Assassin's Creed

This blog is now exclusively about video games. If I ever post anything about another topic I give you my permission to finish reading the post, forward it to a friend and then write an encouraging comment (you can also do this even if I do write about video games)

So I finally got round to playing Assassin's Creed on the Xbox, and yeah I know it is 3 years old, but I'm going to write about it anyway.

I'll start with the good, and the good is that this game has made me obsessed with stealth games. I think this moment dawned on me when, in game, I was stalking an interrogation target, running across the rooftops of Jerusalem. When my target took a turn into a secluded alleyway I jumped down from two storeys, landed in front of him, scared the shit out of him and I imagine my character saying something similar to:

"SHIT YEAH MUTHAFUCKA!!!! STEALTH GAMEPLAY"

Anyway, stealth gameplay is awesome.

Now onto the bad, the problem with the stealth gameplay in Assassin's Creed is that while it is brilliant, it is almost completely optional. You are given assassination targets and these guys are often quite well protected in castles, compounds, fortresses etc. But unfortunately because of the combat system stealth is often harder than just walking into the fortress in question pulling out your sword and declaring

"HO HO HO! I AM AN ASSASSIN, HAS ANYONE SEEN THIS MAN! I WANT TO KILL HIM!"

But if you want to play the game properly, you always try and stealth into places, the issue is that in a stealth game that should be the only option or if you want to walk in it should be a hell of a lot harder than it is. This is partly because 90% of the time your Assassination targets, try to fight you. Which in some cases is okay, but at other times is absolutely ridiculous.

At one point the game wants you to Assassinate an elderly doctor because he has been doing some questionable experiments. Anyway so there I was, sneaking into his hospital guards surronding him as they expected an Assassination. I walked up to him ready to stealh the shit out of that guy, when a guard noticed me and raised the alarm.

That was fair enough, except that even when 20 guards were all trying to fight me this elderly doctor pulled out a sword, he obviously carries around with him when he is doctoring, and decided that his best place was on the frontline fighting a trained killer.

This sort of thing really hits home when for the last three missions you actually just fight hordes, upon hordes of enemies. No stealth involved at all, you don't actually get the option, for some reason your cunning, underhand Assassin character has decided he is now honourable and challenges people to fights.

And these fights, while intresting at first quickly become boring as pigshit. Mainly because the badguys evidently went to that school of bad guy fighting where they teach you to stand around in an intimidating circle and take turns fighting you one at a time.

This mean it becomes almost irrelevant how many enemies you are fighting as you are just fighting them one at a time and the process becomes tedious. But it stops being tedious and just insultingly easy when you unlock the move 'counter' which is a one hit kill move, so you spend combat tapping 'x' at enemies.

But that being said it is an incentive to avoid combat and be stealthy, so maybe they did it on purpose.

I know I sound whingey but I swear this is the last complaint I have about this game, and it is a complaint I have about lots of video games...here it goes:

please stop with the arbitary timelines.

There I said it, if you're unsure what I mean I'll explain. At one point in the game, some dude wants you to collect his flags he lost in exchange for information. Why he wants a trained killer to collect the flags is beyond me, and why I don't just beat him up until he tells me is also a mystery. What's even more confusing is how he managed to lose his flags all over the rooftops of Jeruselam. But I was willing to overlook all this until right there in the corner of my screen was a clock counting down from 3 minutes.

Why in the goodname of god, did this guy only give me 3 minutes to collect his flags? What happens after that, do they explode? does he lose interest in the flags? no I'll tell you what happens, I go back to him, with all the flags and he says, sorry you were too slow, try again?

Why would I try again, I have all your flags here, in my pockets, fuck you, just take them.

Even when they tried to explain these time limits it seemed a bit odd. As in one instance where I had five minutes to kill someone because after that my informant was leaving town. Seriously, five minutes? unless I kill this guy? maybe give me a little bit longer. But again, I realise that was just to add an extra element to gameplay so I did let this one slide...that is until the unthinkable happened.

So ther I am innocent little me, having killed this guy's target, rushing back to him my timer runs out I figure oh well, surely it doesn't matter, I've already killed the guy. Nup. The informant said,

"Sorry, you were too slow, could you do it again?"

Kill the guy again? Because I was too slow? sure that makes sense, also you said you'd leave town after five minutes you douche bag, why are you still here.

Okay, I think that is my rage about this game gone, but overall I did throughly enjoy this game and I'm getting the sequel tomorrow. The sequel apparently improves on everything I have just bitched about, so I'm looking forward to it.

Family Guy and KFC

so here I am at 1 am in the morning, I may go to sleep soon, it's hard to tell. Anyway, I've decided to be almost semi regular with my blogging during the holidays just to stimulate my brain.

Also in other news if you type "toothpaste" and "trying" into google my blog comes up on the first page, but I'm not here to brag about my place on search engines. I'm here to talk about why you, like me, should hate family guy.



For a large part of my life I haven't minded family guy, in fact I may have watched it occasionally and maybe even partaken in the occasional lol. But the other day it dawned on me what an abomination that show is, I was driving home from the coast with a bunch of people when my obese, semi-friend, with a beard leaned over to me, chunks of KFC still in his teeth from lunch, sweat dripping from his brow caused by the exhaustion of being alive and quoted a family guy line at me.

This line wasn't actually a joke, it was a lead in to one of those random cut scenes they do. And this is when it hit me, family guy is shit. The jokes are just random, and completely interchangeable and fat people who eat KFC quote it and say things like "giggity-giggity" and do that Peter laugh. That's not comedy, that's you quoting something that wasn't funny in the first place.

And this leads in to a sort of person who can really annoy me, I think we all know who I'm talking about, the guy who doesn't tell jokes they quote jokes from TV shows and movies, not every once in a while like a normal person, but that is all they ever do. They are also probably eating KFC and having a beard.

So in conclusion don't watch family guy and if you do, don't quote it at me and don't grow a beard or be obese.

Oh and I haven't capitalised family guy throughout this on purpose.

The Beach

The Beach, does anyone actually enjoy it?

This is the question that floated through my sun affected brain as I got dumped into the sand by a wave for the 14th time.

Here I am getting sunburnt, sand is going places it shouldn't be, I'm expected to take off my shirt and show off my pale, scrawny body and to top it all off all these beach 'regulars' can spot me as a tourist from a mile away and are giving me dirty looks.

These damned tanned, ripped local dudes are the worst part though, they seem to be straight out of some stupid teen movie, they give me this look that seems to say:

"You're not building a sandcastle but if you were, I'd knock it over then call you a dweeb"

But damnit I'm not a dweeb, I'm just a man, a sunburnt, sunburnt man.

And that is really my main problem here, normally I like the beach but I got badly burnt a week ago and it is still bothering me, so fuck you beach.

Also on a different topic, if you are actually reading this you should comment because then I go higher up the list in search engines. :D