Game Mastery: Lord of Blowing Sh*t Up

When a video game sucks me in and I spend hours upon hours playing it, I generally have two ways of going about it: I either break the system or I find a way to destroy everything and wreak the most havoc I can.

This post is about the latter.

It all began way back in GTA III, when we would spend hours on top of a building with a sniper rifle, playing the insane gunman and abusing the game's weak AI (they can't shoot up). This is one of the few times I condone cheats, as ammo is hard to come by in that game - however we found a couple of "cheats" made the game more fun, and a lot harder. After inputting the Everyone Has a Gun code and the Riot code, the game would enter a state we called Ragnarok Mode.

Standing in a safe place, away from the city traffic, an explosion would immediately go off, and screams would echo through the air. Gunfire would rattle eerily from the streets, and suddenly you would feel like you were in the middle of a warzone. You would run out into the street, past a burning man and an old lady with a flamethrower, and try to steal a car (lord help you if the driver had a rocket launcher, as he would fire it at you as you drove away), and tear off through the streets, fervently hoping a stray explosion, errant gunfire, or a zealous woman with a flamethrower wouldn't take you out - and it always happened within a minute or two. To make matters worse, as soon as you respawn at the hospital, you'd be assualted instantly, since you are 10 feet from the street.

We made a provisional rule: if you didn't survive more than 30 seconds, you didn't have to pass the controller.

The next game to pique my appetite for obliteration was Burnout 3, particularly the spectacular crash mode, which played out in slow motion with all manner of explosions. We would play the same crashes over an over, long since having beaten the high score, simply trying to destroy every vehicle on the map. The fact that you could trigger an explosion at any time (because, apparently, your vehicle is packed with explosives) made things all the more satisfying. The next iteration of the series, Burnout: Revenge, didn't have quite as much flair in the crash modes - they we more challenging to simply complete the first time, and it lost the addictive replay value of the first one.

Of course, there was always the old standby of the Worms Series, in which small invertebrates hurl a variety of explosives at each other, destroying the world around them in the process. I lived to engineer the largest explosions I could, and do the most damage to the most worms in the process - on more than one occasion, I have cackled with glee as I launch a banana bomb at my own troops, watching the chaos unfold. Oh the times I had with mad cows and old ladies.

But all of those have gone by the wayside in recent years, as newer yet less destructive games have taken root. Long has my appetite for destruction lingered dormant (while I still have my older systems, I'm too lazy to set them up), waiting for a new title to make an explosive entrance.

And then, lo and behold, Red Faction: Guerrilla debuted on the Xbox 360. We must have played the demo for hours, just to find new and interesting ways to annihilate our surroundings. A game that features realistic building materials, and gives you a sledgehammer to destroy them with? Pure awesome. Watching buildings collapse in real time, and being able to knock them over into each other? How could this get any better?

After playing for a couple hours, we realized this game features everything that drew us in to all the above games. The open sandbox environment encourages destruction on a wide scale, which is what we craved in GTA. When we load a car with a dozen remote mines and drive it into an enemy base and detonate it, we're reliving Burnout's crash mode. Taking structural supports out of large buildings with a variety of interesting and highly explopsive weapons and watching them slowly topple is the very spirit of the Worms series.

This truly is the Epitome of destructive gaming. I can only dream of what games will use this engine for in the future.

A side note here: when I played Mass Effect, the most entertaining thing I found in that game was driving around on the Moon's surface. I drove around for hours (no, really) doing donuts with the full Earth hanging over me, trying to get a glimpse fo the original lunar lander in the distance (I still believe it's out there, somewhere). Now, in Red Faction, I get to drive around on Mars! Awesome.

To sum it all up, Red Faction: Guerrilla is the best choice for satisfying one's appetite for desctruction. If you crave explosions, do not hesitate - this game is perfect for you.