Such a fun word to type. Ass Ass In.
Last week I beat Assassin’s Creed Unity, and decided to try going through the series chronologically, and bought the very first game, Assassin’s Creed 1.
And migod, what a game. The graphics look very good even by the standards of today and the game is from 2008! And while some aspects can’t help to be a little more primitive than Unity, which came out in late 2014, for the most part it is the same experience, just with a bit less stuff.
Decent writing too. The fact (spoiler) that the guy who gave you all your assassination targets would turn out to be the final villain was telegraphed heavily. The science fiction framing device, where it’s the present and you are some random dude abducted by the Templars (aka the Bad Guys) and forced to relive the life of an ancestor via “genetic memory” and a machine called the Animus, was interesting but superfluous.
I mean, yeah, it allows them to make sequels where you are technically the same dude in each game, and as science fiction plots go it’s pretty creative, but if I am spending 99 percent of the time as one of my ancestors in the past (Arno in Unity, Al-tair (pronounced Al Tie Ear) in 1) and only one percent of the time as Desmond Miles in the present, the most natural thing to do is to think of the sci fi bits as being the occasional hallucinations of my ancestor.
Anyhoo, I beat AC1 early this morning. Pretty decent ending, despite knowing that my final flight would be with Al Mualim (Moo A Limb), and overall I enjoyed the heck out of the game, almost as much as I enjoyed Unity.
Unity was slicker, and by that game (AC5, technically), the controls had gotten somewhat slicker and they had given up entirely on this godawful idea of having the buttons represent you feet, head, left hand, and right hand.
That might be how people work but it’d not how video games work. Presumably, someone thought it would increase immersion.
That person was stupid.
But the controls were easy enough to learn once I learned to ignore that shit.
So to recap, beat AC1 this morning and immediately bought 2. Just tried it out and one thing immediately impressed me : the second game starts exactly where the first one left off. Like in the exact moment.
One nitpick, though : In the first game’s over-plot, they clearly establish that your character (Desmond Miles) is a former Assassin, but at the beginning of the second game he’s never been one and goes on about how he’s not good at fighting.
Not only is that a retcon, in the first game he spent a huge amount of time as a deadly and highly skilled Assassin in the past.
You’d think he would, ya know, remember some of that.
Whatever. The second game looks just as awesome as the others so far.
This time, I get to be an Italian dude named Enzio in Renaissance Florence.
Should be pretty cool.
More after the break.
Will of iron, heart of steel
Let’s take another stab at this insistence on total self control of mine,.
It’s irrational. We’ve established that. In my zeal for not taking my emotions out on others like my Dad did (RIP, Larry), I closed down every possible avenue of spontaneous emotional actions and thereby stifled the fuck out of myself.
Nobody is supposed to have total self control at all times. There has to be the option for emotions to lead directly into actions or the id gets fatally wounded and it is the source of all life force, passion, feeling of freedom, feeling alive, and joy.
And you kind of need those things.
It’s not surprising that this regime of mine is a tad lacking in nuance and subtlety. After all, I invented it when I was a child.
It started when I was raped at the age of four and got extensively remodeled when I was the school pariah and bullied all the damned time,
Those led to my withdrawal from reality more than the self control shit, though. That came straight from my father and his dinner table tirades.
It’s hard to envision all the ways his temper fucked me up. I know there I have a lot of anxiety from trying to deal with it. All of his kids have it. That’s what happens when you have to walk on eggshells around one of your primary parents. Life was always a lot more tense when he was around. That made us kids not want to be around him, and he knew that, and I am sure it hurt him a lot.
But he never owned up to it. If he’d been capable of apologizing for his temper once he was calm again, that would have made a huge difference.
I am not saying that would have made it okay. But it would have made it better.
And so we avoided him if possible, and kept him at arm’s length the rest of the time. And it was his own fault.
But I still regret it. Well, regret’s not quite the right word.
I really wish it could have been different. That there had been some way to bridge the gap and bring Dad in from the cold. To make the family whole, instead of polarized.
And to my credit, absurd as it surely seemed at the time, I tried. Back when I was a Seventies kid who thought all we had was a communication problem, I put myself in between my father and whichever sibling he was venting on at the time and tried to get everyone to slow down and chill out so we could work out our differences.
That’s something tragically noble about that.
But eventually I figured out that it wasn’t a matter of communication and understanding. He needed these temper tantrums. They were a pressure release for him. And that meant that nothing could ever keep them from happening.
I mean, I saw the man look for something else to be mad about when one of his angry tirades got blunted by hard reality.
That told me all I needed to know. He was mad and loving it, and he wasn’t going to let something as minor and silly as that anger not being justified ruin his fun.
He’s never have admitted it, of course, because part of that whole rage addict trip is that sweet sweet feeling of righteousness, and you can’t keep that righteous buzz going if you admit you are angry because you like being angry.
Hmmm. That has been very cathartic. I should talk about Larry more often.
Because like it or not, he’s a big part of me, and now that he’s dead, the parts of him in those who knew him are all that is left of him.
I do miss you, Larry Donald Bertrand. We had some great times together. Everything was cool when it was just the two of us, hanging out.
RIP Dad. Maybe we will talk more in the future.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.