Saturday!

There have been multiple reviews of Watch Dogs so far and, yeah, reviews are (to put it gently) “Mixed”.

It seems that there were a lot of “bullshots” (which is a downright bait and switch) and that the gameplay is just *this* close to being good. I know that I find the driving, for example, to not be as tight/smooth as in the Grand Theft Autos. I certainly am not far enough into the game to recommend it or not, but there are a lot of little charming things about the game.

For example: as you walk around the city, you get a little display of each person on the street and a little blurb about them. “Jaybird: owns 4 cats. Maribou: recently got Master’s Degree.” and so on. Now, you may ask, “What do you do with this information? When you find someone who downloads hentai or is behind on child payments, can you blackmail or threaten them or something?”

Well… no. All the displays really do is demonstrate that you live in a universe with an illusion of privacy and nobody has any and they don’t even know it. So the whole “what do you do with this information?” issue really doesn’t stick in my craw the way I’ve seen it stick in others. It becomes part of the background noise of the universe you’re in.

At this point, I’m actually mostly reminded of Shenmue. You’ve got this epic story where you need to avenge your relative’s death… but first you have these chess puzzles to master, and poker games to play, and there’s a shell game that bamboozles me whenever I get to level 2. I *WANT* to get to the main story where I can better protect my sister and my nephew but there’s so much awesome *STUFF* to do.

It makes me wish that, for example, the driving were tighter.

So… what are you playing?