Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Assassin's Creed Unity

I remember Assassin's Creed Unity being mired in technical issues at release. One vivid memory is of character face textures not loading but eyes and mouth still being there -- the stuff of nightmares. I think in general people didn't like the game back then but the perception of Unity seems to have curiously turned around: you see a lot of positive comments these days. Playing it now for the first time, I personally found the game to be one of the worst in the series.

Saturday, March 23, 2024

A Fire Upon the Deep

Apparently the name of 1992 science fiction novel A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (Oct 2, 1944 – Mar 20, 2024 -- died just three days ago; a somber coincidence) was built by the author's editors in a brainstorming session: they wanted to utilize Robert A. Heinlein's technique of using either Shakespeare or the Old Testament. I have to say that what they came up with is a lot better than what Vinge had wanted to call the novel. A while back there was a Youtube video about Fire in my recommendations (again by Media Death Cult) and the novel's name is what immediately piqued my interest.

Friday, March 22, 2024

Assassin's Creed Rogue

Assassin's Creed Rogue and Unity were released on the same day back in 2014. That seems quite unusual but the reasoning was to have a release on the older gen consoles too (Xbox 360 and PS3) that never got Unity. Rogue was released few months later on PC too and years later as a remastered version for Xbox One and PS4. Rogue was pretty much like a consolidation price for the older gen: its development even helmed by kind of a secondary studio, Ubisoft Sofia, whose previous work for the series had been mainly AC Liberation.

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

The Grace of Kings

The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu is another literary awards winner that to me doesn't seem worthy of such recognition. A quick google search for reviews gave me a Reddit post that described the novel as cliff notes of itself, which I found a humorous yet accurate depiction.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag (& Freedom Cry)

My playthrough of Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag coincided with the release of Skull and Bones. The latter's development was troubled and costly -- and the end result was not something people thought worth the time it took for the game to come out. A common sentiment I saw: Ubisoft had already made one good pirate game; all they had to do was to build upon it. However, I'm not certain if Black Flag's single player campaign would have lent itself into a multiplayer live service format that easily. There's a multiplayer mode too in Black Flag but it doesn't involve naval combat, which is what Skull and Bones is about.

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Dead Space (2023)

In last year's January, EA released a remake of their 2008 third person survival horror shooter, Dead Space. The remake was developed by Motive Studio, which I believe is the place BioWare Montreal's people were largely shuffled into after they were shutdown in the aftermath of Mass Effect: Andromeda. How many of the actual same people were involved, is unknown to me. But like that game, does this remake too run on EA's in-house Frostbite engine.

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Lies of P

The reasons for my rule of not touching games developed by Japanese studios are many. (I should start writing them down; I feel like I've started forgetting them.) And that rule still holds. South Korea is culturally and geographically close to Japan -- at least when viewed from here -- but I haven't needed to think if they are close enough for Korean games to be included in the prohibition of mine. For the longest time South Korean studios seemed to release only pay-to-win MMORPGs in the West and those are easy for to me to ignore. But now there's Lies of P, a third person soulslike action roleplaying game released in September last year. It was on Game Pass day-one but I decided to wait for bug fixes and balance adjustments.