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Reviews & Impressions  By TempestDash, on January 26th, 2012
Review:
I talked about this game quite a bit already, so I’m not going to be terribly verbose about the gameplay or mechanics. Read the linked post in the previous sentence if you want more detail on those items. The short of it is: if you played Brotherhood, the game is very similar. The hookblade is an interesting addition to the game, which allows for fast travel between rooftops that HAVE a cable set up between them — incidentally, these cables are painfully deliberate that one wonders how they ever got set up in the first place – but those cables are not common enough that you won’t be spending most of your time just jumping between rooftops. Beyond that, the game play is largely the same.
I do want to elaborate, however, on something I began talking about in that post, which is to say the scripted sequences. Scenes like the underground chase I described before are prolific in the game, and it’s wonderfully cinematic and exciting. I know, intellectually, that these scenes are rigid and must occur in nearly the same way ever time, but the fact that the game lets me run them under my own power, makes them feel so much more meaningful.
Emily Short talks about Player Agency a lot in IF games, and basically what we’re seeing here is a very good job at giving the impression of Agency while not actually letting the player do anything unintended. There are two things at work here that make this effective for me: strongly hinted gameplay, and a story that provides a sense of meaningful urgency.
The strongly hinted gameplay is pretty ingenious, as I spoke of before. Visual cues become a language in Assassin’s Creed, because they’re essential to travelling quickly across the city (Constantinople). The more you play the game, and the more it makes you search all over the map for things, the more you’re encouraged to learn the language of the rooftops to make travelling quicker. The fact that certain roof heights that you can hop verses have to climb up become ingrained in the player is intentional. The cues for a hookblade possible cable are subtle but very consistent. Even the spaces you know you can jump versus can’t are important because when the game sets up an action sequence where you have to race, those cues will all come to the forefront of your mind and will guide you towards the right path simply by presenting those cues in the right sequence.
The other half of what makes this work for me is the presentation of the story. Simply put, while I technically can poke around and try to break the game in these sequences, the story is interesting enough and the urgency of getting to the next story sequence compelling enough that I don’t want to. And that, I believe, goes a long way to hiding the fact that you’re in a scripted sequence. There will always be people trying to break games, but I think a well written and well communicated story will encourage a majority of players not to try. Assassin’s Creed: Revelations does a good job at making the player feel compelled to move forward at the points where it feels the most exciting to do so.
So, with that out of the way, let’s talk about the story.
I loved it.
I had always liked Altair, but it was pretty obvious that he was a jerk in the beginning of Assassin’s Creed. The great and noble leader that he supposedly leaves as legacy during Ezio’s time always seemed a little false to me. The first game portrayed a childish assassin, in my mind, and I didn’t understand how he rose to such glory. Revelations answers that question superbly. We get to see Altair’s challenges after the death of their leader, the betrayal of one of the other Assassins to usurp his position, the fate of his family (very, very tragic) and the eventual return of Altair to the leadership of the Assassins by becoming the Mentor. Finally, we get to see Altair’s end in a way that skillfully, and touchingly, wraps up the whole story of the 4 games thus far.
That ending, incidentally, is really well done. Ezio finally makes his way into the vault where Altair’s library remains hidden. It turns out, however, there is no library. The vault holds only two things: the Piece of Eden that Altair came into possession of at the end of Assassin’s Creed 1, and… the body of Altiar. When Ezio reaches the body he finds a Memory Disk on him and gets to relive Altair’s final moments. We see that Altair created the room right before the Mongolian invasion and sealed himself inside in order to pass on his Piece of Eden to Desmond’s future, which he had seen through the Piece of Eden. We see him bidding farewell to his son, who is to travel to Alexandria to take the last of the actual books of the library away (probably setting up events of Assassin’s Creed 3) and then his final walk to sit in the chair an peacefully die.
We also see Ezio’s end as well. He finds the Piece of Eden but decides to leave it, concluding that it wasn’t meant for him and that he’s ready to retire. He then uses his knowledge of the experiences in the previous two games to conclude that Desmond must be watching and gives him a final message of hope and, despite all of the tragedies of Ezio’s life, a bit of thanks to the First Civilization. Ezio actually feels gratitude, that he got to be part of something that transcended his life and wonders what it was that made him so special to be able to live hundreds of years past his own death. It was a remarkably humble scene that really solidified Ezio as the ‘Greatest Assassin’ that Lucy said he was way back at the start of Assassin’s Creed II.
Finally, we learn what the objective of the next game would be: there is a hidden First Civilization bunker, beneath Maine, that contains the controls to activate the last of their efforts to save the civilizations of the earth from destruction from solar flares. The First Civilization did not have time to use them all to save themselves, but they have left them behind, intact, for Desmond’s time, in the hope that tragedy could be averted.
Assassin’s Creed started off as a novel idea that took a great gameplay mechanic and wove a subtly complex story around it. Now, four games later, I play these games just to see where the story will go next. The gameplay has remained great, but it’s the tale being told that interests me the most. This game has continued to intrigue me and I can’t wait to see where things end this year with Assassin’s Creed 3.
Some critics have complained that the gameplay hast gotten stale, but I think it’s just moved to a point of refinement instead of revolution. I’m okay with that. The gameplay was good in 2006, it’s still good today. But the story has never ceased to amaze me.
Highly recommended.
Blogging  By TempestDash, on January 25th, 2012
The original Arkham Asylum game was great, and really proved that a studio that understood the essence of the modern Batman character could produce a fantastic game. In many ways, it’s stunning it took so long to get here. Batman IS the typical PC in a video game: peak athletic form, tons of equipment hidden on themselves, endless endurance, ridiculously flamboyant villains, and a tendency not to speak unless he absolutely needs to. Apart from the cape, he’s no different than Master Chief or the Doom Marine.
The Arkham Asylum’s real strength is creating a gameplay experience that was absolutely in line with the Batman character, and then telling a story that was 85% action, 10% introspection, and 5% Mark Hamill. By this formula alone, the game was crying out for a sequel.
The issue was, though, that the story of the first game didn’t actually set up very well for a sequel. There was the standard hook at the end when you see something emerge from the waters around Arkham Island, but apart from that, the game was very insular. Everything was one island, the island was lost, and Joker was taken down. What was next?
Arkham City expands the ‘island’ setting of the first game, with its fairly linear structure (more like a metroidvania game, really) and blowing it out into a GTA or Assassin’s Creed style open city with dozens of side missions and a roaming main plot that involves traversing the city’s rooftops or skyways with style. The parallels between this game and Assassin’s Creed were enough to ease of my doubt of an ‘open world’ Batman game, and the improvements to the fighting system and the fascinating beats of the story won me over.
The game is visually gorgeous, in line with if not exceeding the style of Arkham Asylum. With the change of setting from old island prison to decaying city, the style has a very Blade Runner feeling to it, dark, gothic buildings stacked on themselves with girders and scaffolding everywhere punctuated by neon signs and billboards. It’s different, I’ll admit, but feels sort of cluttered. As if the city was intended to emulate the rock faces that Arkham Asylum was built into.
It also makes navigation rough. Assassin’s Creed’s cities were invariably well maintained, with define pathways and a more or less easily traversed path from one end of the city to the other on foot. Batman’s city, however, is full of seemingly impossible shapes. Streets and roads don’t appear to connect in a logical way (such as to allow cars to move through the city easily) and as such the only practical method of getting around is to climb to the top of the nearest building and glide.
Gliding, of course, is fun, but takes a little getting used to. You have to be constantly heading towards a building if you want to keep your momentum because you’ll have to use your grapple to fling yourself back up into the air to get height. There are no updrafts or jetpacks to obtain in this game, you just have your cape, which glides well, but it is just a glide and is not flying by any means. In comparison, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood and Revelations had Parachutes, which accomplished the same thing, but you could gain some height and speed by diving then pulling up suddenly. Batman does not have this ability, which is perhaps more realistic, or perhaps a result of carrying around 2 tonnes of steel gadgets.
Much of your gadgets from the first game carry over, incidentally, which is awesome. Of all people, I would expect Batman to keep his equipment from game to game, so it’s gratifying to see the familiar detonation gel, remote controlled batarang, and hacking device to be right there from the start of the game.
Finally, the story. The game is a continuation of Arkham Asylum, but in the interim, the inmates have been merged with Blackgate (the prison) and cordoned off into a section of the city and given free reign of that area. Impossibly, the whole thing is run by Hugo Strange, the crazy psychologist Batman villain who knows Batman is Bruce Wayne. I can’t explain why he got the reigns of this establishment, but, whatever.
I find myself a little… meh, on the story right now. I haven’t given it a lot of time to develop, and this may just be a case of a game where I actually am more intrigued by the gameplay than plot. We’ll see if it gets better as time goes on. Right now it’s just been used to set up a few fetch quests and explain the return of the Joker. Maybe it’ll get more interesting. I really liked the story of Arkham Asylum, how the doctors developed the Titan formula and how Joker got control of it. We’ll see if something just as interesting happens here.
What IS interesting, though, is the Catwoman story, which runs parallel to Batman’s story and the game jumps back and forth between the two. This is a huge divergence from the first game and it’s absolutely welcome. Not that I particularly wanted a Catwoman game, but to see the plot from two perspectives very refreshing, and I like the various cues that show how the stories intersect. Hopefully Catwoman continues to play a major role to the end.
I’ll probably focus back on L.A. Noire for the next week to see if I can finish off the last two desks and close the book on that game before coming back to Batman. But when I do, I’ll talk more about my experiences in the game.
Blogging  By TempestDash, on January 25th, 2012
There’s not going to be a TITAN Show this week unfortunately, so I figured I’d actually show some love to Rogue-Penguin and post something. I’ve been playing a lot of L.A. Noire and Batman: Arkham City recently and I thought I might talk a bit about my experiences. First off: L.A. Noire.
L.A. Noire is a 2011 game from studio Team Bondi, who rather famously and publically imploded on itself immediately after the game was launched. If I recall correctly, the root of the problems of the company had to do with serious mismanagement to the point where it was simply infeasible to continue to support the studio when other, better managed studios in the Take Two empire were producing just as successful games.
Still, real world issues aside, this is a really great and well polished game. L.A. Noire is set in the 1940s, just after the end of World War Two and you play Cole Phelps, a beat cop who quickly climbs the ranks of a corrupt police precinct in Los Angeles. The game has a very distinct and – in my opinion – appealing visual style that apes the classic black and white movies of that era. Each ‘mission’ in the game starts with a title, displayed prominently across the screen in a bold, italicized, sans serif’d font, and begins with a brief scene of the crime being committed. Then the games fades to color as you take control of Cole and you are called into (or assigned, when you make Detective) the case.
The game is clearly inspired by Grand Theft Auto’s gameplay, with an open world that vast, detailed, and features a hell of a lot of roads and traffic, combined with some truly suspicious vehicle control issues. Just as in GTA4, it is nearly impossible to drive down a street without striking another car or a lamppost when you turn a corner. Thankfully, the game doesn’t penalize you for these transgressions, so you can smash your way through traffic jams with glee and still your police cruiser will be good as new when you arrive at the crime scene.
Now, I don’t like GTA, so if the game was just Vice City set forty years earlier, I wouldn’t be interested at all. Instead, this game has a very prominent and heavily scripted story to play out. Once you make your way through the (dangerous) streets to the crime scene, you begin your investigation. Mostly this involves walking around the crime scene until your controller vibrates and you hit a button to inspect whatever it is that you just walked over. A majority of the time, it’s random trash that doesn’t apply to the case. But two or three things in each scene is actually relevant and you make a note in your notebook about it as you inspect it with your hands.
I should say that after watching over a decade of Police Procedurals set in the present day, I find it very distressing to see Detective Phelps pick up a key piece of evidence or even manipulate the body of a victim with his bare hands. I have to keep reminding myself that there is no DNA testing, no major fingerprint database to compare to, no trace analysis. It was a simpler time where interrogations was the principal method of catching a criminal.
Knowing this, the game’s interrogation procedure is fairly unique. First you ask the person a question and they respond. Then, in Hollywood Squares style, you’re prompted with three choices: did the person tell the truth, lie, or were they misleading? Each question has a ‘correct’ choice that will make more information about the crime available, and two incorrect choices that is supposed to make the investigation harder, though it’s really impossible to let the criminal get away. Eventually, at the end of each case, the criminal does something colossally stupid and incriminates themselves regardless of evidence.
How, you may ask, do you know whether the witness or suspect is lying? Well, part of that is possessing the necessary evidence to disprove their statement. The other part is watching the person’s facial expressions and body language. This game did something to motion capture facial language of their voice actors and… it’s honestly stunning. I’ve never seen such expressive characters in a video game before. It’s almost in a completely new class of its own in terms of realism. There are studio CGI movies that do not have the expressive range of these characters. I’m truly in awe of it.
Unfortunately, I find it’s often very hard to determine when you should be calling a person on a lie or casting doubt on what they said. Sometimes I’m fairly certain that a person is lying but I don’t think I have the evidence to contradict their statement. Sometimes, it seems like a person is lying about EVERYTHING, when it really has to do with something else entirely. A young girl, for instance, is victim of a sex crime and she looks suspicious with every statement she says and it turns out that’s because she’s also a child runaway and she’s worried Phelps is going to send her back.
So, it’s nuanced to a degree, and exciting, but also frustrating. I think the good outweighs the bad here, but sometimes I do get very frustrated when I end up calling four questions in a row incorrectly and end up with no new evidence to investigate.
As for the overarching story – yes, there IS in fact a large story at play – I’m still not sure how it’s going to coalese, but I got a few big hints recently when I transferred to Homicide. There are a number of newspapers lying around the world that tell the story of this corrupt psychologist treating PTSD suffers coming out of WWII. It seemed more than a little disjointed to the main cases, though, until I randomly came across the lead Vice Detective in my precinct having dinner with the psychologist. Ah! Yes, there’st the link I was looking for. So, now, I suspect that we’ll see those two stories join up whenever I transfer to the Vice Squad.
Anyway, the game is very well made, and has a suitably engrossing storyline that I’ve enjoyed every step along the way. I’m moving through the game at a good clip now and I suspect I’ll be done within a week or so, so I’ll have to put the rest of my thoughts on the game in there.
Later today I’ll put my Batman: Arkham City impressions.
Blogging  By TempestDash, on January 18th, 2012
I haven’t said very much in the last week or so and it’s probably looking like I’m about to go back on my goals for 2012. Well, the truth is that there is always an unstated goal to anything I put out, and that’s to write more, better, and complete more works of fiction. To that end, I’ve been in sort of a writing fugue-state since early last week and I haven’t yet left its grip. There is only so much time I have during lunch hours or at home after my son goes to bed and it isn’t very much, so what I’ve got I’ve got to use effectively.
Over two years ago (damn, it has been long) I started working on a fanfic set in the Ben 10 Universe. It was an effort to inject some quality epic fanfiction into the Ben 10 fanon, which seemed to be a little dry (at least if the TVTropes.org recommendations are any sign). I wrote quite a bit of it (around 60-70 pages) and then ran into a planning wall where I could no longer figure out what my villain was going to do next. I shelved it, and moved onto other things.
Well, last week I picked it up and figured out how to finish it and since then I’ve been churning away. I’m past 110 pages now and I think about three chapters from the end. That still means close to another 40 pages to write but I hope to finish it off by the end of the month.
During that time, I can’t say how frequent other posts will go up. I have thoughts to share on Assassin’s Creed: Revelations (which I finished), The Next Three Days (the Russell Crowe movie), I Am What I Am (a Buffy fanfic – yeah, really), and the new season of Sherlock on the BBC. I’ll try to find some time to get those thoughts into posts this week, but they might end up on the short side until I finish writing.
I am quite pleased, I must say, at how much more productive I’ve been at writing recently. Getting Apocolocyntosis Episode 4 done was a huge victory for me, and finishing this Ben 10 fic would be huge as well. Combined with the consistent writing I did from August through October last year, I’ve been in a period of amazing productivity. I hope it continues.
Blogging  By TempestDash, on January 17th, 2012
This week’s podcast is now live over on sister-site The Titan Show (www.thetitanshow.com) and can be heard here. We talk mostly about detective shows and movies (with emphasis on my part on Sherlock Holmes) as well as few posts here on Rogue-Penguin including my review of Batman: Year One, and my completion of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations.
Check it out!
Movies  By TempestDash, on January 11th, 2012
Review:
This is the latest in the DC Animated Films overseen by Bruce Timm’s team, and while it’s a decent film starring Batman (always the biggest draw in this series of productions) I came out of this story feeling it was a little mediocre. Which is crazy, right? Batman: Year One was a really important comic series that help cement the current comic incarnation of the hero and heavily inspired Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins movie. How could I not feel anything but reverence for such material?
Well, first off, this is an adaptation, and a frightfully faithful one. Why do I say frightfully? Well, because you can’t just use comic book panels as a storyboard and move right into filming. Comics have a pace, and a language, so to speak, that doesn’t have the same meaning in film. Reading comics is a semi-active experience, you have to piece together the action between panels and assume much of the activity that the individual frames do not show. A film, however, is incredibly different. A film has a generally captive audience (comic readers can just put the book down a walk away at any point) and all aspects of pacing are directly controlled by the filmmaker. A comic can throw up a dramatic panel with an incredibly powerful message on it and have a reasonable level of expectation that the reader will only move on once they’ve digested the page to their satisfaction. Not so with film, however. The film must move forward and if the viewer hasn’t got the message by that time, well, then they’re at a disadvantage for the rest of the experience.
What does this have to do with Batman: Year One? Well, for one thing, I found myself a little bored. The film has its action set pieces – which are beautifully animated, by the way – and the story moves forward at a fairly good clip, but I found the split attention between Gordon and Wayne somewhat defuses the tension of both stories. Especially since we’ve seen the Batman genesis tale enough times that nothing here feels new anymore.
Gordon’s story is much more interesting, and to its credit, the film focuses more heavily on Gordon than Wayne, but even there, too much is glossed over in too short of time. Gordon starts, persists in having, and then ends an affair in somewhere around 4 brief scenes, which is just appalling. Gordon is a very moral character, and for him to adjust or compromise his morals for sex is a very big deal. So why isn’t it given more attention? Were the filmmakers afraid we’d get bored or kids would brush if off as a ‘sappy love tale’? No romance is ‘sappy’ if you treat it properly. It’s not the IDEA of a romance that people get squishy about, it’s the EXECUTION. I’m sure a good writer could turn Bella and Edward into Romeo and Juliet given the opportunity.
Then there’s the question of Catwoman, who is here because… I’m not quite sure. She does not contribute to the film in a meaningful way. She has a number of interactions with Wayne and Batman, but none of them ever feel essential to the story. It’s like the filmmakers found themselves split between Wayne, Selina Kyle (Catwoman), and James Gordon and couldn’t make up their mind about whose story this movie was. Catwoman suffers the most, of course, who’s backstory is hinted at but never fully discussed, and who ends up in a lurch at the end of the film with no real development other than the decision to stop being a prostitute and start being a thief (a decision which is not explained or telegraphed very well).
I can’t help but draw parallels between this movie and Star Wars Episode III. We know what has to happen, and the filmmakers know that we know, so everything ends up having this feeling of inevitability to it. Characters do things because… well, because they do. Instead of the film providing compelling motivation for them act, they act because there is no other choice in the cannon. And that’s just not good storytelling.
Apart from the story, the mechanics of this animated film are fairly top notch. As mentioned before, the animation is beautiful and smooth, with high levels of realistic detail throughout. Characters are well designed, nice to look at, yet consistent with earlier portrayals and the comic book. Gordon’s glasses constantly reflecting only white is a stylistic carryover from the comics and I think it works very well here.
Sound and music are good, and for the most part the voice acting is up to the high quality set by previous films… with one exception: Batman himself. I’m not familiar with the actor they picked to voice Bruce Wayne, but he’s terrible. His opening narration is stilted and hollow and his “Batman-voice” is simply laughable. They would have been better to have pitch-bended his normal voice instead of the silly attempt at sounding gruff this actor takes. Given how important it is that we hear Batman’s narration, I’m shocked they allowed such a disappointing performance through.
Ultimately, I’m left in a bad place. This is a Batman film from the gurus of Batman adaptations. It was even directed by Lauren Montgomery, my favorite of the directors from Timm’s cabal. And yet, I’m not impressed. I’m not even satisfied. I’m just … there. Not hating it, but not loving it either. This is where I have to leave this review in the end: with no recommendation at all.
Blogging By TempestDash, on January 11th, 2012
The 14th episode of The TITAN Show was recorded tonight and it’s already live! How about that for a new leaf in 2012, less than 2 hours after completing the recording and it’s ready to be downloaded and listened to!
This week’s episode talks about the end of 2011, and what’s coming up in 2012 in our mind. We talk about movies, video games, RPGs, model painting, and whole collections of geeky things that pretty much epitomizes The TITAN Show. So, all in all, it’s a pretty good start for the year!
Check it out here!
Blogging  By TempestDash, on January 10th, 2012
I mentioned before that I was looking into making changes to the website this year, and, well, that’s started this week. I don’t have a test system, and the traffic to this site is minimal, so I’m just going to start making gradual changes until I’m satisfied. Some of this involves reorganizing the posts, but a lot of it has to do with presentation: meaning graphics.
I love fancy features, and this website has seen its share over the years. Its original PHP 3.0 with SSL was painfully basic and designed from scratch by me. The colors were awful, and the method of updating it was insane. But it served its purpose as a launch pad for the first comic and the incredibly infrequent posts by my contributors. The only ‘feature’ that website had was that it could be updated and edited through a series of forms I had created. Though those forms were horribly insecure and vulnerable to any number of attacks or SQL injection.
The next iteration of the website had replaced my self-built php back end and had hooked the whole thing up to a phpBB forum. That ended up being a very easy way to manage content. The home page put up a nice face for the comic and posts from the admins but the forums handled all the vagrancies of content management and comments. It worked very well and we stuck with that format for years of front page redesigns.
Then there was the XOOPS installation. That always SEEMED like a good idea, given it was a powerful CMS that could handle things like comics, galleries, forums, and a “blog” (though I didn’t identify the site as one of those for a very long time later). This was the first time I got in over my head because XOOPS had way too much functionality for a website that is essentially ME and maybe half a dozen readers. The website struggled under the weight of XOOPS, which demanded a lot of customization and a lot of content for simple posts. It did have a good design, though, and it was something I would try to ape when I took the next important step.
Which brings us to WordPress. After years of trying to be something I wasn’t, I moved onto WordPress and, specifically, the ComicsPress theme, which had a lot of hooks for webcomics creators. It was simple, straightforward, easy to theme, easy to fork into different sites with relative ease. It was excellent for a webcomics creator to use and manage.
Except by that point I wasn’t really making comics that much – honestly I wasn’t ever making comics all that much. So the extra bits of ComicsPress installation went unused for long portions of time and everything was centered on the blogging bits and posts by me and a few others. And when the most recent Comic posted to that website was two years old, it was time to retire that intent and focus on being a blogging site.
So WordPress was restarted, the database wiped, and we ended up here, the site we have today. Launched in 2008, it went through a number of stylistic interpretations but the central focus has stayed on the blog posts.
So as I look to the future and what I want to do with the redesign, I need to remind myself constantly that the most important part of the site is the blog posts. Everything else has to be second, or I’ll waste time installing and configuring an expensive (time-wise, not money) module or add-on that ends up being neglected for years on end.
So, right now what we have are some minor modifications to the way post headers are done. It’s a simple enough change, but one that took me hours last night to figure out. It’s inspired by a theme called “Irresistible.” I couldn’t quite copy it exactly, but it had a visual element I liked and I wanted here. So, while I don’t have a plan, I have a step, and it looks like I’ll be using it as the anchor for the rest of the redesign.
I think I’ll tackle the layout next. All that crap on the sidebar is not entirely useful. Also, I want to have a a more unique header image again. I like headers.
Blogging  By TempestDash, on January 9th, 2012
I still love this game series.
I’ve been plowing through this game over the last week and made a considerable amount of progress towards completion. I’m almost a little disappointed that I’ve done so much in so short of time because it’ll soon be over and I’ll have to wait a whole twelve months to play more.
On the other hand, nearly everything I’ve done has been awesome, so I can’t been that upset over it.
The game follows tightly in the mold of the previous installment, Assassins Creed: Brotherhood. Our hero is Ezio Auditore, he’s traversing a largely contained city that is rife with things to do and is simply gorgeous to look at. I thought Rome was beautiful, but Constantinople is stunning. I almost feel more worldly playing this game series. The texture of a period city, filled with highly detailed people and interactions, excellent voice acting, and animations is simply beyond anything else being delivered in gaming today. It’s silly to hold something like L.A. Noire’s period Los Angeles, or Red Dead Redemption’s wild west up against the city of Constantinople circa 1500. I can’t believe nobody else is doing something like this. The results are extraordinary.
It’s beyond a backdrop as well. There are some nice set pieces set up in this game and last night I played possibly the most exciting chase sequence I’ve ever played in a video game. Period. It was so well orchestrated that I knew halfway through it that I would remember it for some time.
It takes place beneath the city in some cavernous underground rivers that ancient Assassins had set up scaffolding in. A group of Templars are escaping down the river and Ezio needs to give chase through these centuries old wooden pathways that are crumbling with his ever step. The chase is nearly 6 minutes long of constant running forward over treacherous terrain. But the game designers were clever. Since this chase occurs at the midpoint of the game, there are lot of visual cues the player has already become accustomed to and the chase uses them strategically to subtly guide the player down the right path.
The result is an event that is very tightly scripted and yet is not a cutscene. It’s a chase where the player must do a LOT of work to keep pace with the Templars but there are no quick-time-events. There are no signs at all of the game holding your hand through the event, actually, and yet I went through it on my first try looking like an action hero doing so. Brilliant. I want to do it again just thinking about it, but then the magic would be lost. It really is incredible and I hope other people realize how much work had to go into a scene like that. Ubisoft is doing some of the most well designed games right now.
So we’ve talked visuals, we’ve talked gameplay, of course, there is the story. (Some spoilers ahead!) This is Assassin’s Creed, after all, the story is paramount. And so far I’ve been very pleased. There has always been an effort to thematically link what’s going on in the Ancestor’s life with what the current day Assassins are trying to accomplish. But, honestly, the narrative end of Desmond’s life has always been a little… sparse to say the least. Not this time. Given the shocking ending of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, this game has placed a much greater focus on Desmond and what he’s going through in the future.
Apparently, the ending of the previous game splintered Desmond’s mind a bit and the Animus is struggling to keep it together. The illusive Subject 16 appears before him and tells him that he needs to wrap up his memories from his ancestors so that the Animus can sort them out and separate them from Desmond’s consciousness. He only has as long as his body is alive, however, and if he fails, he’ll be trapped as a ghost in the machine, like Subject 16 has become.
So Desmond’s goal is to reassert his identity, which plays out in some intriguing sequences where he reflects on his upbringing and the events that eventually led him to flee the Assassins prior to Abstergo kidnapping him and placing him in the Animus 1.0 back in the first game. His side of the story (compared to Ezio’s) is still very short, but at least it gives us much more meat to chew on compared to prior versions.
Oh, also, there is an Assassin in the future named William who we’ve never seen but is clearly being voiced by John de Lancie. So, I don’t imagine he’s going to be a minor character. 
But back in Ezio’s life, we find him as an old man, and is being constantly assaulted by reminders that he’s past his prime. It mirrors Desmond’s journey because Ezio is also reflecting on his life, and the life of Altair, and seeing the triumphs and tragedies from a new perspective. He marvels at the Assassin’s guild in Constantinople, filled with young men and women ready to change the world. He also looks back on Altair’s life and how the guild fell apart beneath him.
He also looks at Altair’s family and pursuant pride and heartbreak. He wonders how he missed all that. Which brings to the fore a question that has been looming since the start of Brotherhood. We know how the genetic memory works in this game series, which means the only way that Desmond can have the memories of Ezio that he has is because he has not yet sired the child that will carry on his bloodline to the present. And thus, the game gives us Sophia, who I’m pretty certain will be the mother of the child that leads to Desmond.
Anyway, I don’t want this to turn into a review, so I just end now by saying this game has really impressed me so far, and I really question the people who are saying the AC formula is getting tired. An excellent story paired with brilliant level design just speaks volumes of a studio that knows what it’s doing and how to do it right. We couldn’t ask for more from this excellent series.
Reviews & Impressions  By TempestDash, on January 9th, 2012
Review:
It’s like Kingdom Hearts meets Lego Star Wars, except not quite as fun.
I’ve got a pretty firm handle on why the “Lego” series of video games has been such a hit. They’re simple games with a straightforward and unchanging game mechanic hitched to large media franchises that people already know the stories to. Long time fans of the movies or media franchises will enjoy the tongue-in-cheek recreations of famous scenes, while younger players can easily grasp the mechanics and quickly excel in the game. It’s a simple formula and has become a staple in the year that we’ll see some sort of Lego game come out every year, even if it’s a painful rehash of an existing game.
Disney Universe… I’m not sure what they’re trying to do. It seems like a good idea at first. If Indiana Jones or Star Wars were good choices for Lego, surely the entire Disney catalog would be a home run for this game. Except… well, it’s not, AND they made some pretty suspicious choices in the creation of this game that hits my jaded sensor and leads me to believe this was intended as part-propaganda machine.
The real issue is that there’s no real story here. Not that I was expecting BioWare levels of exposition, but the game simply doesn’t have much of any story at all. And what IS there, is confusing, and your actions as players don’t demonstrably affect the weak framing tale expect that when it’s all done the villain is inexplicably defeated.
With the Lego games, there is a narrative going through them, which is just aping the narrative of the popular movies/comics they’re based on, but at least there’s a narrative. It doesn’t have to be original, it just has to exist. The story in Disney Universe is — I think – that Disney has created a virtual reality simulator for guests to experience various Disney stories, which is supposed to be fully safe, however a self-aware computer virus turns it into a typical Holodeck episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and now the dangers are real.
And… well, apparently you have to play through each level and ‘rescue’ your friends. And by ‘friends’ it means costumes inspired by the movies you visit. I thought at first your ‘friends’ might have different powers or abilities, but no, there is only ONE player character (cloned 4 times in different colors if you play multi-player) which can be wearing a variety of outfits that barely affect gameplay at all. In the end, after you’ve gone through all of the supplied worlds (not that you have rescued all your friends – some are still out there at the end to force replay), an ending cinematic plays that implies you defeated the virus.
Oh, and before he dies, the virus sings It’s A Small World After All. I’m serious.
So, there is no real story — even in the individual worlds you visit — but a game doesn’t need a story to succeed. Years of Atari and NES told me that. So what about the gameplay? Well, it’s a mixed bag. You can see the inspiration from Lego Star Wars present in the game, but Disney chose to make modifications to the formula that really drag it down. Power-ups, for instance, are ever present in the game, and really, really annoying. They appear at random as flowing blue or black cubes and when you’re playing multiplayer they actually track and pursue you until you use them. That wouldn’t be horrible in and of itself, but a majority of the puzzles in the game require the player to pick up or drag items and while you’re “powered up” you can’t do that. So you are forced to wait out the fixed time of the power up until you can get back to progressing through the level. It’s incredibly frustrating.
There are only three attacks in the game, a normal attack, a jump area attack, and charged area attack. There is not a really appreciable difference between the three. And in all modes of the game your attacks can hurt the other players. So when you’re using the area attacks, odds are you’ll kill your partner just as frequently as your enemies.
Which is easy to do with the normal attack to because the game has a horribly cluttered visual style. Players are not easily differentiated from enemies in shape, movement, weapon, or coloring. I frequently found myself in a cluster of enemies (happens a lot in the game) and lost all track of my character. This is further exacerbated during mini-boss fights where you’ll find yourself trying to strategically attack the boss (since all the bosses have techniques you must use to defeat them) while being horded by bad guys obscuring the visual cues you need to see on the mini-boss to know when to hit. It’s really aggravating. In fact, what you learn as you progress through the game is that you must move slowly, killing all enemies that appear immediately, dropping everything your doing at the time, before you can progress.
Level design is no better, by the way. Some levels are simply laid out but most are cluttered with foreground and background elements, confusing where you’re supposed to be going. Oh, and there are scores of “hidden” objects that are really just obscured by the camera being stubborn and periodically refusing to follow the characters around. Not good design. Also, there are lots of jumping puzzles that have few cues as to the depth of the next platform. So you’ll find yourself jumping right when you needed to jump towards the screen instead.
Finally, the choice of “worlds” is why I’m thinking this game is partly a propaganda machine. There are a number of classics from the Disney/Pixar catalog, including Lion King, Aladdin, Wall-E, Monsters Inc. Then there is Alice in Wonderland. But it’s not the classic Alice In Wonderland cartoon from the Disney vault – no, it’s the recent Tim Burton film’s version of Alice in Wonderland. Why? This is a kid’s game, they’re far more likely to have seen the cartoon than the disturbing live action film. Why choose that film over the originally animated classic?
More pointedly, though, there is a Pirates of the Caribbean world. But, it’s not based on the really popular and successful trilogy, but instead is wholly based on the 2011 relaunch, “On Stranger Tides.” Why the hell would that be the foundation for this world? It JUST came out. Most people probably haven’t seen it yet since it just made its way to DVD.
Oh, wait! Unless they WANTED to remind people that movie existed. And they were doing a movie-tie in with SEVERAL films at once. In that case, it makes lots of sense.
I have a lot of nitpicks for this game, mostly because there is an easily accessible model that worked really well and this game turned its nose up at it. But there is stuff to like about this game. Despite the cluttered appearance, the visuals are quite nice and smooth looking. Animations are quick and fluid, and attacks have a weight to them that is relatively easy to judge. Each world has some common elements but is diverse enough to remain interesting. And while I think you need a slightly older child for this game than the Lego series, it’s still youth accessible and could be highly entertaining for a few days.
But for me, an adult with a child too young to partake, I don’t recommend it.
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About Rogue-Penguin is about how a gamer and animation enthusiast sees the world of media. Film and Video Games come up most often but every now then a random short story, comic, recipe, or life event will get examined.
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