B.C.

WHAT IS IT?

Five hunters, all carrying wooden spears, cautiously approach a T-Rex. In videogame terms, this is known as a “bad idea." When they toss their spears, the Rex rises up. It's pissed, and someone’s going to get hurt badly. And we’re sad to say that the red stuff spurting out of the dinosaur's wounded belly and spraying from the hunter’s wrecked corpse crunched between its jagged teeth isn’t raspberry jam. Peter Molyneux, the brains behind such PC classics as Populous and Black & White, calls B.C. “the goriest game ever.” After watching hunters get torn apart, smushed, and otherwise divested of their lives in the most painful ways imaginable, we’d have to admit he may be right. B.C. makes no bones about life being cheap and death being free and all-too-easy. Call it the first third-person “existence is suffering” simulator for Xbox.

Players control a tribe, one member at a time, during their 100-mile journey to reach a safe haven. Along the way, you discover fire, build settlements and temples, invent new tools, craft weapons, and play havoc with the game’s environments. In this fantastical world, early humans coexist with dinosaurs, so brains are the only way brawn can be beaten. Use fire to wipe out a stand of fruit trees, and the animals eating the fruit will flee, as will the carnivores that feed on them; block off a water supply by building a wall around it, and watch all the animals head out in search of another drinking spot.

WHY SHOULD WE CARE?

All the game’s creatures, from the fearsome T-Rex down to the lowliest rat, will be influenced by hunger and thirst. In addition, every animal in the game, save for one quite notable exception, has been plucked directly from the fossil record. "Real creatures were as exciting and as ferocious as anything we could come up with here,” says B.C.'s Development Director Matt Chilton, “especially the underwater ones.” Oh, and that notable exception? According to Lead Designer Ben Cousins, it's something completely different. And quite horrible. “Along the way,” Cousins told us, “they’ll meet another animal that we’re not talking about. What we’re doing is we’re kind of thinking about a hypothetical prehistoric past where man was directly competing with another type of intelligent creature.” It’s kill or be killed when B.C. ships this fall.