"So many minds, all talking, all dying!"
Feb. 7th, 2010 05:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nano_mooseI was going to post this gigantic gamebabble post for Australia Day but the koala round-up went for longer than it usually does this year. I dunno, man, they’re quick little bastards.
So, about that Assassin’s Creed 2.
It is so nice to have my faith in a game rewarded. Man, the improvement over the original is all the more startling considering how little is different – you’re still a dude in the future pretending to be an assassin in the past who has anachronistic free-running skills, can stab people in the neck with his wrist and mysteriously disappear into a crowd, despite wearing an even more impractical outfit. Except this time the assassin is likeable, the mission structure has gone from being utterly pants to completely awesome, the mechanics have been tweaked to perfection and the tasks have actual rewards.
Also, it is very pretty.
- I don’t know whose idea it was to add a sarcastic British character who writes sarcastic British database entries about historical figures and locations as you find them, but whoever you are, please accept this soul with my gratitude. (Oh, it’s not my soul, I just found it somewhere. I don’t know where mine went. It might have been sold to your bosses.)
- Ezio, Ezio, Ezio, you are kind of a jackass and it is wonderful. Just go right ahead and announce your full name and motives in front of a huge crowd directly after assassinating a prominent public figure, you ridiculous boy.
- Also. His voice. Is really good. Oh my god when he’s young he sounds young and as he gets older his voice deepens and when he’s upset he sounds upset and oh my god it’s such a relief after “Too Cool to Vocally Inflect” Altair.
- Guys, guys, did you know Venice is really pretty? It’s very pretty!
- So I think to myself, “What a wonderful world Man, the voice-acting in the messages from Subject Sixteen is damn good, I wonder who the actor is?” and I look it up and it’s CAM CLARKE. CAM FREAKING LIQUID SNAKE CLARKE. WHAT THE EFF. He really knocked that one out of the park; I ended up tearing up over the poor crazy man.
- On that point, kittens to the first person to write disturbing minimalist Subject-Sixteen-Gradually-Losing-His-Mind stream-of-consciousness fic. The same applies to The Saga of Shaun Hastings’ IP-Ban from Wikipedia for Failing to Maintain Objectivity (as Compiled by Rebecca Crane for Her Personal Amusement).
You know, it’s probably fortunate that AC2 managed to finally break me of my Thief habits. I probably wouldn't have gotten past Prototype's opening mission, otherwise.
It isn’t the sort of game where it’s helpful to avoid killing people, or display subtlety, or conserve resources, or have any sense of empathy for the hapless fools who impede you in reaching your goal as you mow them down -
Hey, look, it is really hard to tell the difference between an infected civilian and a regular civilian when you’re in a tank! I swear I was otherwise the very nicest flesh-eating humanoid abomination I could be! …Except for all the time I spent skipping zombies across the river.
At any rate, the annoying thing about Prototype – actually, there are a lot of annoying things about Prototype, but this is the one most prominent in my mind at the moment - anyway, the most annoying thing about it is that it’s actually good.
Oh, playing it for the story, I can tell you solemnly not to play it for the story. (The main campaign is confusing and disjointed and the Web of Intrigue, while stylistically interesting, mostly works because it’s meant to be confusing and disjointed. Although it did hold my interest tightly enough that I stuck with it through some really frustrating moments and could be distracted from anything, including imminent death, by the sight of a character I could nom for backstory.)
Oh, Alex is not particularly likable. (And not because he eats people. I could deal with that. Well, he isn’t human, and he’s got to get all that energy from somewhere; absorbing living matter to shore up biomass makes about as much sense* as any health restoration in any video game anywhere. I was even virtuous enough to get the “Nice Guy” Achievement and avoid eating civilians at all. Nope, it’s mostly because he’s an asshole. The only people in the setting less charming than him are everybody else and they’re mostly Lovecraftian plague monsters, mad scientists or the Blackwatch, whose members were the ones who ticked the ‘psychopath’ box on the military sign-up forms and are therefore both homicidal and total idiots. I may have a worrying fondness for fictional murderous bastards and hood-wearing jerkfaces, but not when they’re the entire game. Except Alex’s sister, who is adorable, and Alex’s doctor friend, whom I felt very sorry for; Alex disturbs me sometimes and I’m the one pulling his strings.
*i.e. none.
In an odd way it’s the first game I’ve ever played where the player character is just a flat out vicious dick who’s only the hero because everyone else is worse. It’s not a parody like Overlord, ambiguous like Thief, a choice like any BioWare RPG or a tragedy like Silent Hill 2: Mercer is a monster, and he damn well knows it. He’s not very happy about being a monster as indicated by the gory murder of everyone responsible for making him one, but he’s disturbingly quick to make “kill and/or eat” his default solution to problems. Though, he does become a tiny bit heroic. In the sense of...you remember how comic book heroes were in the Nineties? Like that, but with more clothes, fewer pouches and a plausible physique.)
Oh, the game decides, about a third of the way through and for no visible reason, to turn off most of Alex’s superpowers and make him fight a boss without them. (This is a very silly thing to do if your game is built around handing the players great power and allowing them to be totally irresponsible with it.)
Yet, really, it’s not a bad game. It’s noisy, exploding, forgettable, superheroic-with-the-ethics-turned-off, marginally mindless but generally solid fun. I don’t think I enjoy it without reservation – it’s smarter than it looks but it has a large helping of technical and creative issues, it’s stupidly violent and it alternates between going too far and not going too far enough – but I got it for far less than the usual price and thus cannot bitch.
I can, however, mock, and mock ceaselessly.
- The closest point of comparison I have isn’t actually Assassin’s Creed, because Assassin’s Creed has at least a passing acquaintance with realism – it’s much more similar to the adaptation of the Spider-Man 2 movie. Alex is, basically, like if you put Venom, Wolverine, Altair and a zombie-making virus in a blender and then watched the result smash through the wall of your kitchen and go on a car-throwing rampage as you scream “YOU ARE MY OWN CREATION! I COMMAND YOU TO STOP!” He smiles about as much. In fact, I get the feeling the developers made him up at least in part so they could win a few fanboy wars.
- An hour in, I’d used up all my variations on “Braaaaaaaaains!” and “ALEX CRUSH STUPID TAXI!” and “Come back here so I can eat you. I mean hug you. Hugging is what I meant!” and had to resort to boggling silently at the animations. They’re – they’re violent. They’re really, really violent. Like, to the point where it becomes physiologically implausible. After a while I had to wonder why it wasn’t bothering me more than it did, because normally viscera just ain’t my bag; I’d usually have given upon finding out you can’t even move without Alex punching somebody in the face.*
Sadly, I have a definite feeling the superpowered parkour was all it took to make me forgive it - Kratos may have been just as violent, but he couldn’t run up skyscrapers. Perhaps I was playing it wrong, but I got bored killing stuff and instead found most of my enjoyment backflipping off things. Oh, I dutifully murdered everything I was pointed at in the story missions and found it good, but off the clock it was running up walls, jumping off high buildings, gliding around, accidentally crushing cars and giggling like a schoolgirl.
*He cannot comprehend subtlety. I guess it’s not a skill you need when you can juggle buses.
- All right, yes, fine: the Patsy ability is glorious, glorious schadenfreude. Especially when the soldiers start congratulating themselves on taking me down over the bullet-ridden corpse of some hapless Blackwatch soldier as I’m exiting the base in the commander’s body with my shiny new grenade launcher, trying not to cackle.
- Poor Dana Mercer. Her first scene goes like this:
Blackwatch Soldier: Journalism student, huh? Haven’t seen your brother in five years, eh? That’s just the sort of seditious lies that get people shot dead in their homes.
Alex: If I can interject here YOUR HEAD GO SMUSH NOW
Blackwatch Soldier: Hey that’s my favourite headughk
Dana: TRAUMA.
Alex: Don’t be scared, I won’t hurt you! …And that’ll probably wash off.
Dana: …TRAUMA.
And her life just goes downhill from there.
- Same with Doctor Ragland, actually. First, when Dana mentions Ragland’s name, Alex appears to have every intention of eating him until she points out Ragland isn’t actually an employee of Gentek. When they meet, Ragland assumes Alex is from Blackwatch, and then finds out he’s something even more dangerous. Then Alex stuffs him in a tank and drags him into an infected military base.
- To be slightly serious for a moment: yes, Dana’s storyline is a very cheap way of telling us that Alex isn’t totally inhuman or beyond sympathy. But, dammit, I kind of like her anyway. I like her incredibly foul mouth and her unswerving loyalty and her insulting the Blackwatch to their faces and that she serves a genuinely useful purpose in the storyline despite not having superpowers or military training. I like that Alex has no idea how the fuck he’s supposed to interact with her because he doesn’t want to terrify her and he’s so very very bad at not being terrifying. I like that Dana is the only person to whom he apologizes for being a crazy asshole and the only person he touches without violent intent.
SO DAMMIT WHY DID SHE FALL OUT OF THE PLOT
- Hey, Mercer. Mercer, listen. Word to the wise: telling Dana the people you kill talk to you inside your head afterwards, as sane-sounding explanations go, ISN’T ONE. I DON’T CARE THAT IT’S TRUE; YOU ARE TRYING TO REASSURE HER YOU’RE NOT MADE ENTIRELY OUT OF WHACKOFACE oh you crazy virus man.
- (I like Cross, too, if only because he turns out to be both the brains and the soul of Blackwatch and plays Mercer like a violin which is awesome, even if he tricked him into being the test subject for the most annoying game mechanic ever. It’s too bad he gets eaten by the final boss; I would have liked to have known more about him.)
- “Dana! Noooo! I need you to retain the player’s sympathy!”
- Another criticism: really, would it have been too much effort to program a ‘put down safely’ option along with the ‘throw’ and ‘eat’ options when you hoist an NPC into the air by the neck? If the freaking Incredible Hulk could do it, why can’t Alex?
- Also he dies far too often for a protagonist who can survive a rocket to the face. You guys, it got to the point where he made the same speech about how the military could never stop him five times because he kept getting killed by them. It was a hilarious speech, though, because the voice actor just abandons all restraint and starts ROARING AT THE MIKE IN VERBAL CAPSLOCK. Said actor also looks disturbingly like Young Ocelot in his offical photo. It's bizarre.
- Alex. It’s nice to see you have a sense of humour, and that you can actually emote, and have expressions and things. Please don’t ever smile again. Augh creepy.
- “I have to ask, Alex, is there any particular reason you’ve trapped a Hunter in my morgue? I don’t recall asking for a pet.”
“Aah, you know, Doc, he followed me home. Because I need to kill it, and I need you to figure out how.”
“Oh. I was going to name him Blasphemy.”
“Yeah, that’s great, tell it that while I distract it and you check for weaknesses. Most of them I can break their spines without too much trouble, but not these ones. I’d like to know why so I can fix that.”
“Alex, I estimate it as being twice my height and six times my weight and you want me to…look it over? As in examine it closely? As I recall, I’m not the one here who can regrow limbs.”
“Well, the way I see it, Doc, you got two options. You either go in there with that thing where yeah, it might eat you, or you stay out here, and I will definitely eat you.”
“…You make a persuasive argument.”
“I’m known for that. Now get in there.”
- In a weird way, the Web of Intrigue videos reminded me of Thief. (Well actually everything in the entire world reminds of Thief, but this time there’s a basis for it rather than just that I love that game like puppies.) Specifically, the old briefings and how they weren’t coherent scenes, just a lot of little pieces of context. Garrett mentions a place; a map of it fades in. He mentions vaguely looking for information and there’d be a picture of his informant or him passing a bribe. He’d say he was ‘suspicious’ of a visitor, and there’d be a shot of him pinning the guy to a wall with his dagger.
There were quite a few scenes like that in the Web, and they were the ones I found most striking. Like when they begin talking about PARIAH and show pictures of a little boy playing with blocks, in a military complex, surrounded by soldiers and ten-foot-high walls topped with barbed wire. Or the sequence of images when they describe Alex’s consuming abilities: a scientist slumped over his desk, a security keypad smeared with blood, and Alex’s hooded silhouette. Or all those shots of the people used in the early experiments: old photos with their eyes and faces scribbled out.
Of course then they fail to have a single female character so much as speak in any of them even though there’s over a hundred videos. DAMMIT GAME INDUSTRY.
- Roughly ninety percent of the game is narrated by Alex to another character.
I’ve decided this involves him going into laborious detail describing all my faffing about in between missions (“And then I jumped off the same building three times and then I spent half an hour chasing shiny blue orbs and then I -”) and the other guy every so often pulling a Farah (“- you were spotted stalking a Blackwatch commander and riddled with lead.”
“…No I wasn’t.”
“Mercer. Since I obviously haven’t succeeded in multiple attempts on your life, allow my delusions for just one goddamn moment.”)
- I imagine Doctor Ragland felt pleasant astonishment upon discovering Alex cared about Dana. I imagine this was overridden by total searing panic when Ragland was made personally responsible for her and he began wondering what Alex would do to him if anything happened to her.
- Me: Man, Alex kind of needs to be punched really hard in the face.
Blackwatch Commander: (shoots Alex in the head)
Me: …That works.
- Attention Supreme Infected:
When you have your enemy in your hands and your preferred kill requires melee range and his advantages happen to be agility and speed, don’t throw him out of reach.
I hope your impending decapitation teaches you a valuable lesson.
Regards,
Alex/ZEUS/Blacklight/DX-1118/…Whatever. I’m losing track.
- My Dear Father,
You, similarly, could examine the wisdom of becoming unaccountably chatty when your targets are at your mercy.
Also, stop throwing missiles at me.
Regards (and sneering),
The Supreme Infected
P.S. The lingering voice of my host says that you have his permission to execute any Blackwatch officer who enquires after the wellbeing of an infected creature, for all the good it does him.
P.P.S. You suck.
P.P.P.S. Seriously quit it with the missiles.
- Both You Slimy Germy Bastards:
STOP EATING US WHILE WE’RE EVACUATING.
Sincerely,
The United States Marine Corps
- Even though Alex woke up on an autopsy slab, tore a steel door off its hinges with his bare hands, caught a taxi out of the air and destroyed a helicopter with it, devoured a dude accidentally then devoured a lot of other dudes on purpose, lands jumps in a manner to which the word “crater” can be applied, has tantrums to which the words “horrific death toll” can be applied, develops at least three extra senses, shifts shape like most people change clothes, has an entire army and a crack scientific team tasked solely with killing him and making it stick, appears totally immune to bullets, often has tentacles and spines and spiny tentacles, is perfectly capable of fighting horrible giant flesh-beasts hand-to-hand, finds the only other being whose condition is comparable to his own can unleash a zombie horde at whim, has voices in his head on a scale of multitudes, and punches tanks to make them explode…it comes as an enormous shock to him when he’s told he isn’t human.
His personality profile, by the way, says he’s super-intelligent.
- I also love the way Alex walks because it’s ridiculous, especially when he’s not in his usual body. His fists are clenched and he’s perpetually scowling anyway, but when he walks he seems to be trying to achieve motion through the sheer force of his raaaaaaage.
- Oh, and I've discovered I hate most of the fandom with the scorching nuclear fury of a thousand suns.
Long story short, play Assassin’s Creed 2 unless you think Assassin’s Creed 2 doesn’t have enough blood or anthropophagi or villains or something.
One final thing: Attention, bastardisers of Dante’s Inferno. That…is not quite how you effectively mock a fellow developer. Please stop before you dig yourselves in even further.
Here’s how you mock a fellow developer.
So, about that Assassin’s Creed 2.
It is so nice to have my faith in a game rewarded. Man, the improvement over the original is all the more startling considering how little is different – you’re still a dude in the future pretending to be an assassin in the past who has anachronistic free-running skills, can stab people in the neck with his wrist and mysteriously disappear into a crowd, despite wearing an even more impractical outfit. Except this time the assassin is likeable, the mission structure has gone from being utterly pants to completely awesome, the mechanics have been tweaked to perfection and the tasks have actual rewards.
Also, it is very pretty.
- I don’t know whose idea it was to add a sarcastic British character who writes sarcastic British database entries about historical figures and locations as you find them, but whoever you are, please accept this soul with my gratitude. (Oh, it’s not my soul, I just found it somewhere. I don’t know where mine went. It might have been sold to your bosses.)
- Ezio, Ezio, Ezio, you are kind of a jackass and it is wonderful. Just go right ahead and announce your full name and motives in front of a huge crowd directly after assassinating a prominent public figure, you ridiculous boy.
- Also. His voice. Is really good. Oh my god when he’s young he sounds young and as he gets older his voice deepens and when he’s upset he sounds upset and oh my god it’s such a relief after “Too Cool to Vocally Inflect” Altair.
- Guys, guys, did you know Venice is really pretty? It’s very pretty!
- So I think to myself, “
- On that point, kittens to the first person to write disturbing minimalist Subject-Sixteen-Gradually-Losing-His-Mind stream-of-consciousness fic. The same applies to The Saga of Shaun Hastings’ IP-Ban from Wikipedia for Failing to Maintain Objectivity (as Compiled by Rebecca Crane for Her Personal Amusement).
You know, it’s probably fortunate that AC2 managed to finally break me of my Thief habits. I probably wouldn't have gotten past Prototype's opening mission, otherwise.
It isn’t the sort of game where it’s helpful to avoid killing people, or display subtlety, or conserve resources, or have any sense of empathy for the hapless fools who impede you in reaching your goal as you mow them down -
Hey, look, it is really hard to tell the difference between an infected civilian and a regular civilian when you’re in a tank! I swear I was otherwise the very nicest flesh-eating humanoid abomination I could be! …Except for all the time I spent skipping zombies across the river.
At any rate, the annoying thing about Prototype – actually, there are a lot of annoying things about Prototype, but this is the one most prominent in my mind at the moment - anyway, the most annoying thing about it is that it’s actually good.
Oh, playing it for the story, I can tell you solemnly not to play it for the story. (The main campaign is confusing and disjointed and the Web of Intrigue, while stylistically interesting, mostly works because it’s meant to be confusing and disjointed. Although it did hold my interest tightly enough that I stuck with it through some really frustrating moments and could be distracted from anything, including imminent death, by the sight of a character I could nom for backstory.)
Oh, Alex is not particularly likable. (And not because he eats people. I could deal with that. Well, he isn’t human, and he’s got to get all that energy from somewhere; absorbing living matter to shore up biomass makes about as much sense* as any health restoration in any video game anywhere. I was even virtuous enough to get the “Nice Guy” Achievement and avoid eating civilians at all. Nope, it’s mostly because he’s an asshole. The only people in the setting less charming than him are everybody else and they’re mostly Lovecraftian plague monsters, mad scientists or the Blackwatch, whose members were the ones who ticked the ‘psychopath’ box on the military sign-up forms and are therefore both homicidal and total idiots. I may have a worrying fondness for fictional murderous bastards and hood-wearing jerkfaces, but not when they’re the entire game. Except Alex’s sister, who is adorable, and Alex’s doctor friend, whom I felt very sorry for; Alex disturbs me sometimes and I’m the one pulling his strings.
*i.e. none.
In an odd way it’s the first game I’ve ever played where the player character is just a flat out vicious dick who’s only the hero because everyone else is worse. It’s not a parody like Overlord, ambiguous like Thief, a choice like any BioWare RPG or a tragedy like Silent Hill 2: Mercer is a monster, and he damn well knows it. He’s not very happy about being a monster as indicated by the gory murder of everyone responsible for making him one, but he’s disturbingly quick to make “kill and/or eat” his default solution to problems. Though, he does become a tiny bit heroic. In the sense of...you remember how comic book heroes were in the Nineties? Like that, but with more clothes, fewer pouches and a plausible physique.)
Oh, the game decides, about a third of the way through and for no visible reason, to turn off most of Alex’s superpowers and make him fight a boss without them. (This is a very silly thing to do if your game is built around handing the players great power and allowing them to be totally irresponsible with it.)
Yet, really, it’s not a bad game. It’s noisy, exploding, forgettable, superheroic-with-the-ethics-turned-off, marginally mindless but generally solid fun. I don’t think I enjoy it without reservation – it’s smarter than it looks but it has a large helping of technical and creative issues, it’s stupidly violent and it alternates between going too far and not going too far enough – but I got it for far less than the usual price and thus cannot bitch.
I can, however, mock, and mock ceaselessly.
- The closest point of comparison I have isn’t actually Assassin’s Creed, because Assassin’s Creed has at least a passing acquaintance with realism – it’s much more similar to the adaptation of the Spider-Man 2 movie. Alex is, basically, like if you put Venom, Wolverine, Altair and a zombie-making virus in a blender and then watched the result smash through the wall of your kitchen and go on a car-throwing rampage as you scream “YOU ARE MY OWN CREATION! I COMMAND YOU TO STOP!” He smiles about as much. In fact, I get the feeling the developers made him up at least in part so they could win a few fanboy wars.
- An hour in, I’d used up all my variations on “Braaaaaaaaains!” and “ALEX CRUSH STUPID TAXI!” and “Come back here so I can eat you. I mean hug you. Hugging is what I meant!” and had to resort to boggling silently at the animations. They’re – they’re violent. They’re really, really violent. Like, to the point where it becomes physiologically implausible. After a while I had to wonder why it wasn’t bothering me more than it did, because normally viscera just ain’t my bag; I’d usually have given upon finding out you can’t even move without Alex punching somebody in the face.*
Sadly, I have a definite feeling the superpowered parkour was all it took to make me forgive it - Kratos may have been just as violent, but he couldn’t run up skyscrapers. Perhaps I was playing it wrong, but I got bored killing stuff and instead found most of my enjoyment backflipping off things. Oh, I dutifully murdered everything I was pointed at in the story missions and found it good, but off the clock it was running up walls, jumping off high buildings, gliding around, accidentally crushing cars and giggling like a schoolgirl.
*He cannot comprehend subtlety. I guess it’s not a skill you need when you can juggle buses.
- All right, yes, fine: the Patsy ability is glorious, glorious schadenfreude. Especially when the soldiers start congratulating themselves on taking me down over the bullet-ridden corpse of some hapless Blackwatch soldier as I’m exiting the base in the commander’s body with my shiny new grenade launcher, trying not to cackle.
- Poor Dana Mercer. Her first scene goes like this:
Blackwatch Soldier: Journalism student, huh? Haven’t seen your brother in five years, eh? That’s just the sort of seditious lies that get people shot dead in their homes.
Alex: If I can interject here YOUR HEAD GO SMUSH NOW
Blackwatch Soldier: Hey that’s my favourite headughk
Dana: TRAUMA.
Alex: Don’t be scared, I won’t hurt you! …And that’ll probably wash off.
Dana: …TRAUMA.
And her life just goes downhill from there.
- Same with Doctor Ragland, actually. First, when Dana mentions Ragland’s name, Alex appears to have every intention of eating him until she points out Ragland isn’t actually an employee of Gentek. When they meet, Ragland assumes Alex is from Blackwatch, and then finds out he’s something even more dangerous. Then Alex stuffs him in a tank and drags him into an infected military base.
- To be slightly serious for a moment: yes, Dana’s storyline is a very cheap way of telling us that Alex isn’t totally inhuman or beyond sympathy. But, dammit, I kind of like her anyway. I like her incredibly foul mouth and her unswerving loyalty and her insulting the Blackwatch to their faces and that she serves a genuinely useful purpose in the storyline despite not having superpowers or military training. I like that Alex has no idea how the fuck he’s supposed to interact with her because he doesn’t want to terrify her and he’s so very very bad at not being terrifying. I like that Dana is the only person to whom he apologizes for being a crazy asshole and the only person he touches without violent intent.
SO DAMMIT WHY DID SHE FALL OUT OF THE PLOT
- Hey, Mercer. Mercer, listen. Word to the wise: telling Dana the people you kill talk to you inside your head afterwards, as sane-sounding explanations go, ISN’T ONE. I DON’T CARE THAT IT’S TRUE; YOU ARE TRYING TO REASSURE HER YOU’RE NOT MADE ENTIRELY OUT OF WHACKOFACE oh you crazy virus man.
- (I like Cross, too, if only because he turns out to be both the brains and the soul of Blackwatch and plays Mercer like a violin which is awesome, even if he tricked him into being the test subject for the most annoying game mechanic ever. It’s too bad he gets eaten by the final boss; I would have liked to have known more about him.)
- “Dana! Noooo! I need you to retain the player’s sympathy!”
- Another criticism: really, would it have been too much effort to program a ‘put down safely’ option along with the ‘throw’ and ‘eat’ options when you hoist an NPC into the air by the neck? If the freaking Incredible Hulk could do it, why can’t Alex?
- Also he dies far too often for a protagonist who can survive a rocket to the face. You guys, it got to the point where he made the same speech about how the military could never stop him five times because he kept getting killed by them. It was a hilarious speech, though, because the voice actor just abandons all restraint and starts ROARING AT THE MIKE IN VERBAL CAPSLOCK. Said actor also looks disturbingly like Young Ocelot in his offical photo. It's bizarre.
- Alex. It’s nice to see you have a sense of humour, and that you can actually emote, and have expressions and things. Please don’t ever smile again. Augh creepy.
- “I have to ask, Alex, is there any particular reason you’ve trapped a Hunter in my morgue? I don’t recall asking for a pet.”
“Aah, you know, Doc, he followed me home. Because I need to kill it, and I need you to figure out how.”
“Oh. I was going to name him Blasphemy.”
“Yeah, that’s great, tell it that while I distract it and you check for weaknesses. Most of them I can break their spines without too much trouble, but not these ones. I’d like to know why so I can fix that.”
“Alex, I estimate it as being twice my height and six times my weight and you want me to…look it over? As in examine it closely? As I recall, I’m not the one here who can regrow limbs.”
“Well, the way I see it, Doc, you got two options. You either go in there with that thing where yeah, it might eat you, or you stay out here, and I will definitely eat you.”
“…You make a persuasive argument.”
“I’m known for that. Now get in there.”
- In a weird way, the Web of Intrigue videos reminded me of Thief. (Well actually everything in the entire world reminds of Thief, but this time there’s a basis for it rather than just that I love that game like puppies.) Specifically, the old briefings and how they weren’t coherent scenes, just a lot of little pieces of context. Garrett mentions a place; a map of it fades in. He mentions vaguely looking for information and there’d be a picture of his informant or him passing a bribe. He’d say he was ‘suspicious’ of a visitor, and there’d be a shot of him pinning the guy to a wall with his dagger.
There were quite a few scenes like that in the Web, and they were the ones I found most striking. Like when they begin talking about PARIAH and show pictures of a little boy playing with blocks, in a military complex, surrounded by soldiers and ten-foot-high walls topped with barbed wire. Or the sequence of images when they describe Alex’s consuming abilities: a scientist slumped over his desk, a security keypad smeared with blood, and Alex’s hooded silhouette. Or all those shots of the people used in the early experiments: old photos with their eyes and faces scribbled out.
Of course then they fail to have a single female character so much as speak in any of them even though there’s over a hundred videos. DAMMIT GAME INDUSTRY.
- Roughly ninety percent of the game is narrated by Alex to another character.
I’ve decided this involves him going into laborious detail describing all my faffing about in between missions (“And then I jumped off the same building three times and then I spent half an hour chasing shiny blue orbs and then I -”) and the other guy every so often pulling a Farah (“- you were spotted stalking a Blackwatch commander and riddled with lead.”
“…No I wasn’t.”
“Mercer. Since I obviously haven’t succeeded in multiple attempts on your life, allow my delusions for just one goddamn moment.”)
- I imagine Doctor Ragland felt pleasant astonishment upon discovering Alex cared about Dana. I imagine this was overridden by total searing panic when Ragland was made personally responsible for her and he began wondering what Alex would do to him if anything happened to her.
- Me: Man, Alex kind of needs to be punched really hard in the face.
Blackwatch Commander: (shoots Alex in the head)
Me: …That works.
- Attention Supreme Infected:
When you have your enemy in your hands and your preferred kill requires melee range and his advantages happen to be agility and speed, don’t throw him out of reach.
I hope your impending decapitation teaches you a valuable lesson.
Regards,
Alex/ZEUS/Blacklight/DX-1118/…Whatever. I’m losing track.
- My Dear Father,
You, similarly, could examine the wisdom of becoming unaccountably chatty when your targets are at your mercy.
Also, stop throwing missiles at me.
Regards (and sneering),
The Supreme Infected
P.S. The lingering voice of my host says that you have his permission to execute any Blackwatch officer who enquires after the wellbeing of an infected creature, for all the good it does him.
P.P.S. You suck.
P.P.P.S. Seriously quit it with the missiles.
- Both You Slimy Germy Bastards:
STOP EATING US WHILE WE’RE EVACUATING.
Sincerely,
The United States Marine Corps
- Even though Alex woke up on an autopsy slab, tore a steel door off its hinges with his bare hands, caught a taxi out of the air and destroyed a helicopter with it, devoured a dude accidentally then devoured a lot of other dudes on purpose, lands jumps in a manner to which the word “crater” can be applied, has tantrums to which the words “horrific death toll” can be applied, develops at least three extra senses, shifts shape like most people change clothes, has an entire army and a crack scientific team tasked solely with killing him and making it stick, appears totally immune to bullets, often has tentacles and spines and spiny tentacles, is perfectly capable of fighting horrible giant flesh-beasts hand-to-hand, finds the only other being whose condition is comparable to his own can unleash a zombie horde at whim, has voices in his head on a scale of multitudes, and punches tanks to make them explode…it comes as an enormous shock to him when he’s told he isn’t human.
His personality profile, by the way, says he’s super-intelligent.
- I also love the way Alex walks because it’s ridiculous, especially when he’s not in his usual body. His fists are clenched and he’s perpetually scowling anyway, but when he walks he seems to be trying to achieve motion through the sheer force of his raaaaaaage.
- Oh, and I've discovered I hate most of the fandom with the scorching nuclear fury of a thousand suns.
Long story short, play Assassin’s Creed 2 unless you think Assassin’s Creed 2 doesn’t have enough blood or anthropophagi or villains or something.
One final thing: Attention, bastardisers of Dante’s Inferno. That…is not quite how you effectively mock a fellow developer. Please stop before you dig yourselves in even further.
Here’s how you mock a fellow developer.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-02-08 05:29 am (UTC)But! The real reason why I am commenting is to say that I am now really tempted to get AC2. And Baco agreed with me, so. Possibly it is time to start saving up for a PS3 and some games.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-10 12:23 am (UTC)YAAAAAAAY but, uh, I warn you it may not actually make any sense if you don't play the first game, and the first game is kinda of, uh. Broken. Gameplay-wise. If you like I could maybe do another plot post?
no subject
Date: 2010-02-11 02:27 am (UTC)And yeah! Plot post for the win! You know, if you have time. And want to. why did it have to be broken, the premise seems totally promising, wah wah