Stuff

I haven't blogged for a few days (in fact more than a few days), mainly because I've been busy playing Assassins Creed 4: Black Flag

Now, I'm aware that it's not a new game, but I've only recently got it and it's really good.  If you haven't encountered the Assassins Creed games before, basically you get to play some sort of sneaky chap that runs around, stabbing people.  There's a lot of intricacies, like the ability of your fellow to climb virtually anything (except rocks - he's rubbish at rocks.  I mean, give him a brick wall with a tiny ledge or a broken twig and he can clamber up that just fine, but a load of rocks blows his mind), in fact he's addicted to climbing and leaping off things - accidentally run too close to a wall and you'll find him leaping up and over it like a gymnast.

There's a back story where there's some sort of way of going back in time via DNA, and you're actually a geek in the present using a machine to record stuff that happened in the past, but the stuff in the present (at least so far) is pretty boring, as in the present you're a guy in an office with a tablet, and in the past you're a pirate with a pirate ship, guns, swords, bombs, and poison darts (my favourite being berserk darts - shoot someone with one of these and they'll run around killing anyone else nearby, before keeling over dead themselves)

There are some bits which are "convenient", shall we say.  For example, guards seem to be amazingly laid back about their friends, only metres away, being dragged into bushes gurgling.  If I was one of those guards I'd be thinking "Where's Terry?  Steve?  Bob? Andrea?  They all went off to look at that bush because they thought they heard something, and then they made a choking noise and stumbled into the bush.  Perhaps it might be worth shooting the hell out of the undergrowth before the same thing happens to me!" but of course that's just me.

There's a lot of commanding your ship too, and that's good fun - you get to attack and board other ships, building up your own fleet.

As an aside, I should say that all of the screenshots I took didn't come out well - I must have had my settings wrong, as they're all quite pixelated.  Just trust the captions.

Here I am, tipping someone overboard after stabbing them a lot.  This always feels really cool.

Building a fleet sounds like fun, it does result in being able to send your ships off on quests to get more loot, but it also has a terminally dull sub game where you make to make ship routes safe by attacking the routes again and again in an endless cycle of repair ships - attack the route - repair your ships - attack the route again which gets boring pretty quickly.  Most annoying of all is that the routes get dangerous again far too quickly. 

Here I am, in the sub game, with three of my ships kicking the hell out of a little gunboat.

That aside, it's a fun game with a really open feel to it.  If you fancy sailing around for a bit, that's fine.  If you find an island that looks a bit interesting, there's nothing stopping you from dropping anchor, and jumping off the side to go check it out.  I must admit that I'm not a huge fan of stealth - I much prefer to run at an enemy from behind and skewer him - but it is essential at some points.

And at the end of the day, you can sail off into the sunset.

For me though, the ability to do cool looking stuff quite easily is nice.  I remember when I was really early on in the game - it's essentially an area to "practice being stealthy" by walking through bushes, and whistling at guards until they would come and investigate (resulting in me dragging them into the bushes for an unhappy end), until all the guards were dealt with and there was just some sort of boss bad guy with a pair of bodyguards immediately in front of him.  I decided to stuff being stealthy and run at him full pelt, expecting to get into some sort of big sword fight.  Instead, my character pushed the bodyguards out of the way and impaled the boss without any sort of resistance.  It brings back memories of Path of Neo, where you could do some amazingly impressive moves by frantically hitting all of the control keys as quickly as possible.

In summary it's a big game, lots of opportunities to explore, with a good storyline.  It's well worth a play,

Finally, on Tuesday it's pretend to be a time traveller day, so I'm wheeling out my video from last year where a man from the past tries to find food.

And yes, I did really eat shower gel in it.