shenstra

@kerikxi said:

What's horrifying is the realization it took Squeenix this long, this many years and this many games, before it occurred to them hey guys, maybe we should ask some other people what they think about our game before we finish it, maybe even listen to them. It's not very surprising that Japanese game development has been left in the dust when they've lived in a bubble for so long.

Yet that very same approach is what has made Apple one of the most successful companies in the world. Focus testing, excessive reliance on and overly eager acceptance of feedback, these are the things that make for boringly familiar games. If you ask people what they want, they'll say they want more of the last awesome thing they had. What they actually want is a new awesome thing. The trick is finding out what the next awesome thing should be.

The problem (or I should say: a major problem) with Japanese game design lately has been that they don't innovate enough. They constantly fall back in the same old routine, which seems to appeal to the Japanese market, but not so much to the rest of the world. If there's one thing they shouldn't do, it's listening to focus groups or consumer feedback. That would only further hamper any kind of progress.

Three Stories Unfolding At Once; or how I learned to stop nitpicking and love Assassin's Creed: Revelations

I just finished Assassin's Creed: Revelations. A real roller coaster of mixed feelings. I thought I'd share my final (deliciously spoilerific) views on this game with you guys. I'll be discussing the story in previous games and Revelations, including optional/hidden content. Do not read if you haven't finished all four games yet.

A quick summary of my experience with the series

At the start of the summer of 2010, I finally decided to get with the HD crowd and bought myself a PS3. Naturally, I picked up a copy of Assassin's Creed. My initial impressions were rather positive, to say the least. I may at some point have grunted "uh uh uh" whilst stabbing dudes to death. My excitement quickly turned into boredom as I was sent to do the same four quests over and over and over again.

I moved on to more exciting games, but Assassin's Creed had planted its seed somewhere deep in my brain and a few months later I just had to go back. I played through the whole game in just a few sittings, fully embracing the tedium. The very same day, I started playing Assassin's Creed II. As most of you know, a much better game in nearly every conceivable way. I eagerly awaited the release of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, which I also voraciously devoured and adored. I even ended up playing a fair bit of AssBro multiplayer. And that brings us to this week, when Assassin's Creed: Revelations came out.

So, what happened in the first three games again?

Right, sometimes it's easy to forget all the crazy stuff that happens in Assassin's Creed games. You spend hours stabbing dudes and then *BLAM* supernatural artifacts, a pre-historic über race, genetic memory, all that jazz.

Assassin's Creed, the first one, kept its cards close to its chest. It's quite open about Desmond Miles living in the present (or the near-future) and reliving his ancestor's memories through the Animus. But other than that, we don't learn much about Desmond's story. We meet Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad, a rather young assassin who doesn't play by the rules and has his toys taken away by his master, Al Mualim. He has to stab nine dudes, templars it turns out, to regain his master's favors and the aforementioned toys. In the end, it turns out Al Mualim is a templar himself. He had Altaïr assassinate the other templar leaders so he could keep the Apple of Eden, a strange artifact with immense power, for himself. Altaïr kills Al Mualim and takes The Apple, which reveals the locations of many similar artifacts all over the world. This is the information that Abstergo (i.e. the modern day templars) wanted from Desmond. They now intend to kill him, but luckily Lucy saves him. Also, someone wrote invisible crazy talk on the wall of your Abstergo cell. To summarize: we learn a fair bit about the mythology of the Assassin's Creed world (about genetic memory, the Animus, assassins, templars, artifacts), a tiny bit about Desmond (he's descended form assassins) and a bit about Altaïr (just what happened to him during his twenties, roughly).

Assassin's Creed 2 takes a radically different approach to storytelling. It's a much less game-y game which tells a more interesting story right from the start. Desmond is now hanging out with his fellow 'assassins'. They have their own Animus. They're sending Desmond into the memories of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, an Italian nobleman/playboy who knows nothing about his assassin heritage, much like Desmond in the first game. We are there as Ezio is born. We are there as he beds Cristina Vespucci. We are there as he sees his father and brothers being executed, which leads to him training to be an actual assassin and a final confrontation with Rodrigo Borgia. After this final confrontation, Ezio acts as a conduit for Those Who Came Before, an ancient yet advanced race that was wiped out before recorded history, so they can communicate with Desmond. They inform Desmond that the world is about to end, again. Also, Subject 16, the previous victim of Abstergo, left bits of code behind in the Animus which reveal much more of the mythology of the Assassin's Creed world. We learn very little about Desmond this time around. On the other hand, we learn a lot more about Ezio than we ever did about Altaïr. We see him grow from a boy into a man, an assassin.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood continues where Assassin's Creed 2 ended, using much the same approach, albeit with more enticing gameplay. While the focus is more on the gameplay than in Assassin's Creed 2, there is still plenty of story told. We now witness the downfall of Monteriggioni and Ezio's successful attempt to rebuild a brotherhood, this time in Rome. After once again battling the Borgias, Ezio hides the Apple of Eden beneath the Colosseum. Desmond and friends travel to the Colosseum in modern time to retrieve the Apple, which takes over Desmond's body and makes him stab Lucy and then paralysis him. This game reveals quite a lot about the Assassin's Creed mythology. It also tells a lot about a decent, if not terribly relevant, chunk of Ezio's life. Once again, the modern day story is least touched upon.

And what's the deal with Assassin's Creed: Revelations?

Okay, so we finally get to the good part. Or at least the part that I wanted to talk about. Assassin's Creed: Revelations takes after Brotherhood. It covers yet another chunk of Ezio's life and improves on the previous game's gameplay in subtle, yet entertaining ways. The problem with this approach is that it doesn't impress. We've already had two games about Ezio and while I find him an interesting character, it's a third game about the same guy! And the gameplay in Brotherhood was so great, it didn't really need much improving. Why should anyone care about Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, other than "it's more of the same, so if you like that, that's cool"?

Though I wasn't too impressed with Revelations when I first started playing it, I ended up really enjoying it because of the stories it tells. Although the entire game takes place inside Desmond's head, as he relives Ezio's memories, Revelations manages to tell three stories.

Ezio's story takes up most of the time, which is a bit of a shame. I really like Ezio. Seriously. He's an awesome dude. However, after two games of all Ezio all the time, I didn't really need more Ezio. His story felt the least essential. Having said that, it was a good story with all new, interesting characters. Even Ezio can be seen as a new character, as he's now a weary old man with a different look at life.

Through five special artifacts, called Masyaf keys, Ezio relives some of Altaïr's memories. There are only five six such sequences, but they all feel important. Through these five six sequences, we see the rest of Altaïr's life. We only ever heard about his early adulthood. Apparently, things didn't go so well with Altaïr since we last saw him. He was accused of being a traitor for killing Al Mualim. He was kicked out of the order. He had two sons with Maria and the younger son was killed by Abbas, the new leader of the assassins, in an attempt to get Altaïr to hand over the Apple of Eden. As he was handing the Apple over, his wife was murdered. Decades later, as an old, old man, he returned to Masyaf to right those wrongs and put the order back on the right path. He ended up taking the Apple with him into a secret vault under Masyaf, where he died. This story was easily the most rewarding of the three. Altaïr always had the potential to be an amazing character, but the first game didn't do much with that potential. Revelations makes up for that in spades. Altaïr comes alive. He's one of the more sympathetic characters I remember from video games. He's always tried to do the right thing and ended up an outcast for his noble attempts. At the end of his life, everything comes together, which evokes both a sense of exhilaration and one of sadness, because nothing can undo the bad things that happened to him.

And finally, there's the Desmond story. We learn that Desmond is in a coma, that he is still hooked up to an Animus and that his mind seems to be falling apart. He meets Subject 16, who always seemed like an inevitable bad guy to me. As Ezio finds animus fragments in IstanbulConstantinople Kostantiniyye, separate Desmond memories open up. These first person segments play very differently from regular ass Assassin's Creed and I didn't exactly enjoy the gameplay. However, they do, at long last, tell Desmond's story. I believe we'd heard him talk about "the farm" before, but now we learn that he did actually grow up in an assassin community. He had to go through special training. He was being prepared to be a proper assassin, but he ran off to live a normal life. Instead, he was captured by Abstergo and had his inner assassin drawn out, unintentionally, through repeated, prolonged Animus sessions. While Desmond's story isn't particularly interesting, it's nice to finally hear it.

Learning to love Assassin's Creed: Revelations

So there you have it, stories. That's what I love about Revelations. The series has always been good at fleshing out the mythology, the world. But the only character whose story they ever told properly was Ezio. Desmond was a mystery and Altaïr was a flat character presumably designed so players can project themselves on him. Revelations tells us a bit more about Ezio, something I didn't really need, but I'll take it. Relevations tell us a bit about Desmond, which I really needed. No, really. Yet another game without any Desmond backstory would have been frustrating to me. And Revelations tells us a whole lot about Altaïr, which is friggin' awesome. I'd almost want the next game to be all about Altaïr once more, that's how great the Altaïr stuff in Revelations is.

Besides telling awesome stories, Revelations also works well within the franchise. It brings (somewhat unnecessary) closure to the story of Ezio and it brings (much needed) close to the story of Altaïr. At the same time, it delves far enough into Desmond's story, as well as the Assassin's Creed mythology, to set up future games.

Seems to me like some of you guys are looking for rational explanations because djinn and magic aren't real. This is Uncharted, AKA Indiana Jones: The Video Game. There may actually be djinn in that jar. "Djinn aren't real", you say? Neither are cursed mummies or magical tree sap that turns you blue and immortal; and the Ark of the Covenant doesn't actually have the magical power to kill Nazis, if it even exists. In the Uncharted/Indiana Jones universe, these things exist. The bad guys needed Drake's ring because it's magic. There's something about that ring that makes the decoder work.

Basically, all these things fall under the heading of "suspension of disbelief". At some point in most works of fiction, you have to just go with it. Accept that certain things are such and others are so. We accept that Mario has superhuman jumping abilities and grows to double his normal size when he eats mushrooms. Why not just accept that there's something special about Drake's ring that makes it so the bad guys need it? Why not accept that there are actually djinn in the jar?

Having said that, when Drake hallucinates, he sees bad guys whose heads burst aflame and have the ability to teleport. If you had to come up with a name for those guys, you could do much worse than to call them "djinn". The story about the ancient people summoning djinn and burying them in a jar could be interpreted as an allegory for the discovery of a dangerous hallucinogen and a subsequent attempt to get rid of it. In Arabic folklore, djinn are said to live in a parallel universe. By using the hallucinogen on people, you can make them see djinn-like beings. In other words: you can summon djinn. After discovering the danger the hallucinogen poses, they would want to rid themselves of it. What better way than to bury it (and with it, the djinn) in a special jar?

Both the literal and the allegorical interpretation of the djinn story require some willingness to suspend your disbelief. The former more so than the latter, but either way you shouldn't ever expect a fictional work to spell out every detail in an entirely logical manner. Amy Hennig and cohorts seem to have a certain style of writing that works at different levels of suspension of disbelief. They leave much unsaid, but provide just enough information so that you can choose to either suspend your disbelief, or look for a slightly more rational explanation. Perhaps that's why people sometimes have trouble willingly suspending their disbelief when it comes to Uncharted. The games offer so many instances and levels of rationalization, that people start to expect more and more, up to the point where all fantasy elements are completely removed.

I found the red guys pretty challenging on normal (note: I'm not that good at shooty shooty games). One particular battle (around two fountains, after fighting through the market) had me almost rage quitting because the enemies nearly eviscerated me before I could get my hands on the RPG on the left side, which had enough ammo to take out one-and-a-half to two of them. Then you can move on counter-clockwise to get a grenade launcher to take out the rest. The thing is, when there's a bunch of red guys, they can take you out very quickly and once one or two of them start teleporting around, you're pretty much dead. Or at least I am. I have to take them out hard and fast. Two RPGs/grenades in the face can kill them before they start teleporting.

As for quitting the game, that seems like a huge waste. The blue guys showed up a bit sooner than the red guys (as did the gray guys in UDF I think), but if you find them too much of a hassle to deal with, you can drop the difficulty to (very) easy and breeze through the end of the game. The Uncharted games are all good enough to warrant finishing them, even if you have to do so at a lower difficulty.

Let me start off by saying I love Uncharted 3. It's easily my game of the year so far and I don't see any other game beating it (except maybe AssBro: Revelations, but that's a big maybe).

Having said that, I feel like the series has become a slave to the set pieces. Those are the parts everyone talked about with the second game. Whenever they showed, talked about or teased Uncharted 3, they used set pieces. Yes, the set pieces are spectacular, but it seems like they spent so much time perfecting those that they didn't get around to much else. They drop in a lot of potentially interesting plot lines that never go anywhere. The story jerks around to get from set piece to set piece as quickly as possible.

Some things that feel rushed or wasted: Nathan's history (there are hints, but nothing ever comes of them). What's with that secret society, is it really just Marlowe (with Talbot and other henchmen)? Speaking of Talbot, is he a wizard?! Chloe and Cutter are on board, more so than Elena, until Cutter breaks his legs and they both suddenly disappear without further mention. The French connection (pardon the pun) literally comes out of nowhere, and goes nowhere. What happened exactly between Elena and Nathan (granted, I like that they don't spell this one out completely).

I just get the feeling that they wrote an awesome story, then looked for ways to insert a bunch of cool set pieces, and then had to cut out parts of the actual story to make room for those set pieces.

On top of that, most of the set pieces feel very familiar. Mostly because they are very similar to ones from Uncharted 2, sometimes because they're ripped straight from blockbuster movies. The one exception, to me, was the cruise ship. To be fair, it's difficult to create spectacular action in a completely novel manner, and I wouldn't mind as much if the game didn't feel like it revolved completely around those set pieces.

To end on a positive note, there are also a couple of very specific things they did much better this time around. This game's "blue guys" weren't as offensive as those in the previous installments. I never minded their paranormal nature in Uncharted 1 and 2, but found them a cheap trick to change up the gameplay (for the worse). The flame guys in Uncharted 3, real or not, are still kind of assholes. Some of those encounters really pushed me to the brink of rage-quitting. Luckily, they don't show up as much as in the previous games.

I also really really really really really like how they handled the final boss(es). In Uncharted 1, the final fight was about destroying cover whilst being assaulted by an overpowered gun and a bunch of mooks. In Uncharted 2, the final fight was about taking down a bullet sponge with a shottie (I think, or an AK?) who throws bags of grenades. This time around, the bad guys are dealt with either by the game itself (through cutscenes) or in hand-to-hand combat with a very light QTE coating. This felt much more appropriate for the kind of game Uncharted is.

YOU WERE THE #500 PERSON TO FINISH THIS SET.

Woo! I like round numbers!

It's so painful to see these things play out. On the one hand, people are calling the IGN review a fluff piece, while on the other the Eurogamer review is lambasted for being overly critical.

The problem, I feel, is that most people expect game reviews to be mostly objective valuations of the quality of a game, preferably with a score attached to it that is supposed to summarize the text in a single number on some arbitrary scale which can be used to compare the objective quality of various games.

Jeff has previously expressed a sentiment that game reviews should be mostly objective, discussing the technical soundness of the product, much like car reviews. While that aspect of a review will remain important as long as games ship with bugs ranging from minor distractions to glitches that render games completely unplayable (i.e. forever), I feel it is just as important for reviews to reflect the reviewer's subjective opinion.

In order for the industry to grow (mature, not expand), it has to become acceptable to have opinions about games. If a game is shoddily made, reviews should probably mention that at some point. But other than that, bring on the personal opinions, especially the dissenting ones. Consumers can then read multiple reviews, learn how different people feel about the same game and decide for themselves whether they might want to draw their wallet. By reading a lot of reviews by the same reviewer, readers can get a sense of said reviewer's taste and gain more from their reviews even if they rarely agree. And finally, perhaps, just perhaps, the industry could stop obsessing over review scores. (Yeah, right...)

@ryanwho said:

Death penalty is banned in most states. But I guess until its banned everywhere, we're all collectively pieces of shit.

Which is fine. I use those dumbass teens who rioted in London as a litmus test for every other person in the UK.

While Prodstep's comment is rather inflammatory generalization, it is entirely reasonable to apply said generalization to all Americans rather than just people living in murdering states. Sure, your state may have gotten rid of the death penalty, but your country allows it. Instead of taking issue with being included in the group who gets called crazy, you should take issue with people being called crazy, regardless of which state they live in. Surely you wouldn't be as offended if I said your country is crazy for having the death penalty.

@Karkarov said:

Is the justice system perfect? No. But he was found guilty by 12 of his peers from his community, his case was appealed, and the request for clemency was clearly given very serious consideration. If he was innocent his death was a tragedy, but at the same time I have to trust that in all the years of his execution delays and appeals multiple times multiple people all chosen for their office by officials we elected all came to the same decision every time. That decision was that there was not a reasonable reason to doubt his guilt. This is how the system works and while it is flawed it is the best we have right now and I personally can not imagine any form of justice system that has ever existed that is not equally flawed if not more so.

If anything remember one other fact, it is far more likely an guilty man is able to be found innocent by whatever means than it is a legitimately innocent man is found guilty.

I despise the death penalty, but my main issue with the US legal system (I'm not American by the way, so it doesn't really concern me personally) is that he was found guilty by a group of twelve somewhat random people. If I were to ever be tried for allegedly committing a crime, I wouldn't want to be judged by a "group of my peers". Firstly, because a group of random people wouldn't actually be my peers. Secondly, because even if they were my peers, they would still be amateurs. I'd much rather be judged by a judge, someone who's devoted his life to understanding and applying the law. Someone who has a better-than-average chance of properly determining whether or not I am guilty.

Once you've been found guilty by a group of amateurs, you are no longer presumed innocent. No matter how innocent you actually are, to the law you are guilty. Various appeals aren't designed to let you prove your innocence, but to show serious mistakes were made in finding you guilty.

@turmionaattori said:

Betrayal at Krondor because old school RPGs are awesome.

Agreed. Betrayal at Krondor is a bit like Daggerfall, but better in every imaginable way. It has that old school RPG thing going on, it has interesting combat, you can play a friggin' lute at an inn to earn money and, like all good RPGs, it's based on a series of fantasy novels. It's even available on GOG.

I'm in, about to play my first game!