where are your gloves and your helmet?

Started playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey a few nights ago.

Can I just say how damn refreshing it is to have a work set in the ancient world, in ANY part of the ancient world, where the default accent is not British?

(also the very brief bit that takes place at the battle of Thermopylae? THE PERSIANS WEAR PANTS AND LEONIDAS HAS ARMOR. THANK YOU.)

Last of Us Part II: Is this the most accessible game ever?

The first time Steve Saylor fired up the hotly-anticipated new game The Last of Us Part II, he burst into tears.

"Y'all don't even know how much..." he says between sobs in his video of the moment, which has now had nearly half a million views.

"I'm sorry. I don't even know what to say."

Steve is legally blind, and was looking at the overwhelming accessibility options menu.

Courtney Craven, editor of accessibility-focused gaming site Can I Play That, is hard of hearing and has some motor-control issues, and had a similar reaction.

"The first thing I did upon launching [the game] for the first time was FaceTime a friend and cry," she says.

The game has already been dubbed "the most accessible game ever".

It has more than 60 different accessibility settings, allowing an unprecedented level of customisation and fine-tuning.

Every button can be changed, and one-handed control schemes are available by default.

Players like Courtney can turn on direction arrows on subtitles to indicate where the sound is coming from; players like Steve can outline characters and enemies in vivid colours.

Steve, who goes by the name "Blind Gamer" online, has nystagmus - an involuntary eye movement that blurs his vision. Ever since he was a child playing the original Nintendo Entertainment System, he has had to sit extremely close to the screen, and his reflexes haven't always fitted into what modern games expect.

"For the first time in my entire life, I was able to sit back on the couch and play the game without any barriers getting in the way." he says.

"I was able to sit comfortably and play a game just like if my friends were in the room playing with me. And that, to me, was extremely opening. It was emotional...."

Got the Skyrim edition with all the official DLC included from the used game bin a while ago. I've been watching a friend of mine play through (this is the same person who periodically asks me about Objectivist stuff, who genuinely thought Khal Drogo was going to live because he was too important to die, and who, on a playthrough of Fallout 4, managed to kill Arthur Maxson with a bottlecap mine while Arthur was making a Great Big Messianic Speech- he doesn't like Great Big Messianic Speechifiers). Neither of us has played any of the other Elder Scrolls games, although I absorbed a little about the setting through RPG applications and have been trying to catch up on the lore through the Elder Scrolls wiki before attempting a playthrough of my own.

My friend is at level 80 or 81 or so and has yet to ( Spoilers back here, I guess- what exactly is the statute of limitations on a video game that came out in 2011? )

EEEEE FALLOUT BOSTON EEEEEEE

I'mma go squeal in the corner until Gamestop says I can preorder my copy. (I need to finish Notes From New Vegas before this thing comes out, I know.)