Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Assassin's-Creed”
How Video Games Grew Up When I Wasn't Looking
There was a time when I loved video games. I subscribed to EGM and EGM2. I trolled the nascent World Wide Web looking for video game news. I read IGN religiously. The most powerful systems out there were the Nintendo 64 and the Playstation. Then I discovered girls and dropped the subscriptions. Most of the video games of that time period were still very arcade-y in nature. Or they were platformers like Mario or Tomb Raider that had the flimsiest excuse for a plot. Yo, the princess got kidnapped again. Run through a bunch of levels to get to her. No exposition or reason for anything going on. You just needed to complete these tasks to unlock the final boss fight. Of course, games were starting to have cut scenes between levels to keep the narrative going. And I remember the great FMV flame wars that caused. Were you just working to unlock expository videos? This was better than the Mario case, but there was still just a small correlation between what you were doing to get through the level and what was going on in the story. The biggest exception was the movie tie-in game, but those tended to have gameplay elements that were full of suck.
80s Games vs Today's Games
During Giant Bomb’s Game of the Year deliberations, one of the panelists was talking about how the difference between Pacman and Pacman Championship Edition DX reflects the difference in video game design over the past thirty years. The original Pacman is a stress-enducing game while Pacman CE DX is an empowering experience. Pacman punishes you for the smallest mistake, only gives you four power pellets per maze, and gets more punishing the further you go. By contrast, Pacman CE DX uses a bullet-time effect to give you a chance to turn past ghosts you might otherwise have crashed into, the power pellet regenerate, and the game becomes generally more fun the faster and more frenetic it gets. The ghosts, save one or two, follow you around and aren’t much of a menace unless you come back around to your tail as in the game snake or need to exit through a hole where a sleeping ghost waits. And this wasn’t limited to Pacman, tvtropes has a whole trope dedicated to this called Nintendo hard. Why has this change come about?
Assassin's Creed vs Assassin's Creed II
Because I rarely play games when they first come out, I had the occasion to play Assassin’s Creed and Assassin’s Creed II back-to-back. As I’ve mentioned before ( near the end of the post ) getting to experience sequels one after another can yield some benefits over waiting years in between. (Plus, in the case of stuff like Harry Potter (which I haven’t read yet) you don’t have the tension between books) In this case, it was interesting to see how much had changed while keeping the core game the same. There may be some very mild spoilers below, but I’m trying to keep it so that you can read it even if you intend to play the games.
2010 Game of the Year
I played a lot of games this year. Perhaps more than in any previous year since leaving high school. Since I usually don’t buy games when they first come out, the winner will not necessarily be a game that came out this year. I went to my raptr page and took a look at all the games I played this year. Following is a list of the games and a little about what I thought of them. At the end will be my pick for 2010.