Yeah I’m not sure that the original Assassin’s Creed affected the industry at all, it is sort of this kinda ambitious idea that mostly just doesn’t work. The sequel basically was the course correction to the safest version of the original they could imagine, which of course was successful and inspired a host of later games. The original is probably the shortest of the bunch and has the best treatment of the larger framing story but it’s rather hard to justify an experience of its length just for curiosity sake.
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Have been playin’ a bunch of Warframe.
So much so I made a couple videos of me playing it in my usual bad way.
First one was a demonstration of how to hunt Necramechs with Oberon, with a couple caveats like eschewing some of the harder to get weapons and mods.
The second is also hunting Necramechs, but this time with my usual Banshee build for Deimos (also ends with a kinda funny bit of happenstance at the end).
I mostly play Banshee anymore. She makes the game funnest for me, though I do enjoy other frames from time to time.
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This all describes Origami King pretty well, too. It feels like the developers had to work within some extremely narrow branding constraints imposed on them by Nintendo. All the typical Mario characters and enemies are there, but the game never gets to put much of a spin on their appearance. There are just a ton of completely generic toads, goombas, and shy guys walking around. All the bosses are just, like, anthropomorphized papercraft tools. They look pretty boring, but the game does get some fun mileage out of the ways they’ve been maiming the paper characters around them.
So aside from some neat paper effects, the look of the game is rather unimaginative. The game does do some fun stuff with its quest design though. Each area kind of plays with the dungeon structure in a different way. One that was particularly fun did a Wind Waker homage where you can sail a boat around to explore a bunch of little islands on an ocean map. The writing is alright – it has a pleasant goofiness and occasional decent gags. The battle system is oddly complex, very out of step with the rest of the game. It’s not bad, but it asks for a LOT of mental processing in quite small windows of time, so it can be a little stressful. If I were 9 year old Mario fan I would probably LOVE this game’s rollicking cartoon fanfiction energy but I think I’d have a tough time getting through some of the boss fights.
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Townscaper is on gamepass, it’s pretty pleasant to just make weird little buildings. Should be called “Wave function collapse: the videogame”
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i played ghostrunner (humble choice game) for 40 minutes (three levels) and loathed it.
functionally it’s akin to 3d katana zero; you platform around and use your cool sword powers to kill guys. if you take a single hit, you die. but it’s not nearly as cool and weird as katana zero, and there’s some very annoying design choices. for example, you can slow down time to dodge bullets… but only in midair? so if you try to dash at an enemy on the ground, you’re usually just fucked.
the level geometry is fine, emphasizing multiple paths through same space, but killing enemies (and breaking their shields beforehand) just feels like busywork. checkpointing isn’t very good either, with long platforming sequences before you start fighting the encounter.
basically it stunk! all style over substance. i could finish it but i don’t really feel a desire to.
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Good God the ending of Kirby and the Forgotten Land.
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yeah i want to like this game but mostly find it annoying with occasional moments of exhilaration
Babby’s first Stage Clear in Vampire Survivors only took me… 5 hours of attempts. Basically I think I just finally got some good powerup RNG. It was gratifying to melt all of the final waves of baddies.
I have 2 complaints:
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Baddies from early waves sometimes come back with more HP but at first this was hard for me to realize because there’s not even the courtesy of a palette swap. Like, Hey! Those fucken green guys were dying way easier 4 waves ago give me a heads up that something is different so I don’t just walk into them and get killed.
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I hate the music. Luckily I found a song that is basically perfect for a run:
faked edit third complaint: The “opening a chest” fanfare takes way too fucking long just show me what shit I got and let me carry on
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You can skip that with right click/escape, excepting the 5 item ones.
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Thank you for giving me precious minutes of my life back
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Assassin’s Creed 1 was interesting, as far as I remember it wasn’t a lawnmower sim at all and there were almost no ways to upgrade your character. You had one main mission/assassination at a time and the only reason to do side missions was to lower the difficulty of the current main assassination. The storyline felt pretty disjointed and austere. It wasn’t very well received at all for being such a trend starting graphical marvel
When I moved from Assassin’s Creed 1 to 2 I felt that the game lost its edge and became too much of a crowd pleaser. I’d have to revisit it but maybe… Assassin’s Creed 1… is good… and I know I sound like someone saying « Season 1 of Big Bang Theory was good, before they ruined it »
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Tried playing Jeanne D’arc (because there’s talking animals in it, that’s right, I am THAT EASY to please) but my USB Snes controller won’t work because move controls are mapped to the PSP’s analog nub, which my snes controller don’t have. I had to figure out how to install fonts on da emulator because the default ones wouldn’t fit inside the text boxes.
Forgot I had Solatorobo on here, I don’t think it requires touch controls, so I might get into that again.
Also, we need to talk about Star Fox Command and the horrendus stylus driven flight controls. Horrible. Also every cutscene in that game is about the Star Fox cast’s relationship issues.
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After a hard-won clear of Stage 1, I steamrolled stage 2 of Vampire Survivors and then really hit a wall in stage 3… the “Dairy Plant.”
Of all the god damn things it had to be a dairy plant
edit: finished it
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I’m also of the opinion that AssCreed 1 is “good, actually” but I don’t know that I’d recommend it outright. The big things I remember liking about it was the way it showed the upgrades you got on your character, like every time you completed a series of side missions to get another sheath of throwing knives you’d see them right there on the character somewhere. So over time you saw him get more and more armed to the teeth with knives and weapons.
It was very of the “HD Era” for games in the same way GTA IV was in that it was like wow look at all this added detail we can do now even though by today’s standards it’s super basic. Also I liked the way they mapped the controls to different parts of the body so one button was always stuff for hands, another always did stuff for feet, another for eyes etc.
The problem with it was outside the main assassination missions there wasn’t a whole lot to do except for like you mentioned the three or four types of side missions that all worked to make the main missions easier or give you more options to approach them. That open-endedness was really cool at first but ultimately you realized you’re picking one of a few ways to stab a guy. Will you stab him in a crowd? Maybe jumping from above? Do it in public? Or get him somewhere alone first? Etc.
I still have it installed on my Xbox and keep telling myself one day I will go back and get all of the flags but I know this is probably not really going to happen.
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I beat Inner Isshin today for the first time. A bit feeling proud :>
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The first Assassin’s Creed has the goofy conceit of “you got cocky and goofed up an assassination, so now a bunch of your fellow assassins are dead or maimed and you’re stripped of your abilities.” Your mentor says no throwing daggers, and you gotta obey!
I did really like how big that game felt, though. I’m sure it’s much smaller now, in light of how colossal the games have gotten, but having to ride between the cities felt neat?
It was also way more content to let you do things how you wanted. You had to do a certain amount of research on each target, which meant engaging with a handful of little events - tailing an informant, eavesdropping on conversations, pickpocketing information, beating the shit outta someone.
And then you’re just kinda left to decide how to kill your targets! No real guidance! Here they are, in your assassin vision, figure it out.
Considering it only took a handful of games for the series to forsake that freedom in favor of more structured, cinematic kills (the “rushing through the trenches, up a hill, onto an American flag pole, and killing a guy” played out a lot better in one of the CG trailers than it was to actually play it in AC 3), it took them many, many entries in between to get back to letting you research enemies and kill them at your leisure.
Hell, I killed one of the cultists in AC Odyssey only because the game let me lock onto him - just happened on a dude chilling on a blanket at a temple and gutted him, and got my reward.
Of course, there’s been other trade-offs (climbing is less of an architectural puzzle, and now just mindlessly automatic), but this more recent trilogy feels like it hews closer to what the first game set out to do. They’re just, unfortunately, about 150 hours long a pop, if not more with DLC.
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I finally did it :> I beat the Gauntlet of Strength: Severance. Now I can dress up as the Tengu of Ashina and beat the game twice more for the platinum. Hopefully just twice more…
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counterpoint: assassin’s creed 2 has
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Love how they build up that plot point, and start setting up an entire thing with the digital memories of one of the alien gods attempting to come back to life, and then they just, uh, resolve it in a comic book nobody read.
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this is literally impossible
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