Odd Thoughts

In 2011, Ubisoft Montreal released yet another Assassin's game in a truly commendable effort to keep up with their ridiculous annual release schedule. I can't imagine the kind of crunch that went into releasing an Assassin's Creed game every year from 2009 (Assassin's Creed 2) to 2015 (Assassin's Creed Unity). Revelations continues the story of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, taking the player from Italy to Anatolia. The main chunk of the story occurs in Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), conquered capital of the fallen Byzantine Empire and center of the Ottoman Empire's centuries-long reign over Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) and at various times huge portions of the eastern Mediterranean. The game also features brief forays into Cappadocia, where the player explores a creatively imagined cave city which was one of my favorite locations in the game so far, as well as Masyaf Castle at the very beginning and very end of the game. Players of the original game wil...

Released just a year after Assassin's Creed 2, in 2010, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood has been aptly described as Assassin's Creed 2.5 ever since it came out. While that's a fair moniker, keep in mind that this is still a full fledged game. Where I spent 37 hours in Assassin's Creed 2, I spent 31 in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, having finished the main stories and all of the side missions in each game. Brotherhood continues the story of Ezio Auditore Da Firenze, the charismatic assassin who spent the last game avenging the execution of his father and brothers, dismantling a Templar conspiracy, and retrieving the Apple of Eden. At the end of the last game Ezio made a fateful decision not to kill Rodrigo Borgia, the head Templar and also Pope Alexander VI, only besting him physically before taking the apple and entering an ancient temple. This game begins where the last game left off, with Ezio reeling from the odd visions presented to him in the temple and ...

Going back into the archives of large gaming journalism sites, it's evident that I wasn't the only one who wasn't quite impressed by the original Assassin's Creed. Between its clunky controls, repetitive mission structure, and uninspiring main character, it's quite the surprise that the game sold so well. That being said, I pointed out the game left a solid base to iterate upon. And in 2009, Ubisoft Montreal delivered a sequel that improved upon it's precursor in every way imaginable. Assassins Creed 2 follows the life of Ezio Auditore from his birth all the way until about his forties, when the game leaves off, to be picked up by the later titles Brotherhood and Revelations. From minute one the game is more cinematic, tone-conscious, and interesting than virtually anything its 2007 ancestor had to offer. In contrast to the first game's Third Crusade setting, AC 2 places the player in the midst of Renaissance Italy and its warring states, families, and...

I'm several hours into the original Assassin's Creed, and I'm wondering what all the fuss is about. The controls are clunky, the graphics are dated (okay, maybe I can't blame them for that), it's full of annoying little glitches (I encountered a game-breaking glitch in the tutorial and had to restart), and I'm just bored. The side missions are so repetitive that I'm only finishing the ones that I absolutely have to. I like the parkour - even today it feels like something different than anything I've seen before - and obviously informed games like Infamous, Prototype, and Horizon. I've had to traverse the Kingdom a couple times, and completely don't understand why it exists, and I find myself bored to tears during most of the cutscenes. There are some interesting little philosophical tidbits here and there, but overall it feels a bit overbaked. And then, well, I don't know. Something changed. I found that, despite myself, I was enjoying ...

When I finished writing my review on Mort(e), Robert Repino's book about the ant and animal revolution, I lamented lightly that it seemed to lack a certain amount of focus. The book moves swiftly from animal stories before the change through the war against humanity and to the after-war period in which Mort(e) overthrows the Queen. It was good, and even felt well paced, I just missed some of that war period which only had a portion of the book. Culdesac , a novella which someone aptly described as Repino's Book 1.5 in the series (followed by D'Arc, book 2 and the final book so far, which I'll be reading next) addresses that hole in my heart. And coming in at about 110 pages, it took me less than a day to read. Culdesac follows the titular character, a liberated Bobcat who Captains a group of special forces cats who call themselves the Red Sphinx. The Red Sphinx are an irregular group of assassins and soldiers who perform the most dangerous missions in advance of t...

Mort(e)  sounds like one of the most surrealist books you'll ever read. "Former housecat turned war hero, Mort(e) is famous for taking on the most dangerous missions and fighting the dreaded human bio-weapon EMSAH". Did someone slip acid into my catnip? But 30 pages later, I'm all in. Author Robert Repino does a great job, erm, humanizing his characters and establishing his world so as to make everything feel perfectly reasonable. A vengeful ant queen uses chemical signals to cause some kind of awakening in the world's creatures so that they can kill every human alive and build a world based on new principles of animal equality? Sure, I'll buy it. For the first half or so of the book, it reads like a bit of a radical take on animal rights and the way humans treat animals. The story also follows a sort of cliche war story arc, an alienated soldier trying to return home and reconnect with what he's lost. It's chock full of interesting characters an...

So I've finally played Need For Speed Payback (2017). An author's note, I played it on PS4. And got it at Game Stop. Support your brick and mortar game stores people. Anyways, the last Need for Speed I played all the way through was Most Wanted (2005), which I played the shit out of on GameCube.  I played bits and pieces of Hot Pursuit (2010) and Most Wanted (2012), but neither impressed me enough to want to keep going. Like all gamers, sometimes I just put games down, sometimes I play them all the way through. It doesn't necessarily reflect a 1:1 correlation of quality, because to be clear I don't think Payback was a great  game, I just found I had the motivation to play all the way through. Let's jump into it. In Need For Speed Payback you play Tyler Morgan, an inexplicably incredibly white dude who apparently grew up in the Vegas barrio. Sorry, Silver Rock barrio. Silver Rock is Need for Speed's version of Las Vegas, which is a small and fairly indistinc...