Sunday Summaries 24/01/2016: Assassin's Creed Syndicate

It feels like things are back to normal again. January always leaves me feeling a little... anxious? In an expectant way. It's the start of a new year, and it feels like the equivalent of waking up at 8am and slowly psyching oneself awake to start what we hope will be an eventful day. At least, usually. January started off with a bang for me this year, with the stack of PS4 games I'm both excited and hesitant to blast my way through way too quickly, and a whole lot of TV and internet happenings that are keeping my attention elsewhere. It's a testament to our "on demand" entertainment culture that we no longer have to wait for January - which is usually so packed with completely inessential material that "Fuck You, It's January!" became a thing - to be over before we're once again neck-deep in whatever interests us most. It's only about this time every year that I get used to writing down a new number for the date, which could be a metaphor for... something or other. I guess I'm still a little sleepy, huh.

I'm happy to announce that Heroes Reborn has gone away for good after its finale a few nights ago. I recapped the whole season on my Tumblr, which I'll spare you all from, but suffice it to say its cancellation a week ago was a mercy killing. Heroes has always had trouble course-correcting after its promising initial season, which wasn't half bad even in retrospect with everything that followed, but it's definitely not going to find a place on TV now with Marvel kicking ass with its various "Cinematic Universe" superhero TV shows. Heroes stopped having a monopoly over that contemplative, character-driven, semi-serious superhero show niche years ago, and with its dodgy CGI and LOST-lite "don't show, don't tell" storytelling it's no longer in a position to compete with its contemporaries. Fortunately, we all have more TV than we know what to do with, so I won't mourn its passing. Lord knows there's about four or five brand new shows from last year I still want to check out, let alone the new seasons of It's Always Sunny and The Venture Bros.

New Games!

Of course, the big new game release this week is the long-awaited next project from auteur (you can be an auteur after one game, right?) Jonathan Blow: The Witness. It doesn't take a whiz to know that this will be the number one game this week, if not month, and I'm sure it'll make a big splash when it releases this Tuesday. There'll be streams for days as it works through folk's systems: PS4, iOS and PC so far, though possibly more to come. I know I'll have to spend a penny or three thousand on it eventually, though I'll be paying close attention to the Quick Look and Brad's review later this week. Even so, I can't imagine how much of a relief it must be for Blow right now to finally get it out and release that pressure after many years of waiting and squirming. I'm glad it didn't take a leak from some filthy hacker for it to finally see light at last.

Meanwhile, I may have to see a man about a horse because Final Fantasy Explorers also arrives this week and it's triggering my wanderlust something fierce. It's another 3DS RPG I'll probably not get around to for years - I did just buy a copy of Mario & Luigi: Dream Team though, so I'm slowly catching up - but it sounds like an interesting departure for the series. A riff on Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles with some Monster Hunter thrown in, complete with a multiplayer mode that I'll probably never use. As long as they properly balance the game's difficulty for single-player, I'll be as happy as a moogle.

Elsewhere, LEGO Marvel's Avengers is another licensed TT LEGO game - the second to feature Marvel characters - which I'll toss on a pile with all the others and never get around to them, though I did try to keep up for a little while until I stopped being able to rent the things for free. They seem ideal for playing alongside folk who don't generally play video games, is the impression I get from a lot of people in the industry who advocate them. Interceptor/3D Realms's Bombshell might be this year's Devil's Third, or they could've defied all odds and actually made something competent out of the shell of a Duke Nukem game that has since added a lady wearing nothing but leather straps and a giant cyborg arm; and also Gemini: Heroes Reborn, which... nuh-uh. Don't ask me to go back. I don't care that Patrick "YouTwuber" Klepek seems to think it's actually kind of OK. I won't - I can't - return to the Heroes universe. Noooope.

Wiki!

Lots to report this week on the wiki front. Through an uncharacteristic amount of effort, I managed to spruce up a total of sixteen PC Engine game pages while listening to Griffin, Travis and Justin McElroy pitch Oscar-hopeful coyote dad movies, the WeHateMovies boys rail against the apparently awful and lazy Adam Sandler picture Pixels (who knew?) and GBEast make terrible salad dressing puns that may have been too much for even me.

I'll no doubt talk about these games in more detail with a "Wiki Project: Legend of the PC Engine '90" feature once I'm done with its 1990 library (only thirty-odd pages to go!) but here's a smattering of pages that needed to be created from scratch: Sindibad: Chitei No Daimakyuu is a standard 16-bit JRPG with Sinbad as its lead; Kore ga Pro Yakyuu '90 and Power League III are both baseball game sequels (I added their predecessors too); and Shogi Shodan Icchokusen which is, as you might assume, a shogi game though one that features Momotaro for some reason. No, not the Mortal Kombat centaur.

More noteworthy pages, which is say pages for games people may have heard of, include the venerable strategic puzzle game Puzznic, which had a blank page for some reason despite being released on everything back in the day; the enhanced Xevious "remake", Xevious: Fardraut Saga; Barbarbian-'em-up and Volgarr the Viking-inspiration Rastan Saga II, which is better known in the US for its Genesis port; and Namco's top-down shooter/action-adventure game Legend of Valkyrie/Valkyrie no Densetsu, which plays similarly to Pocky & Rocky with Zelda-style adventure game elements. Valkyrie, of course, would continue to pop up in cameo roles in later Namco games, not least of which was her recent turn in Project X Zone.

What I did neglect to do this time was finish off those three pages I mentioned last week - Mega Twins, Pang and UN Squadron - that were featured in the ST-urday finale I wrote last year, so hopefully I won't forget this week. Watch this become a running goof.

Assassin's Creed Syndicate

I said almost all I wanted to in yesterday's tear down of the Assassin's Creed franchise and the newest entry, Assassin's Creed Syndicate, in particular, though it reads as particularly negative considering this is a game that I've been completely glued to for days. I'd like to establish a few things about that article first before moving onto a significant positive that Syndicate brings to the cloak-and-dagger table.

I am an Assassin's Creed fan. I wouldn't write something as elaborate as the above if I wasn't so invested in the series and in wanting it to be better. It disappoints me to see the same flaws, or different flaws that come about because of new mechanics, because it suggests that the series has no interest in evolving. There's something to be said for a game series reaching a certain "plateau of acceptability" and continue producing games using that model year after year with different stories and settings. I don't think I'd be able to keep up, but then it wouldn't matter so much; there's so few overarching story threads connecting the series now that you could feasibly take a year or two off and not miss a beat. If Ubisoft wants Assassin's Creed to be that, a regular series guaranteed to make its production costs back year after year as a financial safety net for more riskier projects like Grow Home and whatever bear-riding simulator Michel Ancel is making next, I wouldn't have an issue. It's every occasion where I think to myself "Why is this part still broken?" or "Why did they bring this back?" that makes me wince and wonder if these games aren't the product of some creative somnambulance.

The one big positive addition besides the zipline that Assassin's Creed Syndicate offers is how it builds the game's story and mechanics around having two protagonists. As twins who were trained in an identical way, the two are effectively identical to control. Where they differ is in their motives and their specializations.

Evie is displayed as the calculating and scholarly sort, who wishes nothing more than to use her relative anonymity in London to pursue the precursor artifact hidden somewhere within its boroughs. This, we discover, is to continue her father's work into researching the Pieces of Eden, following the footsteps of a man she idolized. True to her nature as a ghost picking through the notes and research and puzzle pieces underneath the noses of the Templars that control them, her expertise lies in the stealthier side of things. She has the unique ability to turn all but invisible when stationary, greatly reducing her visibility, and she's best used for side-missions that require you avoid detection or alarms.

Jacob cares less about artifacts and intrigue, and intends to unite London's underworld to make a very pointed effort to drive out the corrupt Templars that presently run the metropolis from its nobles to its working class. His story missions all involve directly sabotaging the plans of whatever Templar underling he has in his sights next, and often argues with his sister about choosing the overt route over the subtle one. Unlike Evie, he has no love for his father, and used the assassin skills he was taught to make life difficult for the secretive order to satisfy his own sense of justice. Naturally, his focus is in direct melee combat, giving him a few unique skills with which to weather and deal damage. The most interesting is his advanced quick-draw, which will instantly headshot anyone who points a gun at him before they can pull the trigger. I tend to use him for side-missions where it's clear I'll need to do a lot of fighting, or anything noisy in general.

Though the twins have their built-in specializations, it's really down to the player to choose how both will evolve. There's a suite of skills you can learn that'll greatly increase how tolerable the game's driving sections are, for example - one that increases the damage you can dish out when ramming others off the road, another that decreases the damage your cart will take when opponents try the same tactic on you, and one that will boost the cart's overall speed. With these abilities, races and other cart-related missions become a whole lot easier, but you might not care enough about them to spend valuable building points on obtaining those skills. However, since I play most often as Evie, I gave all the fighting and driving skills to Jacob and switched over to him whenever a side-mission required either. That meant I could continue developing Evie the way I wanted - prioritizing stealth, procuring cash and items, and survival skills - without tossing points towards something I'd only need very occasionally. This system also allows you to play the game simultaneously as a silent shadow whose targets never see them coming and as a showy bruiser who regularly beats down multiple opponents at once, all with the simple press of a button in the pause menu.

I feel like Evie was added to the game because fans were clamoring for more female heroes after Liberation's Aveline de Grandpré and didn't take Assassin's Creed Unity's "women are hard to animate" song and dance with good humor, though Ubisoft were also probably a little reluctant to deal with the certain faction of video game enthusiasts in their market demographic who would refuse to play as a woman and even less so a woman with a prominent male love interest like Evie has in the swarthy Mr. Henry Green. Instead, they hedged their bets with two protagonists: a male and a female. Even if that's the case and not just Ubisoft marketing team speculation I just created, having two protagonists turned out to be a much bigger revelation for the series as it creates this opportunity for versatility without sacrificing the min-maxing aspect that goes into creating either a perfect silent assassin or a perfect combative assassin.

I just felt like I had to give AC: Syndicate some kudos for that, and am chagrined that I forgot to do so with the above "On the Anvil" article. It's not all bad! Really!