Assassins Creed 3: The Second Day

I wasn't really expecting to hit each day that I played this game, but so far I've had some pretty bizarre occurrences each day, and I just can't help myself.  I've learned some key things about how life in the Assassin's Creed world differs from that of the real world.

How Not to Get Caught
I was given a mission where I had to sneak through a heavily guarded portion of Boston.  My skills have improved since my first day where I was falling out of trees and jumping off churches (well... I still jump off churches).

I've figured out how to read the screen as I'm going along too.  For example, if Red Coats see something unusual, they'll start to get suspicious and you can watch the bar of their suspicion rising.  Often that's your cue to hide or get out of the way from where they're moving.  I was so excited to have figured this part of the game out that while I was standing beside a warehouse on the docks, I was trying to keep an eye out for those cues.

My friend was with me.  My goals were to keep him safe and keep us both hidden from the enemies.  So sure enough, I see one of those bars start filling up and spring into action.  I turn and start running the other way to get into hiding.

Only my friend was standing right behind me.  So as I turned around and began running, I did what I do to anyone in my way when I start running.  I shoved him hard to my side.  He was standing on the edge of the docks.  I shoved him anyway.  Into the Atlantic.

As I started running, a warning came up saying that my friend had died.  Evidently that was the wrong choice to make.


How to Master the Art of the Assassination
Later, I had a bunch of friends (including the guy who took a drink in the Atlantic) who were disguised as British soldiers and pulling a wagon of prisoners in to a camp to try to infiltrate it.  I was leading the wagon and my friends would rush ahead and lay ambushes for any Redcoats they might see head of them.

It was fun.  I'd sit in the wagon, watch for my allies to get into position, and then shout for them to spring their trap before the Redcoats knew what was going on.  It all worked pretty well.

One time, I had a couple of my guys on rooftops while a Redcoat walked down beside the building under them.  He started to realize I wasn't the normal guy and I ordered my men to attack.  The guy on the rooftop dropped with his knife and plunged it deep into, and killing... the dog sitting next to the Redcloak.  The Redcloak was startled but had the presence of mind to pull out his gun and shoot my friend in the head (he survived the hit - it probably really hit him in the leg).

Sometimes I wonder how my team of ineptitude is actually going to achieve anything in the upcoming war.

Proper Chair Etiquette
Once I got away from the missions in Boston, I started wandering the countryside.  It was winter and snowy, so I figured I was probably cold and when I passed a tavern, I stopped in to warm up.  I muscled up to the bar, but no one wanted to talk to me.  I mean no one.  Weird, right?  Most games I play, I can usually throw the bartender a few gold for a drink or something.  Not in the colonies, evidently.

So I decided to go sit down at a table and listen to the music that someone was playing.  I walked by the table and moved to the chair.  Now I know I can sit on benches - I've done it before - but the best I could manage was standing on top of the chair.

I turned around to leave, but I couldn't!  I was stuck behind the stupid chair!  I finally figured out how to leave by leaping on the table and walking over it until I got to the other side.  Note to self: taverns are for chumps.


Clarity of Directions
Later, I finally tracked down a woman who really did not like me.  I mean, I don't know why she wouldn't.  I've only stalked her for miles through the snow and kept tracking her down.  And insulted her (only out of ignorance).

But finally she was okay with me enough to give me a chance.  So as we stood in the middle of the wilderness, snowcapped hills and forest all around us, she said, "Close to here, there's a hill.  Meet me there."  Then she headed off.

Really?  Close to here there's a hill?  Lady, there are four hills in my immediate field of vision.  You want to give me some more guidance than that?  If it wasn't for the tracker that popped up on my map, I'm pretty sure that would have ended poorly.

 
So my day two of Assassin's Creed went a bit better than my first day.  I am enjoying the game, but I think I'm enjoying making fun of it a little more so far.  Dan and I were talking about the beginning - he's going to be happy to stop playing the British guy and start playing the Native American character.  Personally, I love the British character.  He's got attitude, and he's proper.  It's the kind of roleplaying character I love to play.  Dan, on the other hand, doesn't like all the talking and smugness about him.  I say that's the best part.

Assassins Creed 3: The First Day

I started playing Assassin’s Creed 3 last night after several weeks of dealing with the fact my computer would not install the game (a whole new story that ended with me having to upgrade to Windows 8).  I figured it would be fun to put down some of my initial thoughts.  I have not played either of the first two games.  This one was interesting to me primarily because of the American Revolutionary War aspect.  That time period has always interested me.  I actually have ideas in my head about running a pre-Revolution roleplaying game at some point, but like so many of my ideas, it may just stay in the “wouldn’t that be fun if I did that” category.

Anywho, back to Assassin’s Creed 3.  I knew next-to-nothing about the game before I started.  Imagine my surprise when I start off somewhere in the future.  And I’m being given a lot of information about the Templars.  And Assassins.  And weird computer artifacts.  And all of the sudden I was in a holodeck-like computer program.   Wow.  This is lame.  In my Revolutionary War story, I don’t even live in that time period?  I’m just going through a memory of that time period?

But that’s okay.  I’m sure by the time I’m mixed up in the game, I’ll forget all about the stupid premise.  I mean really, why bother with any of it?  Why not just have the story in the historical time period and be done with it.

Anywho, I started out in London in an Opera House.  I had to kill a guy who was sitting in one of the box seats.  So I had to find a subtle way to get to him without being noticed.  Awesome – having just come off of Dishonored, I love this kind of thing.  I started following the hints around the map and managed to climb part of the interior wall.  Until it got to a point where it said I had to climb out along the wall into the main audience area.  Wait.  How is that supposed to be subtle?  I assumed someone would see me straight away, but nope… they were all ignoring the obviously-dressed, grunting man who was climbing all around the opera house.  Wow.  Must have been a very enthralling show.

I got back stage, made a ton of noise as I climbed across the stage without being seen (I only messed up a bunch of their props and setting pieces, so I wasn’t THAT obvious), and then made it to the box.  There was an awesome cut-scene where I killed the guy, and then I had to walk out of the opera house as the body was discovered and people were questioned all over the place.  I have to say, it was pretty cool how tense they made that part of the mission.

Next step – I’m off to the Colonies.  I spend a couple months on a boat (which takes over an hour of game time and is remarkably boring).  I get in a fight with some sailors, everyone hates me, and someone tries to kill me.  Oh, and I climb around.  A lot.  I guess this is all just getting me used to the gameplay, so I’m fine with it.

I finally get to the Colonies and start off.  There’s someone there waiting for me to arrive and he starts telling me about what’s going on.  Red dots keep appearing on my screen which I quickly learn are the British.  Okay, so my screen will let me know when the Red Coats are near.  Red is usually reserved for enemies, so I decide to walk up to one of them.  He ignores me.  Then I see a woman with a basket of apples trip and spill her apples.  Some guy grabs one and bolts while the woman yells, “THIEF! STOP HIM!”  I’m a good guy.  I take off after him.  He ducks down some stairs in an alley.  I follow him, and he stops running and turns to face me.  Uh oh, is this going to be a fight?

Then he drops the apple and it starts floating in midair, and he walks away casually, ignoring me.  I’m mesmerized by this floating apple and can’t seem to figure out how to pick it up.  After a moment, I realize the real ploy… I stopped watching the thief!  Did he escape!  I turn around and find him a few steps away, leaning against a wall.  “How dare you steal a floating apple!” I want to yell at him.  Instead, the only thing I can do is walk into him repeatedly.  He doesn’t seem to care, but it makes me feel like I did at least something to him after his magic-apple-incident.

Later, I find a bunch of rifles leaning against a board.  I pick one up.  Then I drop it and pick up another one.  Then I just leave with it.  No one seems to care, though one person did comment as I walked past, “That man really shouldn’t be armed.”

No worries.  As soon as I talk to Ben Franklin, my new rifle disappears.  Ben Franklin tells me about his Almanac.  Find the missing pages!  Okay, we’ll see how that rolls.  I go to buy a new gun and sword (the only two things it seems this store sells) and then head to the tavern where I am told that my first mission is to recover a box of research so that my new friend can figure out where I’m supposed to go next.

I head to find a guy who’s tracking the thieves, only there are too many of them for him.  Not too many for me, though!  I pull out a rifle and shoot the lookout, then climb into the thieves fort and sneak along.  I find some guns and shoot one of the bad guys and take aim and… whoa, it takes a while to reload these things.  Oh yeah… ball and powder.  That’s right.  Maybe I should just grab another gun that I’m sure they left sitting here already loaded and… OH MY! I’m being stabbed by four people!  I pull out my sword and make short work of them.

We make our way through the fort to the research and find the leader.  We spend some time offering each other the opportunity to leave without being killed.  I pull my gun on him and aim it.  Then he starts pulling his gun on me.  SHOOT HIM!  SHOOT HIM!  But I don’t.  I wait for him to aim it at me first before shooting him in the head.

A brief fight later and the cut-scene reveals that my shot at his head ACTUALLY hit his leg.  These things are dreadfully hard to aim.

I start picking the pockets of every dead man I can find, grab a gun and head out to fight some more.  Shoot, shoot, shoot, and more shooting.  Soon they’re on me and hitting me.  I kill them with my sword.  We keep moving.  More guys, this time with some on the rooftop.  We kill all the ones on the ground, then I try to shoot the guys on the rooftop.  My gun won’t work.  I think it’s loaded.  I start picking the pockets of the dead people on the ground for more bullets.  Fortunately muskets are terrible aim and I can just wander around without worrying.

No dice on the bullets.  No idea what to do.  I stare at the building for a while as I’m being shot at and then flash back to my days climbing around the ship.  I can climb!  I guess that hour of boring gameplay was worth something.  I run up to the building, climb it, and stab one guy.  Then I climb to the chimney and leaping-stab another guy.  Awesome!

We keep walking.  More people, more inability to shoot a gun, and more stabbing with my sword.  Soon we’ve escaped with the research.

Next task, find some dude that’s on my list of sympathetic-to-my-cause people.  I head in and find his home has been trashed.  Where could he be?  I start trying to track down some rumors, listening to conversations people are having and soon have a new goal… FIND MORE CONVERSATIONS!  So I tell my ally to meet me somewhere and I’m going to go high to listen in.  Um… really? Okay.  Evidently my goal of going high to listen in on conversations involves me climbing to the top of the highest point in the city.  Now I know that I personally am partially deaf and could not hear conversations from that height, but I’m pretty sure no one else could either.  Sure enough, my ascent to the highest point in the city ends with me leaping into a bale of hay.  Um… why did I just do that.

So I get out of the hay, wander around, and climb some more.  I find a conversation I’m supposed to be listening in on and sit in a tree above them.  Unsure of what I’m supposed to be doing, I accidentally fall out of the tree (this one’s completely on me) and a Red Coat comes around and starts yelling at me.  I run away from him and find another conversation.  I hide behind some boxes with a couple other people standing nearby and listen in on the conversation.  But soon the Red Coats are there too, yelling at me.  Damn… I’m doing something wrong.  Maybe if I… wait… did that Red Coat just stab me?  Well, I’ll stab him right back!  Uh oh.  He’s got friends.

And that’s the story of how I got chased around Boston by an army of Red Coats and then shot down by a gun line as I tried to climb a building to escape.

Better luck next time…  Despite my making fun of a lot of it, I am really enjoying it so far and looking forward to seeing what happens.  I know I've barely scratched the surface and I'm probably still in the part that's teaching me how to play the game.

Dishonored, and What's On the Horizon

Not too long ago, I finished off playing Dishonored, my silent killer teleporting all around the city putting his knife to peoples’ throats and ending them something quick.

Actually, he didn’t tend to do that too much.  Where in Skyrim, Red was something of a mass-murderer (I called her “the extinction event for humanity” at one point), Corvo was actually very polite with people.  Well, most people.  He would politely walk up behind them, and then politely choke them out, and then politely hide them while they slept so no one would stumble upon them.

It didn’t always work, of course.  I was climbing a massive lighthouse at one point and could not find an easy way around one of the guards.  So I loaded my crossbow with my patented (non-lethal) sleeping darts, took aim, and shot the guard.  He clutched his neck, stumbled a moment, then fell off the edge of this huge lighthouse.

I don’t think that guy survived.

But still, most times it worked out well.  I could climb all around the city and drop down near people, choking them out and putting them away.  I enjoyed choking out the last person in a line of people who were chatting with each other.  They others would keep talking while I dragged one of them away.  Then I would come back and wash/rinse/repeat.  Soon I’d have a pile of bodies all stacked up, all sleeping together.

Occasionally I would get a little frustrated with the game, give it a quick save, and then rush out and kill anyone I saw.  At the end of the day, I’d be standing in a mess of blood, smiling.  Then I’d go back to the save point and try to beat it without killing anyone.  Like the whole last run-through had been a dream.  Does that make me a sick man?

Anywho, my whole goal was to kill as few people as I could without constantly restarting the missions to get fewer kills.  I had a pretty good record, usually getting between 0-3 kills a mission.  Except one of the missions – the third one.  In this mission, there was a tower that would constantly zap anyone that came around not wearing a uniform.  I learned about its lethality first-hand.  I snuck up to choke out a guard in uniform at one point, and in the middle of choking him, the two of us were zapped by the tower.  He died and I got knocked away.  Another zap and I was dead.  Okay… maybe I should just ignore that group of people then.

I slipped past the tower and then in my exploring, I made my way back to it and rewired it so it wouldn’t shoot me anymore (my first rewiring!).

At the end of the mission, after recalling only a couple kills, the screen came up telling me I had killed 14 people.  What?!  Turns out that in rewiring the tower, it started shooting people with uniforms on instead.  So while I spent another hour or two wandering around and checking out the rest of the city, guardsmen constantly wandered in the way and got blown up.

After I beat the game, I went back and tried the mission again, this time with no kills.  It was much easier after I figured out that I didn’t actually need to do anything to the tower to make it through.

That was also the mission I learned how annoying little girls can be.  I found the Empress’ daughter who had been kidnapped, gave her a big hug, and sighed relieved.  I had just spent a long time cautiously sneaking around the building and making my way to her room without anyone noticing.  She told me she was happy to see me, then told me to follow her.  And she took off running down the stairs.  Running!  Seriousness!  Not knowing what to do I started chasing her, afraid at every turn that I would have a bunch of guards standing in my way.

It didn’t happen, of course.  She was pretty smart – she knew the guard-less route out of the building.  I told her to wait in the dark, cold alley while I headed back in the building and got some killing done.

So Dishonored is finished.  I can’t count all the different ways I died in the course of the mission.  One of my favorites was standing on top of a train that got run through an electric disintegration field.  The next time I tried that one, I jumped off before reaching the field.  I think I was also eaten by piranhas once, and spat at by plants.

But with Dishonored now finished, it’s time to move on to my next game.  By brother-in-law got me Assassin’s Creed 3 for Christmas.  Looks like I’m about to get some more killing done, Revolutionary-War-style!