I really enjoyed District 9 but I haven't seen Elysium yet, it sounds pretty cool the way you describe it. I didn't know that there was a ringworld in that one, I have to see it now.
That's pretty cool, glad you liked the game. Did you try to play it without using guns? Was their any particular way you preferred to play the game?
I was really into the sailing the first time I played Windwaker because there was that sense of exploration and discovery. It only became a chore once I'd explored everything, and I still had to wait minutes sailing around to get anywhere. I wonder if Windwaker HD will add more fast travel options that the original had?
There was a handful of fast travels areas and you could play some song and a hurricane would sweep you away to said areas, but it'd be nice to be able to jump between each island once you've discovered them already (I hope they do that). It's nice they have a faster sail in the game too.
I like open world games. Exploring them the first time is really special when you don't know what's around the next corner. Once I know what's around the corner though, I have no intentions to have to journey back and forth the same way each time. You can't replicate that initial sense of newness more than once with the same areas, so fast travel becomes really useful. Morrowind is a huge game, but there's very few fast travels, you have to ride stupid bugs and pay gold for it even, and the bugs are few and far between. So even though I played tons of Morrowind and saw a lot of cities and wildlands, there's still a ton of places in Morrowind that are uncharted on my world-map, places I've never even seen after all these years because I didn't want to go through the trouble of risking the travel and danger, and there wasn't a lot of fast travel for me.
I think that if Anita looked back and thought about what she was saying she'd probably want to rephrase that and make a better point, or different point altogether. I like her work and the videos she's done on games so far, for the most part, but she's quite rough in spots in regards to her analysis. Some of her criticisms are well wrought and make me think about storytelling in games in general, while some of her other criticisms are more like brain farts or off-the-cuff comments that people occasionally say in conversations with friends or coworkers and have to reformulate later. Except for her, those occasional brain farts or unshaped ideas on are all on camera in her videos and millions of people see them. I support her, she's trying, but you can tell she's more of an amateur on some of the subjects and some of her presentations aren't sharpened very well.
That's no reason for people to be infuriated though, gamers have been quite an embarassment in this whole debate, which isn't even a debate anymore. I'm embarassed for this whole craft that I love, and for all of us. It's a war of elementary words, junior-high logic, and hate speech now by people on both sides. Anita's braver than me though, I could never go on with that project, I'm too sensetive to deal with that kind of harassment and direct hatred and threatening. I'm a non-confrontational person and I don't like fighting. I like thinking, analyzing, and solving problems, but not in a public fashion and not when it ends in screaming and rape+death threats on a regular basis.
I never played AC3 so I don't have first-hand experience with how it was implemented. I heard Adam Sessler say that he enjoyed the naval combat, but it was so discrete that he forgot to go seek it out. It seems like it didn't fit well into the game or the mechanics and experience felt detatched (Sess didn't say either of those two later things but that's the picture I get from how people talk about it).
How was the naval combat actually structured into the game, and what did you think about the mechanics?
There's a lot of AC fans who are rightfully burnt out on these games by now. I'm in a unique situation where I was originally a big fan of the series and liked the first two games for the most part, but once I finished AC2 I became burnt out then lol. I burned out early and AC4 will be the first one I've tried since then. Ubisoft already lost me once on these games and made me stop playing them, now it's been long enough that I'll dip my toes into the new pirate themed one years later. There's likely lots of people who will avoid this one and I think they're probably wise to do so if they're burnt out on the series, I've been there before too.
The only game with Ezio I played was AC2, so I never got to see his character develop and unfold into adulthood and maturity. I never hated his character in AC2, but I also never loved him. A lot of people seem to like his character and how it turned out over the course of his multi-game story arc. I only played the one game of his though so I missed out on all his further development.
Did you ever play Far Cry 3? Are you excited that Black Flag may have an open world design and random encounters similar to FC3?
I wasn't into pirates much as a kid either, I was actually into stoic knights and medieval history and fantasy more than anything. I didn't start getting into pirates until the Pirates of the Caribbean movies came along, the unrealistic romanticized BS version of pirates lol. I think Black Flag is coming along at a good time, I'm ready to play a pirate game. Several years ago I may not have even been interested in the concept. Sailing around in Windwaker helped me to warm up to the idea of pirates and sailing your own boat. And Pirates of the Caribbean got me into the kind of aesthetic and action a pirate story could have.
Lol I agree. I saw that trailer and it was pretty dang cool. What got me sold on the game was the trailer they showed at E3 during the Sony conference, or maybe it was the Ubi conference, they showed the game at both places. I was so down on the AC games and then that one trailer kinda turned things around and I was like, "Shit, I'd play that."
This is going to sound really eff'd up, and it is. My favorite thing to do in Assassin's Creed 2 is to toss gold out into groups of civilians, making them swarm around into a group going crazy trying to pick up all the gold, and then poisoning a guard into killing them all.
I always make sure there's a couple guards around so that they can be right next to the civilians. On a side not it's hilarious how they say, "Money, money! I hear money!" in their Italian accents lol. So once they're all grouped together and the people are scavenging for coins on the ground, I walk up to one of the nearby guards I mentioned, and I use the poison blade on him. He starts stumbling around and after a few seconds the poison will make him berserk and he will pull out his weapon slashing wildly at anything nearby. By the end there's a whole bunch of commoners lying around dying and the guard drops dead finally from the poison, it's fricken crazy. I love doing that.
