All screens courtesy of THQ
50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is an absurd, bombastic game that always felt more or less like a child's power fantasy about their favorite, invincible rapper and his rough and tumble crew. It turns out that's not a completely inaccurate take.GamesRadar, relaying information from its sister publication Edge, breaks down how 50 Cent enlisted the help of his then seven-year-old son to determine whether the most recent build of the game was up to snuff. It was, it turns out, save for one important exclusion: Helicopters."Our guy explained it was a third-person shooter and didn't have helicopters in," production director Ian Flatt told Edge, "but 50 Cent's son said, 'No, I want helicopters,' and 50 Cent turned around and said, 'You heard him. Make a level with helicopters in.'"I'll assume Flatt was paraphrasing, since ending a sentence with "in" is an extremely British way of speaking and Fifty is from Queens, but nevertheless the story explains a lot about why that game is the way that it is. 50 Cent in Blood on the Sand is the kind of invulnerable, effortless antihero you're likely to find in the imagination of any 7-to-14 year old boy—he's always collected, always disinterested, an expert at everything and, of course, irresistible to the ladies.Because of this, Blood on the Sand is a bizarrely fascinating game. There's this unexpected naivete to it that pushes beyond the scope of fulfillment fantasy and into the plotless, Saturday-morning realm of pretend play, where you can't hurt me because I have an invisible force field that reflects all your bullets back at you, and my magic flute summons my pet dragon and Gandalf and all the Rescue Rangers and Goku.Assuming the game's adolescent atmosphere was all Fifty's influence had always made Blood on the Sand feel like a weird, juvenile expression of late-2000s masculinity, and it definitely still is that, but knowing that it's also partly a child's heroic interpretation of their dad kinda makes it endearing. Well, as endearing as a game about killing hundreds of people over unpaid concert fees can be.