Saturday!
The Assassin’s Creed games have a fairly interesting conceit to remove the guilt that might, conceivably, come from a game in which you are a guy who goes around stabbing people in various historical contexts: *YOU* aren’t stabbing people. You’re someone in the modern era reading the embedded memories of your ancestors (hidden in your own DNA).
So when you jump off of a building to stab someone right in the upper historical context, *YOU* aren’t doing this. You’re re-living the memory of your ancestor doing this.
Of course, you’re still pushing the button and you, the player, are still in charge of keeping the “memories” of the modern-day character “in sync” with “what happened” way back when… which means that, yeah, you’re still the guy running around stabling people in the historical context.
But it’s possible to disassociate from that… and, moreover, the first few games go out of their way to argue that the people you are stabbing are bad. They are Templars, after all. Or the hand-picked front line of the Templars. Whenever you start to feel bad about the guys who merely have a job guarding the gate on the far end of the compound, the early games were good enough to demonstrate that these guys were jerks to the various peasants. Or commoners. Or they were Redcoats being mean to the colonists. Okay. That can make a guy feel better.
And, besides, this is a memory. This already happened.
Well, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag
So they do something interesting this time: they have the Assassins come out and pretty much explicitly disavow that the protagonist is one of them. They complain about the number of people he kills. They complain about the chaos he leaves in his wake. They tell him “you have no right to wear that outfit”.
So we can keep the narrative that the Assassins are… kinda… the good…ish… guys in the eternal conflict between the Assassins and the Templars.
Because if you have two teams shrugging and saying “hey, you can’t make an omelette”, you might find yourself finding excuses to play a game where you can at least be fighting against the bad guys (even if you aren’t exactly good enough to be on the same team as the good guys).
But I found it interesting that they felt they had to go there for this one.
So… what are you playing?
(Picture is “Untitled” by our very own Will Truman. Used with permission.)
When I was in fifth or sixth grade, I remember being impressed by a game I played during a weekly trip to the school computer lab, but I never learned the title. Unlike most edutainment games, which were thinly-veiled math or reading drills, this one has more of an adventure format that involved walking around and collecting items. Not Sierra quality, but more interesting than First Man on the Moon.
I’ve made a few failed attempts over the years to figure out what it was, but this weekend I finally figured it out. It was Think Quick, by The Learning Company, which I probably should have figured out by its graphical similarity to Robot Odyssey.
I gave the main quest a quick playthrough. It’s aimed at younger age bracket, so while neither as difficult or as interesting as Robot Odyssey, or as much fun as I remembered thinking it would be (you don’t actually use the items to solve puzzles) it holds up surprisingly well for 80s edutainment.
There’s also a second, “expert” quest which seems promising given that the first one had some nontrivial puzzles. 6/10, would wax nostalgic again.
Also about halfway through the first Witcher for the first time. There are elements of a good game here, but it needs streamlining. I’m spending way too much time running around and dealing with inventory management.Report
The Witcher is one of those games that needs, for lack of a better word, ‘segmenting’ better. Past a certain point, it seems to get bogged down with way too many things to do, and you find yourself running around all over the place.
I mean, I appreciate the size, but the areas should be a bit more self-contained. I’ve got to suggest that games shouldn’t give simple ‘deliver a letter’ quests that require players to walk ten minutes, and then ten minutes back. Oh, so exciting.
And *because* the game does stuff like that, you sort just wander around trying to collect everything in one area before going somewhere else, but now you’re wasting even *more* time.
It’s just…gah. What an annoying game design.
I say this all from a half-remembered attempt to play the game a few years ago, though.Report
Is there fast travel?
One of the things that the Batman city-sized games did to deal with this issue was to make travel positively fun and gorgeous. You’re flying. It’s downright pleasant to get from this part of the map to that one. (And, of course, if needs be you can fast travel.)Report
You *eventually* get access to fast travel about halfway through the game, but it’s of the form ‘Make your way to the teleporter and then teleport to another teleporter’.
I.e., it lets you skip the map areas *between* the current map and the map you want to go to. Of course, it’s countered by the fact that the map exits are usually easy to get to (Being the roads.) whereas the teleporters are often off in some random location.
And on top of that, the real problem is that the maps are *huge* and have large barriers in them, and often are crowded. So just getting to an exit/teleporter takes five minutes.
You know how in most RPGs, when you run around outside buildings, and then go into them, the proportions don’t match? Like from the outside, a house seems to be about 25 feet long, but you get inside, and it’s clearly about 75?
I’m actually somewhat convinced they didn’t do that on the Witcher. Oh, time to exit the town, let me run literally four city blocks.Report