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Jan. 17th, 2014 09:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynI've been playing a number of different video games lately, which is a fair part of why I haven't posted here much. Ploughing through a lot of game material tends to consume my attention. I plan on going back to the Fallout games soon, as I've had the odd nostalgic flash for the Capital Wasteland and/or Big Mountain lately, but I've been having a go at other areas of gaming for a while.
The first big one is that I've played through Assassin's Creed IV: It's Pirates This Time, You Like Pirates, Right?. Which was remarkably fun, and which made me very happy on a number of levels. One was the purely mechanical level, on which I was happy because OH MY GOD A VIDEO GAME VEHICLE I CAN STEER. Seriously. I've played Halo (CE and ODST), Mass Effect (see: Mako, Hammerhead), Half-Life 2, various Mario Kart games, etc., and the only vehicles I've had any real luck with at all have been the ships in Assassin's Creed games. It took me a while to get used to the ship to ship combat system, since you have several different weapons and which one you fire depends on which one you're looking at, plus I am not always good at remembering which buttons have to be pressed or not pressed for which gun, but once I did... YAY VEHICLE I CAN STEER. YAY COMBAT I CAN BE GOOD AT. On a character level I rather liked Edward Kenway; he struck me as a fine example of a Chaotic Neutral Slytherin very early on, and yet he had an appealing personality. Good supporting cast in the game, too- Adewale was kinda awesome, and the DLC in which you played as Adewale was pretty good, although since the main game was "Pirates! We like money and personal liberties! Mostly money" and the Freedom Cry DLC was "Welcome to Port-Au-Prince. Time to make people regret that they ever bought into the slave-based economy in the first place", the DLC was a rather different experience. (Note: you will not be participating in Toussaint L'Ouverture's revolution; AC IV was set in 1715 and a few years that followed, and Freedom Cry is set ten years after AC IV ends.)
And then there was Antichamber.
It's an indie puzzle game, it's been out since last January, and it is amazingly good at helping you clear your mind of extraneous crap and focus your thoughts. There are no enemies and no other characters; there is no plot. Unless you count 'figure out how to get out' as a plot, anyway. It's practically a meditation aid built as a collaboration between MC Escher and Bloody Stupid Johnson, except for the lack of lethality or even danger. The soundtrack is ambient music by Siddhartha Barnhoorn, with other sound effects added in at times- nature sounds, mostly. I wound up buying the soundtrack on Bandcamp. Overall the game is either insanely frustrating or very calming or both, and while people have talked about how much it messes with your head, I don't think I really felt that way about it. Might be worth having a look, if you're into that kind of thing.
The first big one is that I've played through Assassin's Creed IV: It's Pirates This Time, You Like Pirates, Right?. Which was remarkably fun, and which made me very happy on a number of levels. One was the purely mechanical level, on which I was happy because OH MY GOD A VIDEO GAME VEHICLE I CAN STEER. Seriously. I've played Halo (CE and ODST), Mass Effect (see: Mako, Hammerhead), Half-Life 2, various Mario Kart games, etc., and the only vehicles I've had any real luck with at all have been the ships in Assassin's Creed games. It took me a while to get used to the ship to ship combat system, since you have several different weapons and which one you fire depends on which one you're looking at, plus I am not always good at remembering which buttons have to be pressed or not pressed for which gun, but once I did... YAY VEHICLE I CAN STEER. YAY COMBAT I CAN BE GOOD AT. On a character level I rather liked Edward Kenway; he struck me as a fine example of a Chaotic Neutral Slytherin very early on, and yet he had an appealing personality. Good supporting cast in the game, too- Adewale was kinda awesome, and the DLC in which you played as Adewale was pretty good, although since the main game was "Pirates! We like money and personal liberties! Mostly money" and the Freedom Cry DLC was "Welcome to Port-Au-Prince. Time to make people regret that they ever bought into the slave-based economy in the first place", the DLC was a rather different experience. (Note: you will not be participating in Toussaint L'Ouverture's revolution; AC IV was set in 1715 and a few years that followed, and Freedom Cry is set ten years after AC IV ends.)
And then there was Antichamber.
It's an indie puzzle game, it's been out since last January, and it is amazingly good at helping you clear your mind of extraneous crap and focus your thoughts. There are no enemies and no other characters; there is no plot. Unless you count 'figure out how to get out' as a plot, anyway. It's practically a meditation aid built as a collaboration between MC Escher and Bloody Stupid Johnson, except for the lack of lethality or even danger. The soundtrack is ambient music by Siddhartha Barnhoorn, with other sound effects added in at times- nature sounds, mostly. I wound up buying the soundtrack on Bandcamp. Overall the game is either insanely frustrating or very calming or both, and while people have talked about how much it messes with your head, I don't think I really felt that way about it. Might be worth having a look, if you're into that kind of thing.
