A Review: Assassin's Creed (PC)

Similar to what I wrote for my review of sorts for Dead Space, I do not see the point in writing a full review for a seven year old game (as of 2014) that has over 134,000 hits when looking for a review of Assassin's Creed.  Granted the first game search will include the reviews for every game in the Assassin's Creed library due to it's lack of a subtitle or number, but I plod on . . .  Unlike some reviews (on Steam), I never had any issues booting up or playing Assassin's Creed.  The game never crashed spontaneously, the sound never cut out randomly and there was no visible skipping either by the game or by Altaïr.

So Assassin's Creed, the first game in the series of the same name, was released by Ubisoft back in 2007.  Before playing this game, I had played Assassin's Creed: Altaïr's Chronicles back in February and that was it.  All I knew about the series was that you played as an assassin at various points throughout history. . . assassinating people.  I had no idea about any of the "present" day activities as Desmond or anything about the Animus accessing ancestors memories coded within the DNA of said Desmond.  That was a bit of a shock, although it did not bother me by way of a story telling mechanism.

I was a little surprised at the beginning of the game by the typical use of the Metroid-effect of starting out as Samus does in a fully powered suit only to have something happen that brings you back down to n00b status.  So that happened.  By the time I neared the end of the game, despite having gained all of my equipment back (better sword, throwing daggers, short sword, grasping abilities while falling), I never felt that I was the master assassin that I was supposed to be by that point in the game/story.  I felt that I was a guy who was great at freerunning/parkour and who was decent in a fight against anywhere from three to 15 enemies.

There's only eight here, but you can't see the other umpteen that showed up shortly after plus the couple that I had killed before the picture was taken.  And it's blurry because I done just killed a guard.

Being ganged up on was actually one of the most frustrating aspects of the game for me.  There would be times when I would be shoved by a homeless citizen (who has some sort of mental illness as they are always walking around, gibbering and will seek you out if they spotted you) into a guard and then you are wanted by every visible guard.  There were plenty of times when I would be fighting two or three guards, then a small contingent of four to six would reinforce the main unit and I would just give up as by the time they were all done swinging at me, my life would be down by a good eight to ten hit points.  Especially in the later levels, guards seemed to have gained in their sword fighting ability, multiplied in numbers and their proverbial trigger fingers were whatever is the next step after itching.  

There was one battle in particular that occurred near the end of the game that caused me to stop playing altogether.  Granted each time I would watch a "how-to" video my confidence would again perk up a bit, but then after two-to-three more tries and failing, I would give up.  <Pity>It would seem that each time I would reach a rooftop, I would be pursued by a never ending supply of guards and Templars and rarely would each enemy soldier patiently wait their turn to attack me.</Pity>

The information gathering missions were a lot of fun at first, but that was before the guards became increasingly aware and al lot easier to trigger into their blood frenzy.  The problem being that once the guards become aggressive towards you, any side mission you happened to be on (assassination, pickpocketing, physical interrogation, eavesdropping, racing another assassin or picking up flags on a short route throughout the area), your mission would end then you would have to evade the guards until your "Social Stealth Meter" which lets you know how noticeable you are to the guards goes to yellow which means that you can then hide which will then reset your "SSM" and then you can return to the person who gave you the task in the first place to start it all over again.  Whew.  By the end of the game (the last two stages I played through), I gave up trying to complete every single task and only completed the ones that I had to in order to proceed with the main assassination target for that portion of the storyline.

The one side mission that I always completed was also the one that I had the most fun doing.  Climbing to the top of designated buildings would de-fog a portion of your map in the given district the stage was taking place in.

These portions of the stages were fun because you often had to parkour up to a building then jump to an adjacent building  leading to the tower/building that you had to climb.  There were a couple of specific leap/upper-body-pulls that always made me nervous even though being able to "make it" was guaranteed.  Guaranteed, unless you were already spotted by guards who would then shoot arrows at you (rate of fire was reasonable) or throw rocks if you were not too high already.

Another thing that bothered me about the game was the amount of time it took to exit out.  I understand that the process to quit the game was probably designed to create a sense of immersion for the game, being that because you are playing as Desmond who is viewing an ancestors memories through a machine, and in order to exit the game, you would have to exit the machine first.  That is all well and good in theory, but in practice it creates a series of unnecessary steps that only caused me annoyance.  To give you some idea, in order to exit out of the game, every time, you would have to go through the following steps:

• Pause the game to bring up the menu.
• Select "Exit Animus."
• This exits you out of your memory and back into the present, now controlling Desmond inside the Animus laboratory.
• Pause the game to bring up the menu.
• Select "Exit Game."
• This brings you back to the profile select
• Select existing profile, which for whatever reason only works with the mouse and not the controller.
• Select "Quit Game."
• You are asked if you are sure that you want to exit the game.
• Yes I am sure I want to exit the game.
• Exit game.

In my personal opinion, quitting a game should not take that long.  Maybe going from the pause screen to the quit button and if I'm asked if I want to "Save & Quit" or simply just "Quit," I am perfectly okay with those options.  Then I should be out of the game.  If there was something to do when you are outside of the Animus at times that are not designated by the game, then maybe I could see exiting the machine you are hooked up to, but from what I have seen, there is nothing.  You can walk around the lab and one of two people there continuously ask you to return to the machine so that they can continue with whatever it is that they are having you do.  Maybe this was something that was passed over in beta testing?

While this experience has nearly tainted the Assassin's Creed series for me, I do have the second game on Steam and I feel that after a few months, I will probably give that game a try.  I feel that some redemption might be in order.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Flowing Through the Loins of My Pain

Path of Exile: FOR THE LOVE OF ODIN PLAY THIS!

You know, do not even ask me about the "Forsaken Masters" part as I do not really know.  But Path of Exile, I do not think I have ever sunk this much time into a free-to-play game.  Even the previously mentioned Clash of Clans or Plants vs. Zombies 2.  No, not even Mafia Wars, which was way back in the day, as far as I am concerned.

At the moment I have put 35 hours into this game, although that number seems to be growing week-by-week.  But let us talk about the game.

Bloody hell this game is beautiful, just take a look at this dank and infested dungeon!

and a spectral-esque-type forrest.

Now if I only played good looking games, there would be room for an argument here, but I am also playing a lot of The Elder Scrolls: The Arena which looks a lot like Doom with a sword and heal potions.  PoE plays remarkably well too.  Think Diablo, with bits of Torchlight II thrown in (stationary waypoints) as well as MMORPG action hot key type actions as well.   There are even some improvements such as removable gem socketing in weapons and armor without damaging either the equipment or the gems.  I think that is one of the things that helped to sell the game.  

There are even little individual animations that the enemies do.  For instance, an enemy archer will run towards you, stop, pull an arrow from their quiver, lick the fletching, knock the arrow then fire towards you.  That is, if you haven't already shot them yet.  If you zoom in as close as you can, you can see the corpses of fallen enemies twitching a couple of times before they lie permanently prone.  At first I thought it was either a glitch or my eyes playing tricks, but no, you can see hands and feet twitching a few times.  Sometimes monsters will also roar at you before or during attacks, you know, because their wild animals that just happen to want you very dead.

Oddly enough, one of the best things about this games is all the ways Grinding Gear Games does not charge you to play and there are a lot of aspects to this game that I feel that could have been used to create options to pay real world money.  You want to enchant that sword to a +1 to damage, pay 50 gold (translates to $0.50).  You want to recover that life sapping gem from your armor that you no longer want, that will be 200 gold.  You want to create more than one character, pay us 500 gold to create extra character slots beyond your first character.  Of everything that I have seen that the game charges money for, everything appears to be cosmetic.  Sure you have your swag stashed in a chest that has four pages of a 12x12 grid and you can pay for a fifth page, but I do not foresee needing that much space considering I am currently only playing one character.

Basically, there was one time when I left the game for the sole purpose of finding out how I could give Grinding Gear Games money using real money.  Maybe buy a package thing via Steam using my Steam Wallet.  I could not.  There was nothing I could do but use their in-game market.  That was not was I was looking for, so I have yet to give them currency validation towards their great game.

Similar to Diablo and Torchlight, I do have a problem with hoarding.  When I found gems, I saved them until I could create the next higher quality gem, then I saved that gem until I could create the next. . .so on and so on.  I was always paranoid that I would find a better weapon or suit of armor and that gem that I had soldered into my equipment would then be lost forever.  Thankfully in PoE, this is not the case as I can take out and remove gems as frequently as I want (unless otherwise noted in the description of the gem).  Grinding Gear is making this game too easy to like and doing things that I had wanted earlier Diablo-esque games to do.

There are a handful of other features from the game that surprised me.  At first, I was annoyed that the maps were a lot smaller than what I was used to on Torchlight II, but I quickly realized that they were more like the Diablo maps and one of the sidequest goals is to kill every monster on the map.  That would be quite the feat in Torchlight II.  Another is that your health and mana potions autofill as you kill enemies and whenever you return to town, which makes healing spells almost obsolete.  It can become difficult however when you have to go up against a boss that does not want to summon creatures to help fight against you, which would then refill your potion bottles.

To date, I have only played cooperatively once with Chreekat a month or two back.  And while the game could be played with friends, you don't have to and I feel that playing locally would be a lot more fun than playing across the country.  That being said, I am usually up for playing cooperatively if people are interested.  That then brings me to the online-ness of the game.  Unless you are intentionally playing with anyones else, all the areas, with the exception of the towns/villages are instanced.  You do not have to worry about other people running around in the same area stealing your kills and loot.

The only negative statement I have to make about this game is that it takes a while to load.  The first couple of times I tried playing, I gave up because I thought the game was stuck on the loading screen.  It turned out that I just had to wait a minute or two, then everything was as I expected it to be.  There was no noticeable lag in the game and the only times the game had to load was moving between areas.

I am going to stop now so I can get this out there.  Path of Exile has been out there in the world for 13 months now and honestly, it is never too late to pick up this game and start playing.  So, you should go and start playing as it is just too much fun to not play.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
The Great Warriors of Doom and Wind

First Impressions: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (PC)

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has a sordid history with me, which is why I didn't jump on the bandwagon back in 2006 when the game first came out.  Prior to 2006, I had heard nothing about The Elder Scrolls series on any platform, most likely due to the fact that I wasn't a big PC gamer until recently and I didn't own a 360 or PS3.  

The symbol for the school of Conjuration.

I recall seeing the boxes in Target and upon first inspection, I thought that I had stumbled across a video game series based around H.P. Lovecraft's Cthuhlu mythos.  The cues for me were the similarity between the "Elder Gods" and the "Elder Scrolls," as well as "Oblivion" being a frequent theme of sorts in Lovecraft's writings about the various.  Even the logo I thought was an artistic relic based around the image of Cthulhu.  Granted the symbol looks a bit more like fangs, but now that you have Lovecraft in your mind, seeing what I had thought might become a bit more clear.  So at this point, I figured I would get around to playing this Oblivion game.

The house I live in during 2006, we had a housemate whom we will simply call OnlineGamblerGuyWhoLivesInAMercedes, or Axe for short talked a bit about the game then showed myself and Chreekat what the game was like.  He described it as a kind of fun fantasy game played in first person and I immediatly thought of the Neo Geo game, Crossed Swords.  Axe said that by the end of the game it had gotten repetitious and that you can simply jump while moving and you raise in experience levels.  He said that it while it was a decent game, just that by the end, it got pretty boring.

This was my first impression of not only Oblivion, but of this apparent Elder Scrolls series.  It was not a favorable impression.

Ring in 2012.   Skyrim had been out a year by the time I bought the game and delved deep into it's depths (not nearly as much as Conklederp has mind you).  Thus my impression of The Elder Scrolls forever changed and for the better at that.  In March of 2013 I began playing Morrowind (Chapter III) and this January (just over a month ago), I began playing Oblivion.  

My feelings about this game continue to be conflicted.  I understand the immense leap from Morrowind to Obilivion, the changes in gameplay mechanics (the ones I know about anyway), the graphical improvements over the four years between the two games.  However, in the back of my mind are those first feelings of negativity because of the review of a housemate and finding out that the conjuration sigil had nothing to do with anything related to H.P. Lovecraft.

One other sad thing, for me at least, is that I'm not a fan of the intro song, which is just a fanfaric and slightly sped up version of "Nerevar Rising" from Morrowind.  Yes, I know it was used again in "Dragonborn" from Skyrim, but there it's done with a choir and all bombastic, which I tend to like.  Basically the song, "Reign of the Septims" using the "Nerevar Rising" theme, plays it too fast for what the song is doing.  I don't know if that really makes much sense, but that's how I feel.  The rest of the music in the world I do enjoy as it is very Jeremy Soule and fitting for Cyrodiil.

Presently, I am 14 hours into the game, which isn't far by Elder Scroll standards and for those of you who know, I just joined The Blades at Cloud Ruler Temple and that is where I have left the game since the middle of January.  Rather than be all rhetorical, I have not stopped playing, but felt that I could now diverge from the main storyline to do any half dozen of those side quests that always populate these open world games.

There are certain things that I do like so far in Obilivion such as the lushness of the land.  I mean, just look at all these lupins (??)

and I just escaped (was allowed to escape) from prison!  I like the facial feature-thing mechanic that I will/might get to in a later post.  I like building my character and having them focus their abilities along certain paths.  And as is the case with any game, there are certain aspects that I'm not too fond of such as the menu system, the pudginess of faces due to the facial feature-thing mechanic, the ability to fast travel to locations you have not yet gone to but know of their existence and how small Cyrodiil feels, but maybe this last part is normal having come from such a vast expanse in Vvardenfell.

I will come back to Obilivion very soon, I think I just needed some time to figure out my current feelings for the game and how they conflict with how I first felt about the game.  Well, that's about my quota for the month for talking about feelings.  


~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
I Shall Return From Out Of The Fire
P.S.  Have a good (snowy?) weekend all.

Full Review: Assassin's Creed: Altaïr's Chronicles (DS)

Well, due to Salty Liver only bringing up Assassin's Creed II a couple of times in the past, this renewed my interest in the Assassin's Creed series.  This lead me to the Wikipedia article which is where I found out / looked up the chronology for the series.  Being the kind of person that I am, I wanted to start the series in the beginning, even though the first Assassin's Creed came out on the PS3 and 360 back in 2007 (2008 for the PC).  The story in Assassin's Creed chronology begins with the DS game that came out in 2008, a year after the initial release.  It should also be noted that AC:AC, the DS game has been ported to Windows Phones, iPhones and Android phones, so a good portion of this review will be relevant for those OS' as well, just not the control schemes.

The nitty-gritty: AC:AC, while a Ubisoft property was developed by Gameloft, a French company who worked a lot with the Prince of Persia reboot series in the early/mid 2000s.  The company now mainly focuses on mobile and portable gaming, so it is not too surprising looking back that they were given the rights to develop this title, especially with their PoP background.

So let's get down to it shall we!

STORY

Assassin's Creed: Altaïr's Chronicles takes place in 1190, one year before the events in Assassin's Creed.  You mission is to recover "The Chalice," which has been recently acquired by the Templars and it is believed that The Chalice will bring victory to whichever side has it in their possession; so basically it's The Ark in The Raiders of the Lost Ark, and instead of events leading up to World War II, it's the Third Crusade.

Knowing from somewhere that the Assassin's Creed series had a rich backstory (how else could it have so many sequels that have spanned centuries?), I was ultimately a  little disappointed with the storyline in this game.  A lot of the missions were something a long the lines of, "Get info from this guy."  So you would go to City A, which we'll call Damascus, by way of fast map travel, followed by a linear (not an issue for me) level where you would traverse a city by way of leaping from building-to-building all the while avoiding spike traps and swinging axe pendulums. . . Yes,  apparently 12th century cities in the Middle East were very well equipped to deal with infiltrators.  So you would find the guy, get the info and then move onto City B, which we'll call Jerusalem.

For most of the game, it felt as if I could be playing any action adventure game.  It didn't overly feel like I was playing an Assassin's Creed game, although being the "first" game in the series that I have played, I guess my opinion is a bit void.  Regardless, the story is not what kept me playing the game, but my desire to play Assassin's Creed.

I thought it interesting that there was very little set up for the organization that you are a part of.  The game felt as if I were to have already played through the first game so why then bother with setting up the character and/or the setting?

GAMEPLAY

You can't tell, but the apple and scroll are moving.

 You basically move between glowing points in the play area, occasionally come across a much desired checkpoint, then follow the glowing dots through some traps/hazards, often times jumping over gaps/water/sticky oil slicks, et cetera to the next checkpoint: occasionally you will fight a bad guy(s) and kill them.  That is the basic gist of the game.

The game itself is played (in regards to the DS version) on the top screen while a city map is pictured on the lower screen.  You also have the option to switch out weapons when they become available.  One of the first things I read about was how the touch screen was going to play a part in the game in a way that game elements were not be used in the first game.  This included pick-pocketing which really excited me.  The other mini game was interrogating people, which consisted of tapping numbers on the back at the correct time and pulling an arm up behind the shoulder blades.

The controls themselves were pretty straight forward for this type of game on the DS.  I will add that playing on the 3DS, I had the option to use either the directional pad or the joystick to move around.  I instinctively chose the joystick and much preferred this option to the directional pad as the joystick simply felt more natural. 

While researching AC:AC, one aspect of that stuck in my mind: that a number of reviewers wished that they could move the camera.  Initially I felt that going into this game as a DS game, I knew that there were going to be limitations compared to either a PS3/360 or PC game.  After a short while playing, I understood the desire to have a controllable camera.  The camera does frequently move, but it only moves along with you and you have no control over where it goes and what it does.  There were also times when Altaïr was obscured by a building or while travelling from left to right, Altaïr would be on the far right, unable to see exactly what was ahead of me.  If anything, a button to recenter the camera would have been nice.

A lot of AC:AC is jumping from one thing to another thing.  Things include buildings, pillars, levitating platforms, rope nets, floating platforms, rafter/support beams.  And at times, you even get to jump over things, such as pits, pits filled with spikes, city streets and cobras; although the cobras could be easily dispatched with your sword.  So basically, knowing where you were going to jump was very important and just about half of the time I could not tell either how far away my target was or if I was jumping onto onto something at my own level or below me.  I cannot tell you how many times I over/under jumped a target, but it happened a lot.

I guarantee that you will see this screen a lot.

Ultimately, my biggest issue with the game was the gameplay.  While traversing a beam that I had to climb upon in order to jump to the following rooftop, I would sometimes let go of the beam and fall (often to my death; see above picture), I would wobble off the beam, although still grasping it or I would jump to my target and either make it (more often than not I would make it if the target were a rooftop) or I would miss it, if I were aiming for another beam.

Fighting also became somewhat tedious.  You start out the game with basic attacks and as the game progresses, you (somehow) learn different button mashing combos (X-X-X, X-X-Y, Y-Y, et cetera) as well as a couple differing ways to block and parry (of which I rarely used as I found them to be ineffective; or I was just doing it wrong, which is also very possible).  The system isn't bad, it's just that by the point where you frequently ran across the stronger Templar Knights [There are five different types of Templar that you fight: un-helmeted grunts, helmeted grunts, Templar Knights (with and without shields) and crossbowmen], I would almost exclusively use the X-X-Y combo to kill them (after four to five hits) as they seemed to block everything else I tried and counter attacks never seemed to work.

GRAPHICS

Keeping in mind that this is a DS game that came out six years ago, I liked the graphics.  They fit in with the setting.  All the enemies and NPCs intermingled without one being brighter than the other also meaning that both groups blended well.

My only gripe with the graphics partially relates to not being able to move the camera.  At times I could not tell where the platform was in relation to where I was jumping and I would frequently dying from a missed jump because I couldn't tell what I was looking at.

Of the few cutscenes in the game, those that bookended the game itself, each looked about alright.  They do not really stand up to the cutscenes/graphics of the PS3/360/PC versions, but nobody should be expecting them to hold up to comparison.  They look good for what they are: DS in-game cutscenes from 2008.

Overall though, I was quite pleased with how the game looked.

SOUND & MUSIC

I was happy with how the music sounded.  Sadly, after going through the credits twice, I was unable to find out who composed the music for this release.  Even a pseudo-broad search of the internet (including IMDb, VGMPF and VGMDb) turned nothing up.  It might have been Jesper Kyd, the composer of a number of the entries in the  Assassin's Creed series, but that is just speculation.

I really enjoyed the sound editing for the game too and as is the case here too, there was no sound editor of any sorts to credit here.  A lot of the sound effects, the background noise of the various cities were all very fitting.  I don't know if I would say that I was impressed, although I will leave it by saying that I was very pleased.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Overall, Assassin's Creed: Altaïr's Chronicles was a game.  I played that game and completed that game and that game took me 16 hours and 38 minutes from start to finish, most likely because I died very frequently.  Saying that it was a "good" game might just be a little too much credit.  There were times when I enjoyed what it was that I was playing and other times when I was simply frustrated by the gameplay, level design, camera angle, et cetera and had to put the game down.  If you were to look at my statistics for the game, you will see that I would frequently play the game for about half-an-hour before (having to/needing to) putting it down.

It is only mildly tempting to pick the game up again once I complete the first Assassin's Creed, but I most likely won't.  I guess my recommendation would be that if you haven't played any of the games in this series and you have a DS/3DS, don't spend more than $10 as the end result will most likely just leave you upset.  In the end, Assassin's Creed: Altaïr's Chronicles is a somewhat solid action/adventure game if you don't care about a storyline and can handle/deal with a computer controlled camera and repetitive killing of enemies.


~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Bewildered On Enchanted Ways

Perusing The Electronic Gaming Store

Before I started today, I was a little stuck as to what to talk about.  Then I went to the bathroom and it came to me.  I really want to play Castlevania II: Simon's Quest.  I can't say why this thought popped in my head while I was standing above the toilet, but it did and that got me thinking.  Not only thinking about the Castlevania franchise, but about Nintendo's eShop on the 3DS and all the games that I would like to see in the shop that just aren't there.

My most recent eShop purchase was The Castlevania Adventure and I'll be doing a First Impression with it soon.  Those born after 1989 may not remember this Gameboy release, but when I saw it crop up in the eShop, I got really excited and purchased it.  I never played it in its original Gameboy release and this gave me the opportunity to put it with all the other Castlevania games that I have and can't beat; although that list isn't very long.  Right now I'm hoping that Nintendo and Konami will release the rest of the the Gameboy Castlevania's, of which there are a total of three: The Castlevania Adventure, Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge and Castlevania Legends.  The point is, Nintendo and Konami really should consider releasing not only these three Gameboy games, but also the three NES Castlevania games as well. I was really excited back in 2004 when the first game was released on Gameboy Advance and sad when they didn't continue to release the other two.  I am aware that all the NES Castlevanias were released via Wii's Virtual Console, but I don't have a Wii.  And besides, these games are perfectly suited for a 3DS eShop release.  Especially with Castlevania: Lord of Shadows: Mirror of Fate being released on the 3DS in early March.

Castlevania aside, there're a couple other games that are available via the eShop, one of them being Night Sky, which is somewhat of a simplistic puzzle game visually akin to LIMBO, but with a different color palette.  I've played Night Sky on my PC with keyboard controls but playing on the 3DS with a touch screen would be perfect.  In the game you're moving an orb through a level fraught with. . . well, pits.  It's a game that I'd really like to play on the 3DS, but since I'm cheap, I'm not ready to spend the $9.99 for a game that I already own on another platform.

On the other side of the price spectrum, is a game I just saw called Gunman Clive which is priced at a paltry $1.99.  Now, you could just look at the pictures from the game and be "meh'd," or you can watch the video and be "awe'd" and greatly amused:

What immediatly comes to my mind, is Elevator Action and Contra, and those two games together, sound like they'd be awesome.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Starring Clive Owen

First Impressions: Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP

Another Humble Bundle game!  The Humble Bundles are the best thing ever.  By the way, there's one going on right now.  11 more days. Upon reviewing my files, I recently discovered that I've bought five Humble Bundles.  Which probably accounts for about 35 of the 50 or so games in my steam account.  I'll probably never play them all, but I'm glad I gave Sword and Sorcery EP a look.  So far, at 2 hours in, I am having a great time.

The game is beautiful in a neat 'retro' way that captures my heart.  I can't explain it, but the graphics and design really mesmerize me.  The visuals are great, the sounds and the animation are also great.  Everything seems to fit in the world, and no element clashes to pull me out of my absorption in the game.  I've enjoyed the sound so much that I decided to download the soundtrack (another perk of the humble bundles).

The story follows a character known as the Scythian.  She is wandering around looking for something called the Trigon, which appears to simply be a triangle.  Except using the 'gon' suffix like a pentagon or septagon.  She encounters some people along the way to help her and some others who are trying to hinder her.  And the whole time the graphics and sound are just great.  

The controls took a little getting used to.  My only real problem was that I didn't realize that I could double-click to direct  the Scythian to walk or interact with items.  I thougth I had to hold the button down, which does work, but it also is the same action that I use to look around the screen.  Mixing the two of these up was frustrating, but since I figured it out, the controls have given me no trouble at all. 

The name is kind of stupid, and so far the writing is pretty stupid as well.   For example, the lumberjack that the Scythian meets early on is named "logfella."  And then the dog she encounters is named "dogfella."  The thing about the dialogue is that it seems to be speaking directly to the player, and not to the Scythian.  The other characters in the story will speak of the Scythian and not to her, and the Scythian herself uses the royal 'we' whenever expressing herself verbally.  After playing the game for a couple of hours, the dialogue has started to become charming, instead of annoying.  I think this comes from the consistency of the silliness.  The game seems to break the fourth wall as a rule, instead of an exception, and this somehow works.  

There are some themes that I don't really understand.  One is the 'EP' theme.  I am guessing that the inclusion of EP in the title is to indicate that the game won't be very long (I have been playing 2 hours and have 47% completion) and that maybe it indicates that the soundtrack won't be very long, as an vinyl record EP runs a standard of about 25 minutes.  The menu screen for the game prominently features an image of an EP vinyl record.  The record reacts to the players menu choices.  Another theme is the triangle, or 'trigon' theme.  Triangles feature in all of the menus, and also as the main source of conflict for the Scythian.    

I want to throw in that the lead character, the Scythian,  appears to be female, based on the sound of her grunts as she swings her sword. However, she is not portrayed as 'super-feminine' - a nice departure from so many of our video game heroines.

The game is available for eight bucks on steam, but I got it for much less, given it was a Humble Bundle.  I probably dropped $20 bucks on Humble Bundle V, and still the games were about $3 apiece.  hells yeah.

-D

I want to also make a quick mention that there was a reference to Al Jaffee in this game.  Yes, that Al Jaffee.  I think that was the precise moment that the silly dialogue began to win me over.  

Also, I want to mention again that the Humble Bundle 7 is out right now and has 11 days to go.  Pay what you want, can't beat that price!

Dear Esther (and the value of patience and follow-through)

Today, I am posting a stream-of consciousness.  

Today, I finally played Dear Esther

Today, I beat Dear Esther (2.4 hrs)

Today, I learned a valuable lesson about patience and follow-through.

Today, when I was playing Dear Esther, I spent the first hour or so struggling with the collision detection.  I wanted to walk to places that the game seemed to not want to let me.  But it wasn't clear.  "This rock seems no larger or more difficult to scale than any other rock. And yet, I cannot pass over it." Alright, fine, I'll swim around.  "Which button is to swim?  Okay seems to be working, but hey, why am I drowning?  Which button was it?  I'm pressing that button.  What the fuck?!  Stop drowning!"

Today, I said, to myself, things such as this:  "fuck this game.  This game is stupid, I hate this game.  I am so pissed off!  Raahhhh!"  

Today, I asked: why was there no sound?  This game is so nice visually, why isn't there any sound?!  This is so dumb.  

Today, I broke with the writing convention I have been employing.  

Okay... I guess I've got it.  I'll just keep going on the sort of path-like spaces.  Path of least resistance.  Just keep moving forward, don't worry about what I'm missing...  Well, shit.  It looks like I'm actually getting somewhere.  That's nice.  Lala la, I think I want to explore over here.  Dammit... fucking rocks.  Oh, hey, maybe I should go over there.  Yeah, that's it.  Okay... la la la.

Oh wow.  That's really pretty.  This is pretty damned cool.  Finally!  This is really working for me.  Okay, I see, it makes sense that I can't run or do anything, really.  If I moved to fast, I'd miss out on this stuff.  Dang, I think this game is kind of like, pretty cool!  Still no sound though, what's the deal?

...oh.  My headphones were plugged in.  ... oops...
...
...
...


Okay, this game is beautiful, I love this game.  I have to play it again now, because I missed out on the sound, so like, half the immersion.  Oh well, I don't think it's long.

What a great game, I'm going to recommend this to everybody.

...
...
...
So, yeah, I pushed through a lot of frustration to get through Dear Esther.  If I had given in to the frustration I felt for the first 30-45 minutes or so, I would have missed out on what turned out to be a great game.  Really great game, truly!   I can only recommend to people that, during the early part of the game-  Don't bother trying to swim.  It will only lead to heartache.  Also: check to see if your headphones are plugged in.