We're now at the end of May, or the consumMaytion, which means another week of May Maturity to wrap up before we hit June and the chaos of E3 and my own "Alternative to E3" blog series. I'm still putting the pieces together for what that might look like, but I'm fairly sure it'll involve more recent games. I have some ideas, but EA's early conference extending the event's length to almost a week is making me consider my options very carefully.

For now, I want to talk about the Far Cry 5 announcement some. It's a hot button topic this week, but I think what often gets left out the conversation is how Ubisoft Montreal and Ubisoft itself are foreign developers (well, foreign to the US) and so are many of the people following their games. It's sometimes easy to forget because American culture is so ingrained across the entire globe, to the point where it's usually one of the most dominant forms of culture in any given country after its own and that of its nearest neighbors. It's a large part of the reason why there are so many English-speakers in foreign countries too; it's certainly not all the UK's doing, our previous imperial aspirations notwithstanding. However, increasingly of late, it's become harder and harder for a foreigner to understand America's isolationist and anti-intellectual (in the sense they no longer trust scientists, journalists or doctors) "heartland" population, of the midwest and the south and those from wide-open states you could draw in five seconds with a ruler. No denigration meant to the many rational and good-natured folk from those regions, many of whom I've befriended on here and elsewhere, but the tide's been turning even before this contentious period of American political history. It's been fascinating (and a little terrifying) to watch from a distance, even if we in Europe aren't exactly immune to waves of populism and resentment for "the other".

I think ultimately, while France and Canada are perhaps in the safest positions of all western civilizations right now, this take on Montanan cults and xenophobia doesn't just reflect what's going on in America but the western world in general. I imagine they picked Montana specifically because it offers the sort of natural diversity and contoured geography to make a Far Cry game work, but any messages they impart with this story - which they're going to have to be super careful about, it probably goes without saying - might well represent in a microcosm what's happening everywhere else also, and how the empathetic majority and the vulnerable minorities will need to band together in this time to ensure we don't lose our way completely. Maybe that message will get diluted just a smidge as the player gets busy turning a bison's nutsack into a new wallet or leads black bears into enemy bible study camps, but Ubisoft has the world's attention right now and they've got nine months to make good on it.

While I've got your attention, however, how about we look at the week's offerings?

• The Top Shelf is starting to wind down its first "season", approaching the end of the PS2's lifespan and my own attachment to the console due to the exciting next generation prospects of the Xbox 360 and PS3. There was some pretty brutal culling this week, as barely a sliver of the highlighted games managed to survive to the second round and beyond. Still, the last two entries for Round One promise to be doozies.
• For the Indie Game of the Week this week, I was The Man Who Simulates Goats. That would be Goat Simulator, the jokey physics game that lets you make your own fun in an impressively large map of nonsense to play with. It's the purest example of a sandbox (though I still prefer "toybox") I've seen in a while, since there's very little direction to be found and the game seems far happier if you just take the time to explore and poke at its boundaries. I might come back to it occasionally to see what else it has in store, but it's not one of those games that demands you hunker down for long stretches in order to immerse yourself fully in its lore and complex game systems. You're really just a goat who butts and licks things, and occasionally licks butts.
• May Maturity continues with this chagrined Outro to Jagged Alliance 2, on which I had to throw in the towel after it undid all my work with a sudden overnight raid on the towns I'd painstakingly liberated - one of my buttons are games that don't respect the player's time, and that's the most egregious example I've seen in a long while. We then have the Intro and Outro to the sci-fi adventures of Commander Boston Low and his team of angsty astronauts in LucasArts's fine but unremarkable graphic adventure game The Dig. Finally, I embarked on another panoramic dungeon crawl with DreamForge's Menzoberranzan; the Intro to what might also be called "Drizzt: The Video Game" sees us tackle the only Forgotten Realms game on my list.

That's going to do it for this edition of the All-New Saturday Summaries. Next time, we'll have the last of the May Maturity updates, some news on what my E3 blogging will look like, and possibly a check in on the SNES wiki work I've once again resumed. Also: I'll be back to playing and reporting on (mostly) new games again! I just have to figure out if I want Tales of Zestiria, Final Fantasy XV or Trails of Cold Steel to be my first big Summer JRPG. At any rate, look forward to more Summery summaries in the weeks to come.