Just ordered me some KFC.
Checked out a couple of other places on DoorDash, but they both wanted to charge me more than $5 for delivery.
Um, yeah, fuck that.
So I said fuck adventure and got good ol’ KFC.
Finished Assassin’s Creed 2.
Loved the heck out of the game. Not quite as good as Assassin’s Creed Unity, but Unity is the fifth game in the series, so it’s like, three games more advanced.
Plus I can’t imagine any setting that would appeal to me more than Revolution Era Paris. It was glorious to soak myself in French culture for a while, even if it was only in a video game and I was killing a lot of people the whole time.
That was admittedly never part of my original time travel fantasy.
Of course, technically, I should hate Paris like my ancestors from the south of France did, because Paris was the headquarters for all those smug elitist bastards who were squeezing the simple honest farmers and fishermen of the south for every lou they could while looking down their noses at people who worked for a living,
But that was hundreds of years ago, before we said “fuck Europe and their wars, we’re coming to the New World to fish and farm in peace!”.
Now we Acadians hate Ottawa, like all good Canadians.
Anyhow, back to Assassin’s Creed.
The ending for Assassin’s Creed 2 was pretty good except for one tiny detail that drove me freaking nuts.
You finally get to the point where the main villain, Rodrigo Borgia, is completely at your mercy…. and you let the fucker live.
WHAT? I killed a thousand dudes to get this far, and now I suddenly decide revenge solves nothing? What kind of weakass bullshit is this?
Hell, forget revenge for having my father and two brothers (including the sweet, sickly, innocent Petruccio – basically an Italian TinyTim), the guy amply demonstrates that he is super evil,.extremely ruthless,and very very dangerous.
Letting him live is guaranteed to lead to people dying.So kill the bastard!
It’s like Batman letting the Joker live…. if Batman killed other criminals all the time.
So it’s more like the Punisher letting the Joker live.
Or Rambo. Or hell, Freddy Krueger.
It’s like the ending of Pokemon The First Movie, where Pokemon is fighting Pokemon to save the freaking world, then Ass Ketchup gives this big speech about how fighting is wrong.
Bitch, you capture these creatures against their will then force them to fight each other for fun. It’s kind of what the whole series is about.
But now, when the fate of the entire fucking world is on the line, fighting is wrong.
In both cases, this sudden attack of conscience comes out of nowhere and seems both tacked on and unmotivated.
But in Assassin’s Creed 2, murder is what I do.
It’s right there in the title.
Kill that asshole!
Aaaanyhow, finished the game, reveled in the glow of well earned victory, then bought the next game in the series, Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood.
And yes, it’s kind of weird that they gave up on numbers on only the third game.
What’s even weirder is that they eventually produced an Assassin’s Creed 3. But made a bunch of games in between.
Don’t ask me.I don’t know either.
And once more, I was very impressed with how the game picked up at the exact moment the previous game ended.
Didn’t skip over a single second.
That’s the sort of thing you can do when you have this whole science fiction overplot where you are Desmond Miles, some dude in a VR machine that lets him explore the past via the memories of his ancestors encoded in his DNA.
Don’t ask me about that one either. It’s one of those classic science fiction ideas that follows science to a certain point then takes a quantum leap into crazytown.
I mean, I suppose that could be what is in our non-coding DNA, aka “junk DNA”.
But I can’t imagine how it got there or why.
Anyhow, in Assassin’s Creek Brotherhood, you are still Desmond Miles and you still spend most of your time as your ancestor Ezio Auditore, same as the previous game.
Which is cool. I enjoyed being Ezio. But part of me is disappointed that I didn’t get to become a different ancestor.
After all, this is the first time I have played the same ancestor twice.
And like I said, you start at the exact moment where you left off in the previous game, so you have all your previous weapons and armor and a nice fat wad of cash to boot.
And you even get your beloved villa back.;It was your HQ for the previous game, and now you return triumphant. The peasants welcome you and laud you, everything is bright and beautiful and Tuscan, and you can finally retire from your life of murder and danger and be a minor country lord with your Uncle Mario.
So obviously that had to end. Including, sadly, Uncle Mario.
Yes, they killed off Mario. And I saw it coming, too. Or rather, felt it. The minute the enemy attacked, my finely developed sense of story told me they were about to kill off Uncle Mario, and I was right.
He was the character with the biggest emotional connection to Ezio, and we were going to need vengeance motive, so he had to go.
But even worse than that was seeing my beloved villa blown to bits by cannon. I had grown quite attached to the place by then, and it hurt to see it die.
But now I am in Rome, and have the possibility of buying entire neighborhoods and thereby tearing one of the greatest cities of all time away from Borgia control.
And also, incidentally, returning Rome to peace, justice, and the rule of law.
Sounds like my idea of fun. Toppling tyranny via murder and real estate.
To be honest, I am not sure which half of that I like more.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.