I decided when I came home late on Monday Evening to give
Streets of Rage 2 one last hurrah, but I found that I wasn’t concentrating
properly and making too many silly mistakes. So instead, I had a look at some
of the bonus games on the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection: Space Harrier,
Alien Syndrome and Tip Top. They are all very difficult early arcade games, and
I didn’t really give them a lot of time engage me; it was just a way of winding
down after a long and not very easy day. Realising I was getting nowhere, I
moved on the following evening.
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I started playing Assassin’s Creed, of all things! I’ve had
a bit of an on-off relationship with this game. The series itself has come
under fire in recent years for releasing the same game over and over again with
naught but a token effort to innovate, but having only ever played the first
one, I haven’t really noticed that. The game is decent enough, and follows a
core loop of the Master Assassin, Altair, researching and investigating a
target for assassination in the Holy Land, before planning your attack and
delivering the killing blow. It’s good at what it does but the gameplay is very
repetitive, and not in a way that I find particularly enjoyable, so I play a
bit at a time and then not touch it again for months, sometimes even years.
Thankfully, this isn’t a game I feel the need to return to the start of for the
sake of the plot, or we’d be here for a very long time.
During the last time I played, I manage to get the
achievement points for surviving one hundred fights without dying. It’s not
that hard if you know what you’re doing; once your health bar gets to a certain
point the fights are generally over before you take any significant amount of
damage. So this would normally be of little significance but I came very close
to messing it up! I started off in the city of Acre, and had forgotten that
you’re supposed to blend in with the scholars in order to leave as most of the
guards in the game will attack me unless I’m hiding. So I ran right through the
guards, who promptly attacked. I tried to fight back, but I’d forgotten the
controls too and it was taking me a while to get an attack pattern going, by
which time I was surrounded by six or seven guards that I knew I hadn’t got a
hope of beating. I ran off to avoid being killed, managed it, and got the
achievement about half an hour later. I realised that the bulk of the work I’d
put in for that would have been done years ago, and that if I got killed I’d
have had to start all over again, so I was very grateful I’d had the sense to
run from that fight!
Those kind of stories are what make the experience for me,
but on a broader scale the game has a lot going for it. Graphically it’s
gorgeous, and the level design is on point for a game of this size. I’ve
progressed about half way through the game and I’m actually finding it a lot
more enjoyable now that I’ve realised I am supposed to be killing the guards as
well. When I played the game previously I was trying to do what an assassin
would do, which is try to kill his intended target with as little collateral
damage as possible. Then I read the achievement list and realised I was
actually supposed to be assassinating the guards. I find the game a lot more
fun having discovered this!
I also continued running Pathfinder for my friends Dave,
Victor, Shane and Ian. I’ve been running Rise of the Runelords for them monthly
for a year and I’m really enjoying how the campaign and the characters are
setting up – particularly Victor, who’s played through the vast majority of the
campaign before with a different system but is enjoying the different approach
this group is taking. We should get another session in next month.
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