X-Com: Enemy Unknown (2012)
StC: 0
A tutorial. In a warehouse. Crates. Barrels. Space boxes. Mysteriously tarped-over bundles (other crates). Like one pallet in the whole place.
The enemy isn’t unknown, X-Com. It’s you.
Fez (2012)
StC: 0
Couldn’t leave well enough alone, eh Fez? A game about finding magical puzzle cubes, 6-sided multi-dimensional figures and a helpful prismatic companion, and you nevertheless had to go ahead and just say ‘A CRATE?’ for your obvious button-pressing puzzle.
The StC scoring committee revokes your score gives you a zero for unmiscrateable puzzle hints.
A question was recently brought up. Both Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite start with the player character going through a small box of stuff. Do these boxes qualify as crates?
Without a doubt any wooden box the player will root around in for goodies IS a crate, and all of the perfect scores that Bioshock Infinite (2013) has received are merely a result of the Video Game Review Industrial Payola Crateplex triumphing over scientific fact.
Start to Crate Community Callout: In the interest of holding Science above Ken Levine’s Randian Will to Power and Positive Reviews, we here at the Start to Crate team would like to officially solicit some well-composed and objective screenshots of the introductory crates of all three Bioshock titles, preferably in jaw-dropping HD.
Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2012)
StC: -5 (Introcrate Penalty)
Criterion’s latest (and currently an Origin freebie if you plunked down for SimCity), Need for Speed: Most Wanted, thumbs its nose at the Start to Crate staff by not only delivering a picturesque view of the crate-filled harbor district in the game’s handsome intro cinematic (under the studio’s title card, no less!), but then also making it impossible to re-view said video (to snap our scientifically rigorous screenshots) without re-installing the game.
We’ve got your number, Criterion.
Our recent Far Crate 3 entry has led to a dramatic dispute in the Start to Crate Ceremonial Staff Room vis-a-vis the appropriate StC score, perhaps necessitating a score in the negative numbers.
After all, the game ‘starts’ well before the amateur tattoo gun makes its first appearance, through seemingly neverending cutscenes and on-rails, insta-fail tutorial missions. With that in mind, we turn this debate over to you, eagle-eyed StC followers!
The first person to submit the earliest appearance of a crate in Far Cry 3 wins a prize, as well as the rank of Lieutenant in the Junior Start to Crate Commandos™.
You heard us… get cratin’!
(Altercration animation created from gameplay footage thanks to FroodyHoop.)
Far Cry 3 (2012)
StC: 0
Shortly after the credits roll, and an agonizingly long time before you get to take control of your character, your new friend Dennis (Dabnis? Guinness?) gives you a quick, dirty, and incredibly out-of-fashion tribal tattoo while what we’re assuming is an ammunition case (with hopefully enough bullets to remove the horrid ‘tatau’) lays tantalizingly close, but desperately out of reach.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD (2012)
StC: 1
Picture it: clean-cut, well-scrubbed boys in post-war America affix wheels to milk crates and tool around their neighborhoods like the Littlest Street Gang.
Fast forward a half-century and a clean-cut, well-scrubbed boy from Carlsbad, California makes an enormous fortune doing pretty much the same thing.
That boy’s name is Tony Hawk, and he pays homage to the humble origins of his craft with a first level (and subsequent eight levels) so heavily strewn with crates, boxes, and cases, it should probably just be called Tony Hawk’s Pro Crater HD.
Dark Souls (2011)
StC: 41
After teasing us by opening in a jail cell (why do so many RPGs begin in jail cells?) that contains a vase, a wooden pail, and a grain sack, Dark Souls finally rewards the patient observer with a room artfully arranged with clay pots (the thinking man’s crate), just dying to be smashed open by you and your new friend the Asylum Demon.
Max Payne 3 (2012)
StC: 65 seconds
Max Payne 3 leaps into contention for Start to Crate’s game of the year with an extraordinary showing of 65 seconds from when the player assumes control of Max and chases his foes into some kind of janitor’s closet, which contains a nearly-appropriate quantity and arrangement of cardboard boxes.
I say nearly-appropriate because in my experience, curatorial staff only order supplies as they run out and tend not to keep a surplus above one box. The likelylihood of-
Oh. Hellooooo ladies. Sorry about the mess.
