DOMESTIC CATS – RED DEAD REDEMPTION II
More reasons why cats get a bad rap in videogames. In Rockstar’s open-world
Western, you can do pretty much anything and everything, including petting
the in-game dogs you find wuffling their way around the towns and farms. Or
sometimes, squatting and having a poo. ‘Who’s a good boy then? Eww!’ But
cats? You can praise them, and they sometimes purr. You can shoo them away.
But mostly, super-realistically, they just ignore you completely and go about the
business of licking their arses, or chasing nothing. The bloody cougars in the
game though, that’s a different story. Both vicious and unbelievably annoying,
cougars are just waiting to take you down.
ALVINA – DARK SOULS
Alvina, or to give her full name, Alvina Of The Darkroot World, is a more sinister
take on the Cheshire Cat from Alice In Wonderland, who sits in a castle window
in an area of Darkroot Garden in the original Dark Souls. Although Alvina lookslike
the game’s aggressive Great Felines that have a horrible tendency to pounce
on you, she talks and allows you to join the Forest Hunter Covenant. This is
apparently a “clan of hunters who track down defilers of forest graves” and if you
join, she then gifts you some useful stuff for helping her protect the forest. If you
don’t agree to join her, mind you, she calls you “pernicious and gross”. Rude. Cats
have never been known for their manners, though.
MAE – NIGHT IN THE WOODS
In this likeable indie adventure game from a few
years ago, you play as a young female cat called Mae,
who has dropped out of college and returned to her
depressed former mining-town home to largely just
hang out with her other zoomorphic mates and drink
and be a bit downbeat about the state of things. Oh,
and run, jump and explore in a sort of platforming
kind of way, and ultimately uncover a dark secret in
the woods and mine nearby. Cutesey cartoon visuals
straight out of a children’s book belie the genuinely
mature themes the game tackles, and it’s worth
playing if only for that reason. To be fair, the fact that
Mae is a cat is absolutely irrelevant to anything at all.
She doesn’t even chase string.EGYPTIAN CATS –
ASSASSIN’S CREED ORIGINS
These cool cats are much more player-friendly. Which
is as it should be in a game set in Ancient Egypt, of
course, where they pretty much invented the idea of
having these fuzzy little morons live in your house,
eat all your food and act like they, not you, are paying
the mortgage. To be fair, back then cats did a very
useful job of killing disease-carrying rodents and
protecting the home from snakes, and so Egyptians
came to revere and even worship them. They even
used to mummify their cats to be buried with them to
take to the afterlife. Although, imagine having made
your journey to the next world, and when you got
there you had to deal with a bunch of undead cats.e110 THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE
extra