already made their bed. And yet, every single game, we win. Effortlessly. Constantly. 

And not only do we win, but we prevent the total annihilation of all life in the universe no less than once per game, sometimes more! Untold hordes of enemies fall at our controller-wielding fingertips, but somehow we're meant to accept that this one is our last chance, for real, we swear. Still, problems come and go at the whim of an inattentive scriptwriter, built up to be the most important thing we've ever seen, left perfectly resolved at the end of a 20-minute level.

In every game, the goalposts are constantly shifting, pushed further and further back by writers who realize, sweat on their brows, that they've started with the destruction of all life in the universe and have to somehow amp it up from there. For three games.

To put it mildly, they are not successful.

What do we have to be afraid of? Not the Covenant, because even the worst weapons we have available to us can tear them apart. All life on Earth, the last bastion of our species, is put at risk a full three times over the course of two games, and every single time we, as the protagonist, turn our back on the problem and are promised it will be solved when we aren't looking. If the Halo rings are fired, all life in the universe dies! Except when it was fired in Halo 2 and only sent a standby signal before being deactivated. Except when it was fired in Halo 3 using a never-before-heard-of "tactical pulse" that is at perfect odds with everything it was stated to do in all three games. 

There's no threat that sticks, no threat that matters. Everything the games have told us to be afraid of are continuously revealed to be utterly inconsequential. Even the moment-to-moment threats become routine, the moment-to-moment losses, unnoticeable. How many times have you gathered a squad of friendly Marines only to lose them all in the next gunfight? Well, don't worry, here comes a Pelican with four new ones, no questions asked. Yes, we're running low on fuel and men and supplies, but here you go Chief, you're special.

But why are we special? Who is The Master Chief? We know some things, but not a lot. We're a supersoldier, a Spartan. We have a ship's AI in our head who tells us what LZs to clear and does all the talking for us. Across three games, approximately thirty hours of gameplay, our main character has a mere sixty-eight lines of dialogue, and most of it doesn't pass the five word mark. Cortana, in comparison, has nearly six hundred spoken lines. Our hero is characterized only by lines like "boo," "green, sir," "I need a weapon," "understood," and "we'll make it."

Truly, a fascinating and deep character to go down in the annals of gaming history. A man brimming with all the personality of a cardboard box, all the empathy of a brick, and all the motives of a potted plant.

And yet, every Halo fan out there will tell you how cool he is, how haunted by his past he is, how deeply he feels the loss of his comrades, and how much he cares for his tiny blue Garmin. 

Why? We played the same games, right? With all the same plot holes and haphazardly shifting priorities, the miniscule cast of named characters that never do anything to extend past their paint-by-numbers archetype? What are they getting out this that I haven’t?

Well, they read the books.

To them, Halo has an excuse. There aren't any plot holes, none at all, because you can just read this piece of licensed fiction to plug it. Are you still uncertain, well over a decade after the fact, just how much time passed between Halo 2 and 3? There's a graphic novel to answer that for you. What about the Arbiter, why didn't he stick around to try to form a proper treaty with humanity after the end of Halo 3? Read the book to find out. Okay then, the Flood invasion of Earth, how'd that get cleaned up so fast? Don't worry, watch the animated short.

This isn't how storytelling works. 

You don't get to present a player of your game, a buyer of your product, with one third of a story and then tell them the rest exists as multiple books. You don't get to ignore key plot points that would bring your story together just so they can be sold off years later in a different medium.

External media, should your property have it, should be to expand on things the primary property has no room for. Hinted-at background events. Formative character experiences. Something tangentially related that still ties in to the main story. If it's really that important, tell your writers to make room for it in the main product. 

Halo has the room for it. Each game will probably take a first-time player around ten hours for a first playthrough, and far less time on subsequent runs. These games are short, but they attempt to tell a story many times larger than they make room for. So make more room. End the focus on getting players in and out in a single weekend sitting. Let your characters talk to each other beyond exchanging stiff one-liners in cutscenes. Stop making every level a bombastic, breakneck setpiece and give the story room to breathe, to actually be told. If it’s the end of the universe we’re dealing with, surely you can spare us more than nine measly levels? Let us actually see the larger situation rather than being told about it. Do you really think Halo fans would complain about a campaign taking fifteen to twenty hours to beat? They love Halo, they want to spend time with it. Capitalize on that, and take the opportunity to finally, actually tell a story with all the parts in it instead of just a third.

Which brings us, finally, to Halo: Reach.

Certain Halo fans, largely the same group of them that defend the poor storytelling because “it’s in the books,” have a reaction to Halo: Reach that can best be described as ‘vitriolic.’ They don’t like it. Why?

Because it’s not like the book. 

You see, while Halo: Reach came out in 2010, a book by the name of Halo: The Fall of Reach came out some months before the first Halo game in 2001. They are both about the same event, but with quite major differences. This caused quite a lot of contention at the time of Reach’s release, mainly from the part of the fanbase that believed they were going to get a one-to-one retelling of this book in videogame form. 

They didn’t get that. Halo: Reach is an original story that tells the tale of a world’s final hours and one team of elite supersoldiers as they attempt to do anything they can to help delay the inevitable end. It’s not the most compelling story ever written, or even the most compelling version of that story ever told, but it’s effective. Even though we’re dealing with the imminent destruction of an entire planet, the story manages to stay small. Reach’s ultimate destruction is a common piece of wall graffiti or NPC combat barks, so the ending is known, leaving room for smaller objectives to take the spotlight. Rescue civilians trapped behind enemy lines. Delay an invasion force to buy evacuation efforts another hour. Clear the skies so supplies and medivac can go out. 

Halo: Reach has almost no connection to the series at large, and it’s quite the breath of fresh air. As a prequel, its ending is a forgone conclusion, but it does what it can with the time it has. The messy, convoluted politics of Halo 2 and 3 are far in the series’ chronological future, letting you fight two enemy factions at once for the first time in the series, away from the plot point that sees them at war with each other. The end of the universe isn’t constantly being dangled over our heads for the third time in as many games, so the characters have a chance to sit down and swap banter, tell us who they are. They aren’t anyone too terribly compelling - Bungie still hadn’t quite figured out character writing - but they’re tested archetypes played well enough for the story’s demands. The threat is known and static, the stakes grow higher by way of the ticking clock drawing us ever closer to the planet’s inevitable end. There’s no faffing around with “trading one villain for another” because killing the first one would have ended the story too quickly, so a new one has to show up with no lead-in. 

Even at the very end of that original trilogy, Halo’s story was too big for the time Bungie gave it. Its own plot points were shoving at each other, jockeying for position, knocking parts off themselves in an effort to fit into nine half-hour levels until all that was left were fractions of what you’d need to find in the books afterward.

Reach suffers from its own short length, but not in the same way. It suffers in that you can point to the characters and they say needed more setup, more time with each other, maybe another level or two here or there to really draw the relationship out. It suffers by pushing a little too hard at the “imminent end” angle, hurrying you through and skipping over hours of in-world time that probably could have been their own level.

But surely even the superfans saw that this was preferable? That a standalone story was the best way to go about things? Surely they understood that attempting to simply recreate the book would have ended with them not seeing any of what Bungie came up with for this new game? There’s a lot to like about Halo: Reach, and a lot to do in it that you can’t do in any of the other games. Surely even the most fervent defenders of the extended canon ended up coming around and being able to separate the two for what they both were on their own.

Of course, that’s not what happened. See again, ‘vitriolic.’ And so here we are at the question this whole thing has been building up to. When a company leans as hard into external supplemental media as Bungie did for Halo, is it then obligated to play by the rules and plot points outlined in those external entities? It’s a tricky question, mostly because up until that point, Bungie had gone ahead as if every book and animated short and comic and webisode was one hundred percent canonical. The reason superfans tolerated those gaping plot holes in the games is, again, because they weren’t holes at all when paired with their companion media. So now, in the far-past year of 2010, Bungie has suddenly decided that one of those sacred tomes of external knowledge is incorrect. 

I think the easiest answer would have simply been to...tell the proper amount of story in the first place, but I guess it’s a little too late for that, especially now. 

So what, then, is the obligation put forward by such a slavish devotion to external storytelling? Were they wrong to do something different? Were they right to forge ahead with something new for the benefit of freeing players who had never read that book and any other related to it from the web of multi-author canon? 

I’d say they made the right move. Let’s talk about Star Wars.

Star Wars and Halo share many a talking point, the most obvious of which is just the sheer amount of additional stories they have stapled to them. Great news for fans who are into it, but terrible news for the actual IP holders. All they do is get in the way when the primary vehicle wants to expand. Disney felt it more than Bungie ever did, but Bungie felt it first: cut away the myriad stories clogging up the canon or you’ll never make anyone happy. Try to appease the superfans and get burned by not touching on every single node of criss-crossing plot webs that is the result of decades of overlapping stories by as many authors, while alienating newcomers by being forced to pay lip service to concepts and characters they’ve never heard of and have no attachment to. 

Disney made the right call, and so did Bungie with Reach. What came next in Disney’s case isn’t relevant, and Bungie washed their hands of Halo entirely afterwards. 

If your story cannot survive without the propping-up of half a dozen pieces of external media, you have failed to tell a good story. If your answer to questions about this story is to tell the asker to read a book, you have failed to tell a good story. I understand the appeal of that expansion, of being able to have a celebrated setting grow and reach new places, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of the setup. The world has to exist before it can be expanded upon. The story needs to be in place for its offshoots to grow. And that’s what Halo fails at, so totally and repeatedly. Bungie was too excited by the prospect of having an extended universe that they forgot to make a universe to expand upon. As a result, the actual core universe exists smeared across half a dozen mediums and dozens of individual pieces, with no true convergence point someone can present a newcomer with and say, “Start here.”

The Halo games are a patchwork mess of uninspired characters, unexplored concepts, unknown stakes, and uninteresting locales. Because they rely so heavily on their companion media to fill in those blanks, there’s nothing there to entice a first-time player to do it themselves. If a character’s inspiration comes from one book, the exploration of a concept comes from another, the weight of the stakes is told through an animatic, and the otherworldly locales are shown in all their glory only in the pages of a comic book, what is the game even for? If everything you need to know about the Master Chief, the Covenant, the war, and the Halos isn’t in the games, what’s the point of them? What do Halo 1, 2, and 3 actually stand to add to a universe seemingly defined elsewhere?

They become wastes of time. Wastes of potential. Other people - artists and authors working under contract for Bungie, not Bungie themselves - did all the heavy lifting to create these worlds and these characters. Does Bungie even know who their own characters are? Could the original writer for Halo 1 tell me everything the Master Chief has become through the works of a dozen other authors over the course of twenty years? 

The books might be good. I wouldn’t know; the games didn’t inspire me to read them.

[guidetoplaystation-blog]

The 9 Best PlayStation 4 Shooter Games of 2019

The Rundown

Best Overall: Apex Legends at Amazon, “Apex shines with its fluid movement and fast-paced shooter action.”

Most Popular: Fornite at Amazon, “The ubiquitous battle royale game is so refined it’s hard to put down.”

Best Characters: Overwatch at Amazon, "With so much to explore, it’s no wonder Overwatch remains one of the most popular shooters ever made."

Best Multiplayer: Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII at Amazon, “Multiplayer enhancements and a new mode make this one a must-buy for Call of Duty fanatics.”

Best Tactics: PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds at Amazon, "Sticks to what it knows, with boots-to-the-ground combat, driving, and first-person shooter mechanics."

Best Visuals: Rage 2 at Amazon, “The desolate wasteland makes for a strangely beautiful and colorful experience.”

Best Open World: Far Cry: New Dawn at Amazon, “This new take for the franchise is a fresh and exciting open world odyssey.”

Best Co-Op: Destiny 2 at Amazon, “The shared universe shooter is the best way to work together with a group of friends.”

Best for Kids: Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 at Amazon, “A charming and creative shooter that provides a lighter, family-friendly option."

Our Top Picks

Best Overall: Apex Legends

No one quite knew what to make of Apex Legends when it was stealth released back in February 2019, on the same day as its announcement. But shortly thereafter, it took the digital world by storm. Going after the battle royale crown is a truly challenging conceit, but with a focus on strong gameplay and fluid controls, Apex Legends has quickly risen to the top of the pack, especially in the category of first-person shooters.

The premise is simple: 20 teams of three drop from a ship and land, picking up randomly generated loot as an ever-enclosing ring of death surrounds them. The goal is even simpler: survive, and win. Where the game shines is in its unique convergence of genres. It's hero shooter (see: Overwatch) meets battle royale (see: Fortnite), so while it features a diverse assortment of guns and character abilities, how you use them depends on your place in line ... waiting for death. After all, only one team comes out in top.

Most Popular: Fortnite

If you are itching more for a third-person battle royale experience, then turn your head to the most popular video game in the world right now: Epic Games' Fortnite. While its premise is ubiquitous, after playing it you'll understand why. The creativity and freedom it encourages leads to a boatload of fun, no matter how many times you queue up a new game.

Setting the template for what a battle royale game really could be, Fortnite is fundamentally rock solid. Its main value proposition is the flow of frequent updates, with everything from game modes, new guns, vehicles, and surprise celebrity cameo appearances touching down weekly. Strong shooting mechanics, unique visuals, and stable gameplay are expected from a game of its popularity, and Fortnite delivers on all fronts.

Best Characters: Overwatch

Overwatch was officially released to the public about three years ago ... although people have been playing it for longer than even that. First soft-launched (in closed beta) in 2015, Overwatch has been a mainstay of the current generation of consoles for quite a while now. And Blizzard, no stranger to supporting a game long into its life cycle, has felt no need to ever stop releasing new content, characters, and modes for Overwatch.

Now, some years later, the amount of pure content available to you within Overwatch is staggering. Still a multiplayer team-based shooter at its core, Overwatch now boasts an impressive amount of content for players to experience: dozens of maps, over thirty characters, and seven distinct modes, to name some. Even better? More content is still arriving at a steady pace for the game, and all of it is completely free to everyone. With so much to explore, it’s no wonder Overwatch remains one of the most popular shooters ever made.

Best Multiplayer: Call of Duty Black Ops IIII

Variety is the name of the game when it comes to Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII. Even with the developers at Treyarch foregoing a standalone campaign with the latest installment of their flagship franchise, you won’t be longing for content. There's enough to see, play, customize, unlock, explore, and share to keep you going for years. And that's before all the downloadable content in the pipeline.

Of course, there’s the flagship multiplayer mode, which is as polished and fun as ever. New additions this time around include predictive recoil and a specially enhanced ballistics mode, in addition to the change in the franchise’s standard regenerative health for a manual healing system. All these additions make for a more rewarding, engrossing experience. Combined with the return of the Black Ops series mainstay “Zombies” mode, and a full-fledged battle royale mode called “Blackout,” there’s more here than ever before for a Call of Duty title.

Best Tactics: PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds

There’s a battle royale game for everyone, it seems, what with Fortnite’s more cartoony third-person aesthetic and Apex Legend’s fast-paced, sci-fi trappings. But for those looking for something a more traditional, you don’t have to look much further than the granddaddy of the genre itself: PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG). Launched in early access in March 2017, PUBG set the foundation for the genre.

But while others have moved onto the supernatural, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds sticks to what it knows, with boots-to-the-ground combat, driving, and first-person shooter mechanics. However, in a genre like this, less is truly more, and the pure visceral experience of playing Pis enhanced by this realistic, no-frills approach. And with the game still being updated with new content, maps, and graphical upgrades on a frequent basis, there has never been a better time to jump back into the militaristic world of PUBG.

Best Visuals: Rage 2

With its punk rock aesthetic and absolutely manic gameplay, Rage 2 has made a big impression on the first-person genre. Developer Id Software’s long-awaited sequel to the 2010 original is unlike any other shooter currently on the PlayStation 4. Its impeccable style gleams and oozes a funky good time, making it stand out amongst the crowd of more drab looking military fare.

In Rage 2, you play as a bespoke ranger who goes by the name Walker, fighting for survival in a world torn apart by an asteroid that ravaged the planet years earlier. Life is scarce, and what remains of humanity has been mutated into deranged mutants. Armed with telekinesis, not to mention a huge arsenal of weaponry and several vehicles at your side, it's up to you to keep some sanity in this deadly world.

Best Open World: Far Cry: New Dawn

Ubisoft took a big swing when it released Far Cry: New Dawn. Unlike the Far Cry games of old, this sequel/spin-off takes place in a nuclear apocalypse following the shocking conclusion of Far Cry 5. You're set loose in this new iteration of Hope County, as a character known only as The Captain, on a quest to restore peace and order to the new world. Cults run wild, survivors need your help, and there's always the occasional mountain lion or bear to fend off while completing side quests and collecting missions.

Unlike most other games that take place in the midst of nuclear fallout, the world of Far Cry: New Dawn is not a bleak and grey one. In fact, the natural environment of the world is thriving after the initial fallout, with new types of flowers and vegetation springing up all over the place. And with the game’s huge open world at your disposal, you’ll have plenty of time to explore every nook-and-cranny of the new Hope County as you work your way through the game’s various collection of criminal bandits, crazed cultist, and everything in between.

Best Co-Op: Destiny 2

The sequel to the loot-driven phenomenon Destiny, Bungie’s Destiny 2 once again throws you into a massive world of missions, weapons, and sci-fi cosmic enemies. Set in our solar system, your fireteam of three teammates quest to defend the last colony of Earthlings from evil alien menaces.

Building off the “shared universe” concept of the original game, you have the option to play the game completely PvE (player versus the environment) or PvP (player versus player), with both modes serving as a vehicle to reflexive gun handling and innovative RPG elements. However, the game truly shines the most in the PvE scenarios, in which you get to team up online with up to five other players in order to perform various mission and raids.

Best for Kids: Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2

The breadth of shooters available on the PlayStation 4 aren’t just all gloomy, self-serious military simulators and mature shoot ‘em ups, or shmups. And for something a little more fantastical and kid-friendly, you can’t go wrong with Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2.

A sequel to the original third-person shooter and a spin-off overall of the timeless Plants vs Zombies free-to-play mobile game, Garden Warfare 2 ups the ante from the previous entry in the franchise by adding new modes like Graveyard Ops, a Zombie-helmed take on the original’s Garden Ops, and Herbal Assault, which sees the zombies defending their base from a besieging horde of plants.

What to Look for in a PS4 Shooter Game

Free online multiplayer - Look for a PS4 shooter game that works online without PS Plus if you don’t subscribe to Sony’s premium online gaming service. Most PS4 games require an active subscription if you want to take them online, but there are some great options that let you play with, and against, your friends for free.

Virtual reality - If you have PlayStation VR, then you have to check out some of the great PS4 shooter games that are designed to work with Sony’s virtual reality headset. Playing a first-person shooter in virtual reality is a game-changing experience, and you can grab a PSVR Aim Controller for an even more immersive experience.

Open world - Most shooters are pretty linear in their campaigns, and multiplayer matches take place on relatively limited maps. If you want a break from that type of shooter, look for one that’s built on an open world, where you have a ton of freedom to go where you want and shoot what you want, on your own time.

[entergamingxp]

Five of the Best: Beaches • Eurogamer.net

Five of the Best is a weekly series about the bits of games we overlook. I’m talking about hands, maps, cats, startup screens – things we ignore at the time but can recall years later because, it turns out, they’re integral to our memory of the game. Now is the time to celebrate them!

It works like this. Various Eurogamer writers will share their memories in the article and then you – probably outraged we didn’t include the thing you’re thinking of – can share the thing you’re thinking of in the comments below. We’ve had some great discussions in our other Five of the Best pieces. So come on, what are you waiting for? On we go!

When I gaze out of the big windows beside me I see building works and grey skies. Oh February. Oh England. What I wouldn’t give to be padding through the warm sands of a beach somewhere else, somewhere hot – somewhere I can splosh in and out of the water all day, drying lazily in the sun.

Thank goodness for games that can whisk us away. They can take us to untouched beaches with pearly white sands and turquoise seas. Or they can take us farther, to different worlds and the impossible beaches of fantasy. So dry off, sit back, and let’s get away for a moment or two. Let’s explore the best beaches in games.

Sega’s sandbox game

Sega’s renowned for its big, beautiful blue skies, and of course those things are often paired with equally magnificent beaches. There’s a roll-call of them throughout Sega’s most iconic games, whether it’s Jeffry’s stage in Virtua Fighter 3, the azure coast of the first OutRun or Sonic Adventure’s opening level. Which is all well and good, but what about the time that Sega made a game out of an actual beach.

First revealed in 2014 and still available to play in a handful of Japanese locations, this thing looks amazing, even if I’ll admit I’ve yet to track one down to play. Will it be as good as its premise suggests, as projections mingle with soft sand that’s begging to be sculpted? Maybe, maybe not, but I’m just so, so glad that it exists. It just goes to prove that, no matter what you say about modern Sega, they’re still the masters of blue sky thinking.

-Martin Robinson

Sea of Thieves

There’s no purer tropical fantasy than sailing a big wooden pirate boat and exploring barely charted islands for treasure, and Sea of Thieves nails it. You can even dress in ridiculous clothes and sing songs!

But what I really like about the tropics in Sea of Thieves is the contrasting weather. One moment it’s idyllic, the sun blazing and sparkling on the calm sea, and the next, it’s raging, rain pouring and thunder crashing, water rising like mountains around you.

Sea of Thieves knows what it is to make you feel humble in nature’s presence, and nature’s presence instils in me a deep sense of calm. I could bob up and down on those seas for days.

This video is amazing! I stumbled onto it in the Sea of Thieves forum.

Halo

“We’re approaching the LZ! It’s gonna be hot!” I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t believe it! As the UNSC dropship plopped Master Chief down on the beach at the beginning of The Silent Cartographer – which to this day remains the greatest Halo campaign level of all time – and thrust me into a skirmish on the shore, I found myself dumbfounded a video game could immerse me in such a heart-pumping, epic shooter battle. Amid the blast of grenades, assault rifle fire and grunt squeals, I looked up. That’s a huge ring in the distance, shooting up into the sky, wrapping overhead and coursing down the opposite horizon. We’re on an island on a ring in space. And there’s a jeep with a minigun on it!

What’s remarkable about The Silent Cartographer is that no matter what the player does or where the player goes, it doesn’t break stride. As you make your way into the island’s mysterious alien installation, going deeper and deeper underground, you start to realise that everything is connected in a way that at least creates the illusion of coherence. By the time you’ve fought your way topside and grabbed a pickup from Echo 419, Halo has taught you it’s a game that takes sense of place incredibly seriously. You really did land on the beach, jump in a warthog, explore an underground base and emerge victorious without a loading screen, without the video game itself getting in the way. The island feels real, even as the wizards at Bungie pull levers this way and that behind the virtual curtain. Back in 2001, Halo’s beach blew me away. Looking back at old gameplay of The Silent Cartographer now, nearly 20 years later, it still does.

-Wesley Yin-Poole

Crash Bandicoot

It’s not a real video game if there isn’t at least one clich in there, is it? Crash Bandicoot is a little wonky by modern standards, the jumping a bit finickity and clichs abound, and that little starter beach is no different. You wake up, face down, waves lapping at your feet, knowing this is a reference to something but not what, exactly, that reference is – one of those iconic scenes that seems to have transcended its actual origins to just be a recurring, ironic nod, like cartoons with baddies tripping on banana skins and clumsy characters trying not to smash a Ming vase.

But anyway, for some reason Crash, of all games, seems to nail the archetypal wake-up-on-a-tropical-beach clich more than anything else I can currently imagine. It actually is iconic, an enormously well-remembered opening, what with the jorts and the title music and that little eyebrow wiggle to the camera before you go flipping off into the jungle. There’s a single, long path ahead, and you’ve arrived at the beginning of it. Clich or not, it’s as good a way to start a video game as any.

-Chris Tapsell

Rime

Rime is drenched in the Mediterranean. The whole game is inspired by it, by a childhood spent playing on its beaches and swimming in its sea. In fact, the deeper meaning of the game grew out of a near-death experience Tequila Works’ creative director Raul Rubio had in the Mediterranean. He was trying to impress a girl by swimming out to a buoy when, all of a sudden, fatigue set in. Unwisely, he panicked, and the last of his energy left him. Then he began to sink…

It’s a story Rubio shared with me when we talked for a long time about the many meanings of Rime. That’s a longer piece published a while ago on Eurogamer. Don’t read it if you haven’t played Rime because it’ll spoil the surprise, but do play Rime and then read it. Or else. (Just pretend you’re terrified.)

The opening of Rime shows the island at its loveliest.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/02/five-of-the-best-beaches-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=five-of-the-best-beaches-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

[wayneooverton]

10 facts about New Zealand that will totally impress your friends

It’s a well-known fact that New Zealand is without a doubt the most incredibly beautiful country in the world. Okay, I kind of made that up. Let’s call it an alternative fact.

But still, you’ve probably been hearing a lot about New Zealand in the past five years because the world is finally discovering the tiny beautiful island and no one can shut up about it.

If you think you’ve heard it all, you’re probably wrong. Besides birthing heroes like Sir Edmund Hillary and Peter Jackson, there are heaps more to know about this little island nation to be learned.

Where is New Zealand? And other questions you’re too embarrassed to ask

New Zealand is full of hidden secrets and interesting little fact bombs. Next time someone tells you there’s one person for every 9 sheep in New Zealand, hit them with these much more interesting factoids.

They’ll be totally impressed. You’re welcome.

1. Kiwi fruit is not native to New Zealand

It may seem counter-intuitive since the word Kiwi is synonymous with New Zealand. The citizens are casually referred to as Kiwis, the fruit grows in abundance throughout the country and of course, the national bird is the kiwi, a flightless nocturnal bird that is rarely seen and endangered.

Despite this country’s undeniable love for all things kiwi, the kiwi fruit is actually not native to New Zealand. It comes from China and is also known as a gooseberry. Chinese gooseberries were exported into New Zealand in 1904 and were originally marketed under the name ‘Zespri.”

When New Zealand began exporting fruit to the USA in the 1950s, the name Chinese Gooseberry was a marketing disaster waiting to happen so instead, they suggested the name kiwifruit.

2. New Zealand is home to the longest place name in the world:

Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu.

If you actually tried to sound that word out, kudos to you because my brain skipped over the word after the second syllable.

Often shortened to Taumata, Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu is a Māori name referring to a hill in Hawkes Bay on the North Island.

For those who didn’t count, the word has 85 characters, 40 syllables and roughly translates to “The summit where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the slider, climber of mountains, the land-swallower who traveled about, played his kōauau (flute) to his loved one.”

You can learn how to pronounce the word here.

3. About 1/3 of the country is protected national park

You probably know this already but New Zealand is a pretty beautiful place and while it continues to gain popularity and be developed for human gain, a large part of the country is preserved as national park or conservation areas, many looked after by the Department of Conservation or DOC as it’s locally known.

With 13 national parks and thousands of designated conservation areas, New Zealand is doing its best to preserve the magic of wild land.

All of the National Parks are easily accessible and you can literally find conservation areas everywhere you turn so getting into nature is super easy here.

4. Bats are the only native mammal in the country.

For thousands of years, birds dominated the animal kingdom in New Zealand. Almost no land mammals existed at all here, except for a species of bats. All of these species currently are either thought to be extinct or are critically endangered.

Human settlement has a truly detrimental effect on the number of bats in New Zealand. Logging and clearing of lowland forests have destroyed their habitat and the introduction of predators (like rats and stoats) has threatened their existence.

That’s why initiatives like Predator Free 2050 are so important here. Save the bats!

5. It’s home to the steepest street in the world

The Guinness World Record recognizes Baldwin Street as the steepest street in the world. The street climbs a vertical height of 47.22m with a gradient of 35% in the steepest sections.

If you want to see the steepest street for yourself, head to Dunedin, the second largest city in the South Island and take a stroll up the hill.

Whatever you do, don’t attempt to ride down the street, especially in a wheelie bin.

6. New Zealand is the least corrupt nation in the world

Anyone who lives in New Zealand will tell you it’s a pretty easy place to call home.

Things are straight forward and the small population makes it easy for change to happen and the people who live here are simply incredibly straight up and genuine. You never really have to guess what’s really going on in New Zealand because it’s mostly all out in the open.

According to the Corruptions Perception Index, New Zealand is the least corrupt nation in the world scoring 89 points out of 100. People value the concept of being fair and understand the importance of press freedom, access to information about public spending and independent judicial systems.

New Zealand continues to top the list year after year along with other non-corrupt countries such as Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Switzerland. Hell yeah!

7. Their hottest election of the year is for a bird

In the USA, years are spent carefully crafting campaigns around the presidential election. Billions of dollars are spent during campaign season, it’s nearly impossible to watch tv or listen to the radio without hearing a political commercial.

In New Zealand, the presidential campaigns have a short build-up and are quick to finish. But there’s on campaign in New Zealand that sparks outrage and combat every year: The Bird of the Year.

Each year New Zealanders ban together and decide on which of their beloved birds should be crowned with Bird of the Year and each year, tears and outrage ensue. In fact, last year there were even reports of cheating with over 300 votes for the shag coming from the same IP address. This is the sort of corruption that stopped us from getting the full 100 points in the Corruptions Perception Index.

For those of you who care, this year’s bird of the year is kererū, a stupid fat wood pigeon, who loves to get drunk on fermented berries and fall out of trees. Sigh.

8. New Zealand is home to a giant carnivorous snail

As it turns out, New Zealand does care about other species other than birds. A prime example is the Powelliphanta snail, a giant carnivorous snail found in the South Island. This snail can be as large as dinner plates and feeds on earthworms, sucking them up like a piece of spaghetti.

These snails lay about 5-10 large eggs a year with each egg measuring up to 12 mm long and once hatched, the snails can live up to 20 years, however, these giant snails are at serious risk from predators like stoats and possums as well as habitat loss.

I haven’t seen one, thank god!

9. New Zealand was the first country to give women the right to vote

New Zealand was embracing feminism before the rest of the world granting women the right to vote in 1893. In most other democracies, women did not gain the right to vote until after WWI. The women’s vote can be largely attributed to suffrage campaigners led by Kate Sheppard, who is now featured on the $10 note.

Granting women the right to vote laid the groundwork for centuries of starving for equal rights for women.

Three out of New Zealand’s 40 Prime Ministers have been women. Sure that number looks grim but it’s a lot better than many other democratic nations (I’m looking at you, USA).

10. New Zealand is home to the first commercial bungy jump

New Zealand is often credited with inventing the idea of bungy jumping and while it’s certainly a big part of our tourism identity, New Zealand was far from the inventor of this completely insane idea.

The first modern bungy jumps were made in the late 1970s from a suspension bridge in the UK by a professional climber who was inspired by “vine jumping,” a ritual carried out by the people of Vanuatu.

Nearly a decade later, a New Zealander by the name of AJ Hackett picked up the idea and decided to turn it into a commercial tourism activity. He had made his first jump off an Auckland bridge then continued to jump off insane heights (like the Eiffel Tower) before opening the world’s first public bungy site. AJ Hackett Bungy is still operating between Wanaka and Queenstown of if nearly jumping to your death is your thing, you’re in luck.

Whatcha think? Feel more knowledgable about New Zealand now? Any other facts to add? Share!

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