Ok, Iäm at it again. Let's do this.
Thursday October 10th: Thursday in Swedish? Torsdag. As in Thor's day. You know, that God of Thunder with the hammer and... That doesn't really have a brother named Loki. In Norse mythology, Thor is the son of Oden and "the earth" (the debate is still going if this is supposed to be Frigg) and Loki is the son of two giants named Farbaute (his father) and Laufey (his mother). There, now I've gotten to correct something out of the Marvel Universe, too =). Anywho.... Here's the reason why I stopped my last post. Thursday I play video games. What video game came out Thursday? Beyond: Two Souls. And I got to play it. So I thought I'd give you my opinion on the game. Here goes:
Beyond; Two Souls is a game about a girl and her.... ghost.... spirit... whatever. We get to follow her, in flashbacks, along an non-chronological narrative. We get to see her as a CIA trainee, as a bum, as an active agent, as a little girl, as a teenager... as a lab rat.... First of all, i have to say, this game looks GORGEOUS. It is as gorgeous today as Heavy Rain looked when it came, if you take my meaning. It's well-acted, Ellen Page as Jodie is good, the girl doing the voice-acting (and mo-cap? don't know...) for little Jodie is GREAT. Willem Dafoe is always good. The others are good. It's all goood.... The story segments are mostly good as well, some of them drag a little, some are.... weird.... some are highly emotional, some feels kinda... throw-away, but not many. Then there are the game mechanics, and the story segments and how they are structured are part of that, and this is where my big beef with this game come in. The controls, just to start with the not-so-negative, are fine. They're not what the avid gamer is used to, sometimes they are a little counter-intuitive, sometimes they are not so clear, but these are things you get used to, mostly. Thinking about it, this game feels a little... point-and-click-y... and sometimes you cant see where you're supposed to click because the thing you're supposed to click isn't marked well, or the marker is white against a white/bright background, or it's out of view. I also have this little thing about Aiden, the ghost-spirit-thingy. He's used far to little. That would have been a great, interesting game-mechanic if only one remembered to use him more. They could have played around far more with that and given us gamers a far more interesting set-up. And then, there is that THING that bothers me about this game. And that game is the lack of suspense. This is the problem of a non-linear game like this. The game starts at the END. We KNOW that whatever we do to Jodie, whatever life throws at her, she'll make it. We KNOW this because if she hadn't, the game wouldn't have started. Granted, you could make the point that it's not supposed to be that kind of game, that it's not about the goal and all that. And it isn't as much the prologue that bothers me (being at the far end of the time axis), it more the decision of it being non-linear after that. You can start with the end. There are other games (and movies) that do, but if you're going to show it as a flashback, start at the beginning and follow it back to the prologue chronologically. Otherwise it just gets confusing and annoying. I kept asking myself "where am i in the story now? Is this before or after event X? Why are we here?" Sure, that might be the point. But at the same time, that makes me feel disconnected to Jodie. Why should I care about event Y when I don't know about event X? And why should I care about event X when I've already gone through event Y? In the end, what drove me to go on was curiosity about Aiden and little girl Jodie, who sometimes shone through in adult Jodie as well. I'm glad I did finish the game in the end, but still felt a sense of disconnect to Jodie. Other loose ends got tied up neatly, and i guess Jodie's loose ends got tied up to, I just didn't care as much as I wanted to. And that kind-of sums up this whole game; not as much as I WANTED TO, I wanted to love this game, and i did, just not as much as I wanted to. I wanted to love and care about Jodie and what happened to her, and i did, just not as much as i wanted to. I wanted to care about and be interested in Aiden, and I did. Just not as much as I wanted to. And the events and characters around her, too..... Don't take me wrong, this is still a really good game. The graphics are gorgeous, the acting is good, the game mechanics are ok, and when the writing, graphics, voice-acting, music and mood come together in the right way, it's fantastic. And for the most part, it does. Just not as much a as I WANTED IT TO.......
Next time Onee-chan comes visiting, I'll have her play the game in chronological order, and see if it gets even better....
I'm going to stop this weeks Project Backlog here, with ha little shout out to one of my fav internet celebrities about this game: Fraser, you stopped playing this on VideoGamesAwsome just short of some of the best segments in the game. Please, if only for yourself, play it through....
Showing posts with label game review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label game review. Show all posts
Sunday, October 13, 2013
Sunday, December 23, 2012
Assassin's Creed III is aws.... ehum.... well....
Ok, first of all: I haven't played it all, yet. I've only played about 15 hours. So I'm not 1000% sure, but here are my first impressions:
So, starting out, I was exited, but only kinda. Revolutionary war, not really my thing. I have a hard time caring about it, maybe because I'm not american. I do care about the people that it affected, be they English French or native american, but the war as such wasn't all that interesting, at least not when I read about it in school. That being said, I can confirm that my expectations for this game were.... not low, per se, but not high either.
Ok, so enter Desmond Miles, the descendant of the Assassins who apparently is the only one who can do this. Exactly what "this" is, I don't really know. Wield the piece of Eden? Go into the Animus to "visit" with the ancestors? Why can't his father William Miles do that? Give Desmond a break? I don't know. Maybe it's Desmond's mothers line. So why can't she do it? Can you only visit someone of your own gender? That has to be it....
Desmond and his little crew of helpers..... and his father.... set up shop in a temple of some sort when Desmond..... yeah.... collapses again.... (sung that song last time around). Their solution to his collapse? Plug him into the Animus! Brilliant, then he can be collapsed and save the world at the same time. This time around he wakes up again, though, and is able to communicate with Rebecca, Shaun and Bill. Even gets out of the animus some times.
The temple seems to be harboring old roman gods. Juno to be exact. She starts sending Desmond, and Shaun, e-mails. Creepy. Desmond & Co also go out for a little adventure during the hours I've played, up until and halfway through sequence 6. Climbing skyscrapers in NYC on the outside? Much scarier than climbing the towers in Florence.....
Well, that's Desmond. What about Connor, the real assassin of the game? Let's head back to the Animus and and the 18th century! And there he is, Connor! I mean... Haytham.... Haytam Kenway! Who the HELL is Haytam Kenway???? What did I miss? Ok, I guess I'll just... listen to..... *voice actor-fangirl mode activated!* That guy that Haytham is talking to... or rather the other way around ... sounds so familiar ..... OMG! It's Gideon Emery! *squeals like a 12-year-old girl.* Moving on.... *deep breath*. So, on to a ship we go and leave tho old world behind for a New World! And I still don't know who this guy I'm playing with is. After some thinking I decide that it must be Connors father of mentor or something, taking the Creed to the new world.
After having spent about 3 hours with Haytham and his mates in Boston, trying out the new controls and menus and stuff (this is basically a tutorial), the games biggest WTF-moment happens. I don't expect them to top that. It's so wierd, even Desmond comments it with a WTF? And when the game itself does that, it's something done right.
Next push. Boston have been left behind for the great frontier and the home of the woman Haytham met and helped. And got help from. And.... laid...... Kaniethí:io (the woman) now have a boy! The boy Ratonhnhaké:ton runs around the forest and plays with his friends and.... wait..... I'm STILL waiting to meet Connor..... I don't care about this boy....... well, I do care a little, because I'm 90% sure this IS Connor. What I don't care about is his frolicking in the woods with his friends playing hide-and-seek. It's not fun, it's not cute, it's tedious and boring. Fast-forwarding a few years and we get a lesson in hunting. Ok, nice, probably something we could do on the frontier. Still... no assassins.....But here we get an up in pacing. It doesn't take all that long until Ratonhnhaké:ton gets whisked away from the frontier and to Davenport and Achilles Davenport, who is house-sitting for the Assassins. Ratonhnhaké:ton actually gets in the door more by his own stubbornness than anything else. It is now, almost 6 hours into the game, that he adopts the name Connor.
After this, not much happens. I do some exploring, repeat a couple of missions to try and figure out what the heck i'm doing. .. Spend a few minutes on a ship, which at first is nice, but swiftly gets confusing and repetitive I send out a convoy for trading (this games equivalent to the last few games opening shops, I guess), but that is a bust, the convoy is attacked and i don't get what i should do about it. Should I do anything? Is the convoy lost forever? I don't get it, it's still there, in the trading menu, but all it says is "attacked", and nothing more. If it is lost, shouldn't it disappear after a while? Like when the next sequence starts? It doesn't, and I sit there staring at it in the interface, getting more and more frustrated. Oh, well.... lets go and.... and..... That's another thing about this game. i'm not sure what to do sometimes And that's a problem. Should I move on in the story? Should I do some exploring? Where do I buy new shots for my pistol, arrows for my bow, snares, poison darts, can i buy medicine to help me survive encounters with Templars? Are the Redcoats templars? Or are they just.... Redcoats? Where am I supposed to be going? Why am I supposed to go there? And why can I climb and travel the canopy? Ok, sure I get that, but why can I only do so for a few meters? then I'm forced back to the ground and to find another tree where I can start on the next leg through the frontier to my goal.
After about 15 hours of gameplay, I have come to a handful of conclusions. 1: I love Gideon Emery's voice. (Please, please, please, never stop with the voice acting, Gideon.) 2: The main game is unintuitive and tedious. 3: The parts where you are Desmond, out of the animus and in the present, feels more urgent and things seems to be moving, unlike the very slow pace of what I've played of the main game. In the other games it felt like the other way around, or, at it's best, both parts felt just as important and urgent as the other. 4: Connor. He seems... boring... and, what is almost worse: bored. Maybe this is a design flaw, maybe it's the voice acting, but this guy doesn't seem to care. The kid and teenage Connor was a little more engaging, but.....
Connor did not inspire this Yaoi fan girl to any fan fiction, which is BAD. So far, Assassin's Creed has inspired fan fiction about Altair + 1(own invention), Ezio + 1(own invention), Desmond + Shaun (actually not until Revelations, for some reason), I'm wondering who Bills secret male lover is, Haytham Kenway inspired me, but Connor..... Hell, Achilles Davenport is more interesting, as a man and as a yaoi ispiration. Hah, even the crazy butcher is more interesting.
I will not give up on this game, but for now, that's only because I want to know what's going on with Desmond and the secret temple and all that. Hopefully Connor and his story will pick up, and get more interesting We'll see, maybe I can revise this once I've finished the game. Until then.....
So, starting out, I was exited, but only kinda. Revolutionary war, not really my thing. I have a hard time caring about it, maybe because I'm not american. I do care about the people that it affected, be they English French or native american, but the war as such wasn't all that interesting, at least not when I read about it in school. That being said, I can confirm that my expectations for this game were.... not low, per se, but not high either.
Ok, so enter Desmond Miles, the descendant of the Assassins who apparently is the only one who can do this. Exactly what "this" is, I don't really know. Wield the piece of Eden? Go into the Animus to "visit" with the ancestors? Why can't his father William Miles do that? Give Desmond a break? I don't know. Maybe it's Desmond's mothers line. So why can't she do it? Can you only visit someone of your own gender? That has to be it....
Desmond and his little crew of helpers..... and his father.... set up shop in a temple of some sort when Desmond..... yeah.... collapses again.... (sung that song last time around). Their solution to his collapse? Plug him into the Animus! Brilliant, then he can be collapsed and save the world at the same time. This time around he wakes up again, though, and is able to communicate with Rebecca, Shaun and Bill. Even gets out of the animus some times.
The temple seems to be harboring old roman gods. Juno to be exact. She starts sending Desmond, and Shaun, e-mails. Creepy. Desmond & Co also go out for a little adventure during the hours I've played, up until and halfway through sequence 6. Climbing skyscrapers in NYC on the outside? Much scarier than climbing the towers in Florence.....
Well, that's Desmond. What about Connor, the real assassin of the game? Let's head back to the Animus and and the 18th century! And there he is, Connor! I mean... Haytham.... Haytam Kenway! Who the HELL is Haytam Kenway???? What did I miss? Ok, I guess I'll just... listen to..... *voice actor-fangirl mode activated!* That guy that Haytham is talking to... or rather the other way around ... sounds so familiar ..... OMG! It's Gideon Emery! *squeals like a 12-year-old girl.* Moving on.... *deep breath*. So, on to a ship we go and leave tho old world behind for a New World! And I still don't know who this guy I'm playing with is. After some thinking I decide that it must be Connors father of mentor or something, taking the Creed to the new world.
After having spent about 3 hours with Haytham and his mates in Boston, trying out the new controls and menus and stuff (this is basically a tutorial), the games biggest WTF-moment happens. I don't expect them to top that. It's so wierd, even Desmond comments it with a WTF? And when the game itself does that, it's something done right.
Next push. Boston have been left behind for the great frontier and the home of the woman Haytham met and helped. And got help from. And.... laid...... Kaniethí:io (the woman) now have a boy! The boy Ratonhnhaké:ton runs around the forest and plays with his friends and.... wait..... I'm STILL waiting to meet Connor..... I don't care about this boy....... well, I do care a little, because I'm 90% sure this IS Connor. What I don't care about is his frolicking in the woods with his friends playing hide-and-seek. It's not fun, it's not cute, it's tedious and boring. Fast-forwarding a few years and we get a lesson in hunting. Ok, nice, probably something we could do on the frontier. Still... no assassins.....But here we get an up in pacing. It doesn't take all that long until Ratonhnhaké:ton gets whisked away from the frontier and to Davenport and Achilles Davenport, who is house-sitting for the Assassins. Ratonhnhaké:ton actually gets in the door more by his own stubbornness than anything else. It is now, almost 6 hours into the game, that he adopts the name Connor.
After this, not much happens. I do some exploring, repeat a couple of missions to try and figure out what the heck i'm doing. .. Spend a few minutes on a ship, which at first is nice, but swiftly gets confusing and repetitive I send out a convoy for trading (this games equivalent to the last few games opening shops, I guess), but that is a bust, the convoy is attacked and i don't get what i should do about it. Should I do anything? Is the convoy lost forever? I don't get it, it's still there, in the trading menu, but all it says is "attacked", and nothing more. If it is lost, shouldn't it disappear after a while? Like when the next sequence starts? It doesn't, and I sit there staring at it in the interface, getting more and more frustrated. Oh, well.... lets go and.... and..... That's another thing about this game. i'm not sure what to do sometimes And that's a problem. Should I move on in the story? Should I do some exploring? Where do I buy new shots for my pistol, arrows for my bow, snares, poison darts, can i buy medicine to help me survive encounters with Templars? Are the Redcoats templars? Or are they just.... Redcoats? Where am I supposed to be going? Why am I supposed to go there? And why can I climb and travel the canopy? Ok, sure I get that, but why can I only do so for a few meters? then I'm forced back to the ground and to find another tree where I can start on the next leg through the frontier to my goal.
After about 15 hours of gameplay, I have come to a handful of conclusions. 1: I love Gideon Emery's voice. (Please, please, please, never stop with the voice acting, Gideon.) 2: The main game is unintuitive and tedious. 3: The parts where you are Desmond, out of the animus and in the present, feels more urgent and things seems to be moving, unlike the very slow pace of what I've played of the main game. In the other games it felt like the other way around, or, at it's best, both parts felt just as important and urgent as the other. 4: Connor. He seems... boring... and, what is almost worse: bored. Maybe this is a design flaw, maybe it's the voice acting, but this guy doesn't seem to care. The kid and teenage Connor was a little more engaging, but.....
Connor did not inspire this Yaoi fan girl to any fan fiction, which is BAD. So far, Assassin's Creed has inspired fan fiction about Altair + 1(own invention), Ezio + 1(own invention), Desmond + Shaun (actually not until Revelations, for some reason), I'm wondering who Bills secret male lover is, Haytham Kenway inspired me, but Connor..... Hell, Achilles Davenport is more interesting, as a man and as a yaoi ispiration. Hah, even the crazy butcher is more interesting.
I will not give up on this game, but for now, that's only because I want to know what's going on with Desmond and the secret temple and all that. Hopefully Connor and his story will pick up, and get more interesting We'll see, maybe I can revise this once I've finished the game. Until then.....
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