Assassin's Creed: Valhalla - Initial thoughts. Hint: Not a fan.

After 8 hours of game play I have left Norway and landed on England's shores where I'm going to live now, because I'm pissy with Daddy for making a deal so somebody else gets to be king. I wish I were joking.

Yeah, that's the motivation for an entire game. Pissed off kid, stomps off, leaves home because he didn't get what he wanted so he takes his toys and goes somewhere else. Oh joy.

Am I avenging my son's death by hunting down his murderers and stumbling across a huge conspiracy across time itself like in Origins? Nope. Pissy kid doesn't get his way so he leaves.

Am I trying to reunite my family and redeem my brother and save them from a secretive cult, while battling mythological creatures, that's bent on destroying our civilization like in Odyssey? Nope. Spoiled child scoops up his toys and runs away from home in a temper tantrum accompanied by pillage, murder, and mayhem.

Want to be mayor of a town and play a city building sim? You're gonna LOVE AC:V. See, in spite of England already having a blacksmith, stable, and general store in every village and hamlet and crossroads you can find, for some reason you want to build your very own that does the exact same thing theirs does. I MEAN EXACT. And the only way to do that is to raid, destroy, and pillage, wait for it... wait for it... monasteries. Yup. Churches are the only source of the supplies I need to build a stable. Why? There's no actual logic to it. Just shut up and go burn down monasteries and build a building to fill with horse shit.

I just lost 3 hours game play where it apparently never autosaved like it claims it does. That's half my game play for the entire day. I even think I saved once but it didn't recognize it when I reset the frozen game. What was I doing that was so game-breakingly bad? I tried to stand up from a crouch.

If I were loving the game it wouldn't be that big a deal but I'm only kinda liking it.

If you're considering Assassin's Creed Valhalla wait for a sale. 

Odin Vision is useless. Your eagle is a crow, or raven, and is useless. If you shoot something in the tall grass you're not gonna find it so don't bother looking. Everything is behind a barred door which in spite of having giant axes you have to do a puzzle to get through. Sometimes I can chain assassinate and sometimes I can't with no clue why not. You'll find a cursed area with no clue or hint or indication how to fix it. Your allies are sadists and torturous assholes. England is apparently the land of 20,000 rivers. You can get tattoos but you can't actually see them because every outfit completely covers you wrist to neck to ankles. Nothing on the map shows up on the HUD until you're on top of it. Comparing equipment is meaningless because you can't see the stats if upgraded on the compare screen and there's no DPS value anywhere to be found so which axe is better? No way to know. 

Overall I completely regret the money spent on the expensive edition I got based on their last two games which I loved and have played for hundreds of hours. That money would've been better spent paying somebody to just slap me randomly throughout the day for the next week or so. I'd regret that too but at least I wouldn't be allied with people who torture folks as a hobby like I am in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla.

I'm not asking the Vikings to be nice. I'm asking the game designers to give us the option to not be torturous ass hats as a play style. 

I'm not providing an affiliate link to it because honestly. I don't want you to buy this game. I wouldn't enjoy the money I made off your bad decision. I'd feel guilty. 

Fallout 4: Billy, the kid in the fridge

As you know may or may not know, I’ve been playing a lot of Fallout 4... a lot... more than I’ll admit to so don’t even ask. If forced I’ll lie. Don’t make me lie.

I was on the way back to I dunno, wandering around or something and I heard coming from behind a house, the sound of someone yelling to let them out. What the heck? A mission! I was super excited because it’d probably be a quick one.

So, I toddled off to look behind the house and what do I see? A fridge!! Oh please... please let the person in the fridge be named Indy. Turns out the kid in the fridge (That’s the name of the quest too) climbed in the fridge to escape the nuclear bombs 200 years ago. Sadly, the radiation turned him into a ghoul. Ghoul’s are radiation ruined people... I say ruined, but they can live forever and don’t get tired or need sleep really... sometimes they sleep though... I dunno. The lore is a little odd on the needs of ghouls. But here he is, literally the very first ghoul-kid I can remember seeing. Now, there may have been more. But I don’t remember them. I remember normal kids, unmutated ones, but no muties, ghouls as they’re called in game. Well, I opened it and he wasn’t called Indy. His name was Billy.He’s pretty burnt up, turns out radiation DOES make it through a fridge. Sorry, Indiana Jones. You should be a ghoul now... and kinda he’s turning into one. Some people age better than others.

Anyway. While talking to Billy the ghoul I find he’s been locked in there for 200 years and he wants me to take him home to see his parents because, as he looks around at the devastated landscape, a result of nuclear war and two hundred years of zero-highway maintenance, he realizes things don’t look familiar to him anymore, and he doesn’t think he can find the way back.

I said I would but not before THIS guy shows up and makes a strange request. Now, I’ve HEARD of slavers and raiders and I’ve killed my share of raiders and gang members throughout the game but this guy, his name is Bullet by the way, pops up while I’m walking the ghoul home, fully expecting to find a blown up house and get to watch Billy fall to his knees cry, wail, "Whyyyyy?" or something like that.

What does Bullet want? Why, Bullet wants to buy Billy. Of all the ghouls I’ve saved, interacted with, worked with, and fought alongside this is the first time someone has tried to buy one and he wants to buy the only ghoul-kid I remember seeing in the game? Um, that’s effed up.

So, I ask him "Why? Why do you want to buy Billy?"

He says because ghouls don’t need rest or sleep or food and make great slaves.

So, I say "No! You don't buy people!"

He doesn’t even get mad. He acts like he’s just asked me for a piece of gum and I’ve said, "Oh, sorry. This was my last piece." He just turns and walks away.

Now, I’m not a bad guy in this game, not really. I’ve been playing this game pretty straight-laced. I hardly steal at all and I only do drugs sometimes. But, with a silent apology to Billy for what’s about to happen... I pull out my high-powered rifle with a bitching scope on it and drop into a crouch. Well, the stars aligned because I managed to critical hit the guy in the back of the head.

I'd intended to simply kill him. What I hadn't intended to do right in front of FridgeBilly was to blow Bullet's head completely off his shoulders resulting in gouts of blood spray from his neck stump as he crumpled to the ground. Oops. Sorry if I grossed you out Billy.

I’ll put up with a lot, I really will... but nobody should be buying or selling kids that’ve been stuck in a fridge for 200 years... wait. I don’t really need to qualify that. Kids shouldn’t be sold, period.

Oh, in case you were wondering? Billy got home safely. His parents were still there and had also been turned into radioactive undying hairless hideously burned ghouls as well so all's well... or as good as it gets in the Commonwealth these days. The real tragedy is the mother's shoes. I've editted them out of this picture so you won't be completely distracted. I'm surprised Billy didn't run from those when he saw them. Sure, being burned up is bad and all, but that is REALLY no excuse for wearing ugly shoes.

Skyrim: Adoption & Why I can't parent

Skyrim is an amazing game that's six years old and still going strong. It features a civil war between the Empire and some rebels. You aren't really a "hero" in the game as you, if you play it all the way through, wind up being head of the thieve's guild and head of the assassin's guild in addition to being in charge or a bunch of werewolves who only gain levels by eating the bodies of those they have killed. All in all... it's a little morally gray area here. Maybe those people you assassinated needed it? Grelod the Kind was a heinous person to run the orphanage. If anybody was asking for it she was.

The problem with wars, civil and otherwise, is they make orphans. And orphans need adopting. So, with the Hearthfire expansion, Skyrim added the ability to adopt orphans to the game and the orphans actually talk and interact with you, their parent. They talk and interact with each other as well. Sometimes I'll come home from a long day adventuring and find them in the living room arguing. I'll tell them both to stop and send them to their room. Eventually they stopped fighting. They could learn! The AI in the game took into account my behavior and changed THEIR behavior.

Then I lost my game due to carelessness and had to start over. Dangit! My poor orphaned kids! Wait. What else did they program the AI to do? What else will the Skyrim programmers let my kids learn? I wonder.

Enter The Prince and the Frog. Up above you see the Prince. I adopted him. Next is the Frog. I adopted him as well and so began an experiment. Remember, these are new kids. They hadn't learned not to argue yet. So, I started off with them in my home and they would argue and I would discipline only the Frog. The Prince I would give a sweet roll to. Periodically they will come up to me and ask me for money. The Frog gets nothing. And as soon as I'm done with the "I don't have any money" dialog I tell him to do chores. The Prince I give the maximum amount of money allowed in the game, every time.

The game has a functionality where you can play games like tag or hide and seek with the kids. When I play hide and seek with the Frog as soon as he hides I leave and never look for him, leaving him out there in the cold, perhaps being chased by a giant or a dragon! I dunno. Meanwhile I continue to shower the Prince with gifts of sweets, new clothes, toy swords, money, books, all he could possibly want. The Frog gets nothing.

Well, almost nothing. I recently gave him a dagger. An enchanted soul stealing Dragonbone Dagger. Now, if he wants what his brother has he has a way of getting it. All he has to do is use the dagger and it's all his.

Meanwhile, I don't sleep at home any more. It's not safe. He has a dagger.

Eve Online: Space Sandbox?

Eve Online is a science fiction themed MMO (Massive Multi-player Online) Game in which you are the pilot of a space ship of some sort or another depending on the role you are taking on. That's vague I know but that's part of what I'm going to talk about here.

I've played most of the popular (and many of the not-so-popular) MMO games out there and they all tend to have one thing in common and that's that they're easy to pick up. They're easy to learn. They've got introductory missions that guide you on a path dependant on your race or your class or whatever. There tend to be quest lines that guide you from your starting newbie area to ever-increasing areas until you're finally in the end game content with other high level players. The zones, or gaming areas, tend to have other players of about your level and the relative safety of you as a player is something you can control typically. You can normally not be hurt by other players unless you're dueling them, which you typically have to agree to, or if you're in an arena area, or maybe if you've chosen to play in a Player vs. Player (PvP) server. Mostly the games are designed to be PvE (Player vs. Environment) and the game designers really hold your hand as you go through it from start to finish. I've played those and I really like those games. It's great. You wake up on a beach or escape from a jail or whatever and usually within sight of where you are is a person with a giant glowing question mark over their head.

Eve Online is nothing like that. Yes, there is an introductory tutorial to introduce you to the game and the controls which is great and if you play it (If you click on any of the links in here it'll get you 21 days of free game play that you can do for free without giving any credit card information or anything. If you DO decide to extend and keep playing it'll cost about fifteen dollars per month. Try it out first though, give it a go. It doesn't cost anything.) I wholeheartedly recommend without reservation, that you do ALL the training missions you can find. The rewards are worth it, very worth it.

An open world is a type of video game level design where a player can roam freely through a virtual world and is given considerable freedom in choosing how or when to approach objectives. The term free roam is also used, as is sandbox and free-roaming. ~Wikipedia.org

Eve Online, like I said, is nothing like that. After you finish the introductory missions you've got a ship, some knowledge of how to operate it, and a giant galaxy... but no guy with a question mark over his head. No information on where to go next or what to do next. And, if you think you're perfectly safe wandering around out there like you would be in other games you're sorely mistaken.  Unlike other games Eve Online is a giant sandbox, the first time I've used the term since the title, and as such the rules about player interaction are very much almost completely hands off from the runners of the game. If a player wants to attack you they can. Sure, in some zones, the starting zones (hi-security zones, AKA hi-sec zones) have a police presence and the police will attack someone attacking you. That doesn't mean you're safe. It means your attacker is in danger. They could very well still kill you and bug out and live through it. The police are strong and fast, but that doesn't mean they can instakill someone attacking you. Also, players can trade items and in-game ISK (that's what they call the money in the game, it's game money earned within the game) and if you're scammed by someone it's not something the game runners, GM's care about. You should've been more careful is their theory. Would you give your rent money to somebody you'd met ten minutes ago? No? Well, why would you give a lot of in-game money to someone you'd just met?

So, there are no quest givers to lead you around by the nose. You can mine asteroids, and if you look for them you can find mission givers that will pay out for doing mining missions. You can run courier missions where you'll pick up something from one station, fly it to another station and drop it off. That's nice. Sometimes there's combat. Sometimes there's combat in all the missions as space is a dangerous place. There are pirates and such out in space and they'll agro, attack, you when you're out in space. The police don't do anything about them. You can be mining or delivering some cows and then get jumped by pirates. Pay attention! Maybe you're running security missions, escorting a scientist from one place to another... you can count on being attacked on those. But you get to choose what you do and you can change what you're doing from one hour to the next, one minute to the next. If you don't feel like mining run courier missions, run security missions. Exploration is another option, harder than the others as there are NO mission givers for this one. It's exploration after all. You go into outer space and use probes to find anomalies and then send in probes to find out what the anomalies are. Are they wormholes? Are they pirate hideouts? Drug warehouses? Only way to find out is use probes and then go in there and see what you can find... if you can live long enough to take it then it's yours. But there are no mission givers and no hints. You just go out there and start looking.

All of this is totally up to you. You need different ships to take on different roles to run different missions. Mining works best with a ship with a giant hold, for example, so you can haul the most ore at a time. Courier missions work best with a fast ship that has a lot of legs and some weapons just in case you're jumped by pirates or opposing faction ships that don't want whatever data chip you're delivering to get where it's going. That variety of ships means you need to learn a variety of skills. Skills are learned at different rates and are learned in real time. You can't really speed it up. So, if it's going to take you 3 days to learn your  next skill level of Frigates then it's going to take three days in real time, before that skill is learned. You don't have to be logged in for it. It's real time.

I love the game and the freedom of it. I love that edge of unsafety that there is. I can be playing side by side with a player who has been playing for 7 years when we're running some mining missions. I have NOT been playing for that long at all. But the level based zones of other games aren't really in Eve Online. The low-security player vs player areas of the maps are mostly higher level players but there's no reason I couldn't go there right away. Now, to do so would mean my almost immediate death at their more experienced, better equipped hands. But I could go there. And, if they were unlucky I could possibly win even.

There’s a new hero in Gotham…

DC Universe went free to play recently so I decided I could afford that. Free to play also means, in case you were wondering, free to download as well. Now, it’s a big game so be prepared to wait for it. Then once I got it (through Steam) and signed in there was another 3 Gig patch to get. Short description and screen shots follow. If you click the pictures I believe they’ll embiggen (Get larger.)

Character creation was pretty easy but I, and I’m not kidding here, I wasn’t real sure what I was doing. Fortunately most Massively Multiplayer Online Games (I’m leaving off the alleged “Role Playing” that people include in the name because honestly… it’s rarely included when they play.) the first few characters are typically throw away you don’t get too attached to as you figure things out. So, I went with a Batman/Robin type. Character. Here you can see me standing on the seal inside the Gotham City Police Department.

Since I was in Gotham I of course had to go and find the place where Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed. Here’s the fun part. I didn’t know there was a tour that would take me here. I found it by exploring. One of the great and horrible parts of MMOGs for me is my propensity to explore and try and find things. I found this and as soon as I saw the roses I knew what I was looking at. When I got close to them some sort of achievement or badge screen popped up but I wasn’t reading it. I was looking at the roses and feeling bad for the boy whose parents were gunned down in front of him at this very spot.

They weren’t kidding when they said Gotham needed help. The place was a wreck. There were super-villain henchmen running amok and the local police weren’t able to do much about them. The Scarecrow was releasing huge barrels of his poison gas into the air causing the fine citizens of Gotham to hallucinate and act out. They weren’t themselves we had to keep reminding ourselves as we tried to merely subdue them and help the doctors administer the antidote. Guarding the specialists in the haz-mat suits as they set up giant industrial air purifiers on the roof tops was not my favorite part of the night, but as you can see here. The air absolutely needs purifying.

The light of the full moon was cutting through the smoke by the time I was done for the night. Security zeppelins were starting to help locate hot spots to call in reinforcements. I called it a night when I got to level 7 and had to run back to Gotham Police Station.  Here I am on the top of a building with a giant full moon behind me. I waited there for what felt like forever for the Zeppelin to get in the shot where I wanted it. It looks like a bug that the moon light is coming through my head but that’s not true. My eyes glow… probably with all my pent up power. Grrr…

It’s been a lot of fun so far. I already want to do these same parts again with a different character. I’m watching other people playing and seeing what they can do and I want to do it too. Yes, flying is one of those things I want to do. I’m not sure how replayable it would be long term but it was free so what do I care?

Also, I’m playing the game with an Xbox360 controller plugged into my laptop. It absolutely works well for that.