Missed Opportunities

Mephisto Mori/ February 18, 2014/ Video Games/ 0 comments

I’ve had nightmares the last few nights.  Not my typical night terrors about darkness and demons or anything like that.  I just keep waking up with this anxiety over some of the things I didn’t get to mention during my panel on Friday.  I have three big issues I keep going over in my head.

In particular Assassin’s Creed has been haunting me.

I could’ve ranted for possibly 15 straight minutes about all the ways the game has gotten progressively worse.

Here are some bullet points: 

– Sid Meier’s pirates SIM is stupid.  You basically spend half the game walking around a mostly empty world basically singing sea shanties.

– Traditional ideas on what a pirate is, historically what a pirate was, and what an assassin per the franchise is supposed to be all conflict in horrible ways.  Ways that are noticeable in the schizophrenic execution of gameplay and themes.

– Ripping off the Batman scheme was a stupid patchwork fix to the franchises horrible combat controls.  A gameplay that showed its flaws in Arkham Asylum (Mario did away with press X to run in the n64 era, what are you thinking?), flaws that became more apparent in Arkham City with the addition of more convoluted finishers (hold various shoulder buttons to slap shit – a feat for an octopus), and basically broke the game in Arkham Origins.

– Became duelist’s creed with mandatory boss fights (not assassination targets) and heavy armored assholes that took more than one “counter kill” technique to kill.

– Atrocious story:  It was aliens.  And you blew up the world and killed your main protagonist.

– Pirates are fucking stupid.

– Trivial difficulty stretched long and thin by just adding extra HP to enemies and not better AI.

– Selling based on historical accuracy and then just making shit up in convoluted and asinine ways.  You can’t have both.  Be historically accurate.  Or be batshit insane with making shit up.  I’m happy with either.  Trying to do both is just lazy, cashgrab antics that end up alienating the historically accuracy fan base in an attempt to make more money off the lowest common denominator.

More like Assassin's Greed

More like Assassin’s Greed

 

I don’t have enough website to contain all my rage and disappointment over this series.

The point is, Assassin’s Creed is a cashcow franchise.  The publishers continue to milk a stagnant IP.  It’s running out of ideas fast and lacks that spark of true inspiration that made the first game worth talking about.  Stealing mechanics and gameplay from several other games and splicing them together is the obvious last-ditch effort of a franchise that has run its course and deserves to die.

Die with some grace… give me the future dystopian cityscape climbing, robot killing, sequel you promised after the first fucking game already.

The other two things are MGS and not having a handout.

I was asked to bash MGS.  It was quite an endearing experience to be honest.  Roast one of my favorite franchises.  I neglected one major point I often harp on in real conversation.  Hideo Kojima is the ultimate VG Director troll.  He trolls his fans and audiences in a similar fashion to Hitchcock.

And seriously Kojima, what is with all the shit jokes?

Finally I regret that I didn’t print business fucking cards or have a flashy handout.  If half the people attending my panel was as drunk as me there’s no way they’d remember my website name.

Oh well.  I had fun.  Others had fun.  Not everything needs to be about shameless self-promotion.

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