AC: Brotherhood - the first hour

Of all the big franchises out there that I'm proud to be a fan of, Assassin's Creed is the one that I have the strangest relationship with.  There's only 3 games in the series, but the pattern has already evolved thus:

• I get phobic and downright hostile towards preview coverage, 
• I start dreading the game's release, thinking it's going to be terrible;
• The game comes out and gets rave reviews;
• I buy it immediately and end up being totally in love with it.  

This happened with AC2 - watch me go from skeptical (1)...to puppy love (2)...to serious man-crush (3)...to full-on infatuation (4).  It's true that AC2 ended up only being my 3rd favorite game of 2009,  but look - 2009 turned out to be an amazing year, and I was torn between AC2 and Batman:AA as my 2/3 for weeks. 

AC:Brotherhood took the phobia and hostility to new, unprecedented levels, however.  First of all, I was not ready for a sequel this quickly - sequels that occur with this kind of pace rarely end up being great.  (AC2 came out almost exactly a year ago, which itself came out almost exactly a year after the first one.)  And, of course, the marketing for this game was totally screwed up - the initial coverage made it sound like it was multiplayer-only, which was definitely not what I wanted out of an AC game, and then when it was revealed that there was a single-player campaign also, I figured it was an obligatory tack-on, and then when it was revealed that it was still set in Italy, with Ezio, I was thinking that this was going to be some shitty quasi-expansion pack cash-in, and planned to avoid it at all costs.

And then the reviews started coming in, saying it was clearly the best in the franchise.  And so my rental copy finally arrived last night, and I started playing, and now I'm totally hooked, again.

The most recent Giant Bombcast has an interesting bit of discussion regarding AC:B (starting at 1:05:22), with one point being that when you break down what it is you're actually doing in AC:B, it sounds an awful lot like Fable 3.  Consider:

• You are attempting to overthrow an evil, corrupt government
• You buy property and shops, which help beautify each area and which contribute to your own personal wealth
• There is an impending cataclysmic disaster that you must prepare for

And there are other comparisons to Fable 3 that are worth mentioning:

• It's a sequel that appeared rather quickly
• The combat is better than in the previous game, but still a little janky
• The graphics engine is a little old - still capable of great stuff, but, still, old

That's the last we'll talk about Fable 3, though.  The first hour of AC:B has totally quashed any and all desire I might have had to slog through a 2nd playthrough of Fable 3, and in any event, the bullet points I listed above are simply conceptual similarities - otherwise, you would never confuse one for the other.

I feel silly even talking about AC:B at this stage in my initial playthrough; I've barely scratched the surface of what's there, and I already know too much about what is to come.  I suspect that most of the rest of this blog's entries for the remainder of this year will be related to AC:B, and I can already tell that this game will make me rethink my top 10 of 2010.

Fable 3

I accidentally finished Fable 3 over the weekend.  That wasn't my intention.  I didn't know I was at the end of the game and had beaten the final boss until the credits started rolling.

I don't think I've ever been so torn on how to rate a game as I am with Fable 3.  I don't even know where to start, to be honest, other than to say that it's pretty clear that Fable 4, should there be one, needs to be a complete reboot.  The engine, the combat system, the map, the social interaction mechanic, the real estate management system, the pause menu, the controls; these are but a few of the major features that require a complete overhaul if this franchise is to stay relevant.

And that's leaving aside the surprising lack of polish that permeates the experience; the glittering trail that leads you to your destination is broken more often than not, and the mini-map that requires several button presses to access is more of an abstract representation of your current location than an actual, 1:1 reference, making it more or less useless - so if your glittering trail refuses to show up, and you're in a new location - or, indeed, in a location that you already know quite well - you can still get lost. 

And yet... I still kinda liked it.  I kinda liked enough to want to keep playing even though my campaign is over; and I must begrudgingly admit that, since my wife is out of town this week, I'm tempted to replay the entire campaign as a full-on evil bastard, since one of the few things that the game does remarkably well is adapt to the choices that you make.  If you play as a good guy, you'll notice that the world will change; the city of Bowerstone, for example, is a filthy, foggy cesspool when you first enter it, but if you choose to make improvements to the city, it's actually a quite lovely place to stroll through by the time you're done.

And what's more, there are repercussions to being completely good, some of which are quite shocking once you see them in person.  We're getting into spoiler territory here, so skip ahead to the next paragraph if you want to avoid them.  The game starts with you, as the king's brother, escaping out of the castle and starting to lead a revolution.  The revolution occurs at around the game's midpoint, and then you're the King, which means that in addition to your regular quests, you have several crucial decisions that you need to make; you learn that in exactly one year, a huge attack will descend upon your kingdom, and you need to make certain decisions in order to make preparations.  Those decisions will also affect your alliances that you've made as you formed the revolution; the promises you made to rebel leaders will affect your ability to properly save up enough money to pay for your kingdom's defense.  I was playing as a good guy, which meant that I kept all my promises, and which meant that I drained my kingdom's coffers completely dry in order to give my citizens a good life.  I assumed that I'd have enough time to donate my own (rather substantial) stash to make up the shortfall; and, if I'd dillydallied enough, I probably could have.  The problem is that the endgame arrived completely without warning; I thought I still had time to make some more money, but instead I suddenly found myself leading the final charge of the final battle.  (And the final boss battle... ye gods, what a fucking joke.)  Anyway, the point (the repercussions from being completely good) is that I had been a good king, but I didn't raise enough funds to protect my people; and so, after the final battle was over and I could continue playing, I decided to visit some older locations to pick up some loose threads from the campaign, and everywhere I went, nearly everyone was dead.  So, obviously, I'm curious to see what happens if you're completely bad.  End spoilers. 

Can I recommend this game, knowing how many other great games there are right now?  It's a very tough call.  If you're a fan of the franchise, and you're willing to forgive the game's numerous problems, both technical and philosophical, you'll probably end up having somewhat of an enjoyable time.  I know I did; there's just enough good in the game that made me feel like the experience wasn't totally worthless.  But if you're unfamiliar with Fable, or if you're trying to shoehorn it in to your already busy gaming schedule, you may want to rent it, and nobody would blame you if you wanted to avoid it altogether.  Life is about choice, after all.

feast or famine

I can't remember the last time I had so much good stuff to play, all at the same time.  It's a little overwhelming, but I'm not complaining.  AT ALL.

We covered Rock Band 3 and Fable 3 on Friday; RB3 is still excellent, and F3 is maybe not as excellent but certainly absorbing.  It's very easy to get sidetracked, which is sort of the point, and even though it feels incredibly artificial and "game-y", it's the sort of thing where you get used to that feeling pretty quickly, and it ceases being a concern.

I finished the first mission or two in the Red Dead Redemption Zombie DLC; man, that game continues to be awesome.  I've had RDR flip-flopping with Mass Effect 2 as my Game of the Year pretty much since the get-go, but RDR seems like it's the more complete package, at this point.  Every time I fire it up I'm immediately back in the swing of things.

My Gamefly copy of Kirby's Big Yarn finally arrived, and it's as charming and adorable as can be.  My wife is very much into crafting, and she took a shine to the art design immediately; I'm hoping I can get her to play it.
 
Your mileage will vary depending on your predilection towards video pinball, but if you're in any way inclined towards it, I would highly recommend FXPinball 2, which took up a number of idle hours this weekend.  For my money, it's the best home pinball solution outside of actually owning a machine.

And I finally caved and bought Game Dev Story for my iPod Touch.  I'm generally not one for these kinds of simulation games, or really any kind of sim game, but I'd heard too much good stuff about this one to ignore, and lo and behold, it's totally sucked me in.  VosstonVisions is about 4 years in, now, and while we'd like to get beyond ninja adventure games, we're starting to make some money.  Highly enjoyable, and highly recommended.

Impressions: Rock Band 3, Fable 3

OK, so.  I had more or less written off the rest of 2010 in terms of "games to get excited about."  And now, suddenly, I'm up to my ears in quality stuff.

Rock Band 3 is easily the best iteration of the franchise, and I say this even though I've only played one 14-song setlist with my wife, and without even owning the keyboard or trying out any of the "pro mode" stuff.  I'm talking strictly nuts-and-bolts here; the game feels "smart."  Being able to save a setlist is a fantastic idea, especially if you want to set something up ahead of time; having the game actually pause between songs is also something much appreciated, to give everyone a second to catch their breath, stretch their fingers, take a quick bathroom break.  The stat-tracking is really interesting; it's keeping tabs on all sorts of cool stuff, which definitely scratches that "let me play one more tune so I can get the next achievement" itch.  I've only seen a tiny fraction of what the game has to offer - I plan on messing with it A LOT over the weekend.  And I still need to get familiar with the on-disc setlist; I've already merged my RB1, RB2 and DLC libraries, so I need to see what's actually new.

I can't quite tell if Fable 3 is the best iteration in its franchise; I'm maybe 30-40 minutes into it, and it basically feels like Fable 2 (which is not necessarily a bad thing, of course, as I very much enjoyed my time with F2).  It does have some strange design choices, though, and I can already tell that some of them are going to get annoying. 

For example:  one of the bullet points of this franchise is that you can interact with anyone, and there's lots of ways to do that; so that's nice.  Except here, if you want to interact with someone, you have to stand close enough to them that a button prompt appears; if you press the button, then the game momentarily stops, and then restarts with a new contextual button prompt; if you then press that button (shake hand, belch, etc.), then you're kicked back out into the first button prompt, and then you have to press another button to get back to the actual game.  This is strange and needlessly cumbersome. 

Also - the X button is both your melee attack and your block, which can be tricky, and the block really ought to have been mapped to one of the triggers, which are not used at all. 

It's not really fair of me to criticize it just yet; again, I'm not even an hour into it, and there's so much more left to do.  But every game's first impression goes a long way toward coloring your eventual verdict.

so much candy

Here, let me blow the dust off of this blog and see if it's still working.

/kicks tires

OK!

Has it really been a month since the last update?  That's just wrong.  I'm trying to recall where the time went, exactly, or if there was some pressing reason why I've not been over here.  Truth is, it's felt a little slow, games-wise.  I've played several games to completion, and acquired an iPod Touch, and yet there hasn't really been anything that's made me say, "That does it, I'm blogging today."  I'm writing today because, well, why not.

If my GoogleDoc is to be believed, here's what I've played since the last post, wherein I was obsessed with Civilization V.

• DeathSpank 2: Thong of Virtue.  In spite of the first game's faults (repetitive, mindless item fetching), I loved the hell out of it, and was eagerly looking forward to more.  Sadly, this sequel suffers from a lot of I've been seeing this year, where it's basically more of the same, but it's no longer fresh or exciting.  I finished it, but whereas I played the first game to 100% completion, I've still got a ton of side quests to do, and I don't care enough to do them.
• Dead Rising 2.  I was hoping that the game had changed enough so that I could try to get through it; alas, I died about 20 minutes in and knew that I didn't have it in me.  I understand why someone might get really into this franchise; the game is designed in a very specific, deliberate way that seems completely insane unless you submit to it, and I know that I don't have the patience to bother.
• Enslaved.  This came out of nowhere to become one of my favorite titles of the year.  I had a vicious headcold when this came out, and ended up spending my day of sick leave huddled up on my couch, plowing through it more or less in one go.  Definitely reminded me of Uncharted 2, which is a great thing.  Probably the best and most convincing facial animation I've ever seen - the relationship between the 2 lead characters is totally believable and real and palpable.  
• Castlevania: LoS.  Fuck this game.  I'm not necessarily a Castlevania fanboy; I like the games, when they're good, but that's more or less it.  That being said, there's nothing about this game (at least as far as I got) that has ANYTHING to do with the Castlevania franchise as I understand it.  It is a God of War clone through and through, with frustrating controls and combat.  It's true that it has a gorgeous graphics engine, but it's 2010 - if I can't have complete control over the camera, I get angry.  Especially since the camera is, generally speaking, miles away from the action, making it difficult to see my dude; also, it's incredibly annoying when my dude gets hit by enemies that are off-screen, "under" the camera.  I stopped midway through the "Lycan" area, and I'll tell you why:  there's this one section where you have to tame this giant rat beast, which enables you to ride it and jump over huge gaps.  I tamed the rat, jumped it over the gaps, and then got to this weird ledge area and couldn't seem to find anywhere to go, so I killed the rat.  ONLY THEN did the game tell me that I needed the rat to climb up the suddenly-blinking vine.  Which meant that I had to go back to the rat-taming arena, which was suddenly easy to do since all the gaps were jumpable by my puny human legs.  This means that the game specifically intended me to have to do this fucking thing twice.  Fuck this game.
• Costume Quest.  I just finished this over the weekend, actually.  It pains me to say this, but Double Fine has not yet made a truly great game.  They make incredible worlds, with great characters speaking hilarious dialogue, and they tell great stories, but the game part is the part that can feel like the last thing they thought of.  CQ gets past this by at least being relatively short, which makes the repetitive RPG-lite combat not terribly annoying.  And the rest of the game is relentlessly charming and adorable and laugh-out-loud funny.  I especially loved the Arrested Development reference in the 3rd act.
• Super Meat Boy.  It is doubtful that I will ever finish this game, as it is beastly difficult.  But it's also fiendishly addictive.

As mentioned above, I also bought one of the new models of iPod Touch.  I've been coveting the iPhone for years now, but as a Verizon customer I've had to bite the bullet and find other ways of having touchscreen smartphone goodness.  I've enjoyed my Droid, but it's getting old and slow and the battery drains alarmingly quickly, even if I don't use it; but I need my apps!  So I got one of the 8gb models and I've already gone nuts; I've got 32 games, plus a ton of camera apps.  Angry Birds and Cut the Rope are fun, sure, but the two games that have sucked the majority of my time are Sword & Poker 2 and Helsing's Fire.  S&P2 is kinda like Puzzle Quest in that it's an RPG fought over puzzles, but instead of being a Bejeweled clone it's got a poker theme.  And Helsing's Fire... I don't know how to describe it, except that it uses the touch screen in an ingenious way, and it's awesome.

I feel like I ought to start prepping for my year-end recap, although there are some notable titles left on my to-play list.  I accidentally ordered the PS3 version of Fallout: New Vegas, and so I sent it back; I'd like to play it eventually, but I can wait until it gets patched.  (And, frankly, I played a little Fallout 3 a few weeks ago just to check it out again, and that game feels positively ancient.)  Fable 3 arrives tomorrow.  I'm feeling aggressively ambivalent about Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, although I felt the same about AC2 and that game ended up being incredible.  I need to play Kirby.  I am curious about Star Wars: Force Unleashed 2, and I am unusually jazzed about the 360 version of NBA Jam.  And I'd like to hope for the best for Epic Mickey. 

And then I suppose I can get on with the recap.

Surrender

I apologize in advance if this post makes less sense than usual.  I was up until 2am playing Civ V.

---------------

But first, let me get Professor Layton and the Unwound Future out of the way. 

I still have a fondness for the Professor Layton games, although it's mostly because they remind me that I own a DS, and I still have a fondness for the DS, because once upon a time it was a kickass handheld gaming machine that had tons of cool games coming out for it all the time. 

Still, though, the first Professor Layton game was charming and witty and unique, and while it may have had one (or ten) too many matchstick puzzles, it was still an enjoyable experience.  The second game was good, too, in a competent sort of way - in a way, it kinda reminds me of Bioshock 2, in that PL2 and B2 are technically better than their original games in terms of UI improvements and mechanics, and yet somehow not nearly as charming or as fun.  PL2 in particular had one of the most bat-shit crazy stories I can remember, which added to my sense of disconnection - the whole game is about solving puzzles, and yet you as the player are never given a chance to solve the fundamental mystery of the story; it seems as if it was pulled out of thin air.

This same problem is in PL3; the big reveal is completely ludicrous and borderline nonsensical, and you are never given a chance to actually figure it out for yourself - nor could you even guess, because it has literally nothing to do with anything you've already spent the last 10 hours dealing with. 

But whatever - you don't play the Professor Layton games for the story, right?  You play them for the puzzles.  And here, the puzzles are very much hit or miss, and more often than not they feel unfair, in that they're written unclearly, or misleadingly, or simply do not make any sense.  I ultimately used a walkthrough to finish the game, which makes the entire experience pointless.

And not only that, but the puzzles don't take advantage of the DS nearly as much as they ought to.  Which is odd, because sometimes they do.  Let me explain.  There are a few puzzles which are fully interactive - the one I'm thinking of in particular is where a piece of paper has been ripped up into pieces, and you need to piece them back together in order to find a secret code.  And the game lets you manipulate those pieces with the stylus - it's like a jigsaw puzzle.  Whereas there are other puzzles, featuring the same exact concept - a photograph of the end of a race has been ripped up into pieces, and you need to figure out who came in third place - but you can't manipulate the pieces.  It seems odd and unnecessarily difficult.

Here's what I'd like to see in a future PL title - I'd like the whole game to turn into a point-and-click adventure, with puzzles thrown in.  I'd like to take some ownership in how the story actually unfolds.  The puzzles don't necessarily have to make sense in the context of the story (after all, they certainly don't right now), but I'd like the whole process to be a little more involving than simply going from screen to screen and clicking on random people and getting nonsensical puzzles thrown at me.  And I'd especially like it if I, as the player, were given a genuine opportunity to solve the grand story for myself, instead of having some crazy deus ex machina do it for me.   Otherwise, why bother with a story at all, if it's never going to make any sense?

------------------

Back to Civ V.

So last night I finished my first campaign; my Roman armies were beating the shit out of France until, inevitably, they surrendered. 

My initial impression of Civ V is probably not all that relevant to the hard-core Civ fan; I was introduced to the series through Civ Rev, which I promptly fell in love with and played on both the 360 and the DS.  Shortly thereafter, Steam probably had a sale on Civ IV, and I played with that for a bit, though eventually I fell back to the Civ Rev version.

Civ V is, to my noob eyes, a perfect mashup of the two.  It's got insanely deep systems and tech trees and whatnot, but it's also incredibly approachable and accessible and you don't have to micro-manage if you don't want to.  It took me about 70 turns to realize that I could automate my workers, which, looking back, was the right time for me to figure that out - that was around the point where the game started to evolve from simply settling and developing cities into building units and wonders and technologies.  I didn't start the game with a desired outcome; I simply built my empire as big as I could, keeping all of my bases covered - in fact, if anything, I eventually decided I'd get a cultural victory - but I soon realized that I was miles and miles ahead of France, which was the only empire left on the continent, and I could probably just send a few rocket artillery units over and raze their cities without too much fuss, and that's exactly what ended up happening. 

It is, indeed, a time suck.  I haven't stayed up that late on a school night in years, and it certainly wasn't my intention to do so.  I figured I'd play up until the 1400s or so and then come back to it later, but soon "one more turn" turned into "well, let's just finish this particular Wonder", and that turned into "OK, let's build some rockets," and ultimately Paris fell, and I rejoiced in my victory, and then fell dead asleep.

You can guess where this is going

Knights of Columbus, this is going to be difficult.

I am currently a beta tester for an upcoming, big-deal product that will be launching later this year.  I'm not entirely sure how I was able to secure that gig, but I'm not complaining; it's as close as I will most likely ever get to being in the videogame industry, and so I'm taking it pretty seriously.

Now, you can imagine that something this big-deal would come with a strict NDA, and you'd be right.  That hasn't stopped other people from uploading YouTube videos, of course, but - as I said earlier - I'm taking this pretty seriously, and so I've been biting my tongue.

Even so, there's only so much of this silence that I can take. 

Can you bear with me?  Can you muster enough patience to get through this with me?

Then know this:  it's not perfect, but it's actually pretty neat. 

------------------

I've listened to a bunch of gaming podcasts regarding ________, and read any number of "hands-on" previews, and they all generally say the same thing:  ________ is not for the hard-core.  These previewers make no bones about their negative bias going in, and nothing they see convinces them otherwise.  (It's perhaps a little unfortunate that the enthusiast press is so clearly lacking in objectivity, but it's not like this is the first time that this kind of thing has happened.)  The larger issue, though, is that they all seem to miss the point:  ________ is not a product that was ever intended for the hard-core.  ________ is meant to get the non-gamer involved.

Of course, the problem is convincing a non-gamer to buy this thing in the first place.  I would imagine that a lot of ________'s sales are going to be from people like me - we'll buy it so that our wives and children and other non-gaming friends will get involved and enjoy it.  And so I recognize the angle that the press is taking here - is there enough value in ________ to justify a purchase in the first place?  Will there be any residual enjoyment after the non-gamer in the household is finished?   Can it ever appeal to the hard-core crowd?   

Lest we get sidetracked here into an unnecessary discussion of what exactly constitutes "hard-core", let me answer the more relevant questions:  Yes, it works (although it's not yet perfect), and yes, it's fun (but mostly when the game itself is fun, too).  And yes, the non-gamers who have come over to the apartment have been gob-smacked, which is probably the reaction that the makers of ________ were hoping for.

The most recent update to the ________ software includes one of the titles that got my wife's immediate attention when we watched some of this year's E3 coverage, and that's the one that we ended up showing off to our guests this weekend.  And they loved it.  They even loved just messing around with it, in between actual games - they loved seeing a 1-to-1 reaction between themselves and their avatars.  They loved seeing how, when my wife and I moved back into the playing area, ________ recognized us and changed our on-screen appearances accordingly.  It's the best thing to use ________ by a long shot, and it's the one that really shows off ________'s potential, even if it's ultimately just a really good-looking proof-of-concept showpiece.  The biggest downside to the ________ software so far is the tendency towards laggy sensitivity, but this specific game seems to have conquered that problem.  It's breathtaking.

And there's more to ________ than the software.  I'm not really at liberty to explain just what kind of testing I did yesterday, but there were hints that the ________ interface will work with various components and applications on the master machine, which would be pretty neat.  (It's more than a little ironic, actually - part of the appeal of ________ is its whole "get off the couch" nature, and yet some of the non-gaming functionality actually ends up meaning that you can stay on the couch, and not even have to press any buttons.)

Hmm.  I'm sure that I've said a lot more than I'm allowed to say, so I'll stop, even though there's a lot more that I want to talk about.  The short version, though, is that it's got some serious potential, and I'm very curious to see what happens next.