Ever since the Bonanza Brothers sneaked onto my Megadrive in the early nineties, bought on budget rather than at release in the mistaken belief that a game in which the main characters look like dustbins couldn’t be great, I have been waiting for a perfect heist game. Bonanza Brothers was great, but some twenty years later and counting, it’s about time it was bettered. With Payday 2 rolling out this week maybe now is the finally the time for this to happen.
Theft occupies a curious place in the moral pantheon of video games in that it isn’t really considered wrong to steal in most games. Theft will get you into trouble in many games, no doubt about that, but for the majority of games, whether you’re playing as Mario in the Mushroom Kingdom, the Dragonborn in Skyrim, or the hero of a point and click adventure it is a given that if something is there, in the game world, and you can pick it up, you’re generally entitled, even encouraged to have it. In Skyrim maybe the guards will be called if you get caught, but you don’t see anybody getting thrown out on the street because you pinched the money in the chest to pay their rent, or starving to death because you munched all the food in their home like a cross between Beowulf and the Very Hungry Caterpillar.
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