What I Played Today: January 1

Sam & Max, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Red Dead Redemption

A quiet day to start off the new year, in which I finished up the Sam and Max: Season One series, and some more games for an audience.

Sam and Max was alright, with a few major deficiencies. Things were going well once I cheated and found out how exactly I needed to get the absolutely essential “bend things with your mind” talisman (oh man, so many steps), and there was a cutscene in which the bad guy enacted his evil plan and “destroyed” Max. I don’t know why they don’t include more cutscenes, because they do them very well. Then it was a simple matter of getting Max back together, which was easy until the last part, in which I had to apparently read the designer’s mind. It required me making the logical leap of assuming a) Max had access to something worth a hundred trillion dollars, b) that he would feed this object to a character who had been tied up in my closet since Episode 3, c) that I would need to actually interact with an object in the trophy room, something that I never had to do before. This was a bonkers assumption, almost as bad as “cat hair as a moustache,” and I would have never thought of that without cheating. The ending was also pretty darn silly. I haven’t like their ending puzzles, mainly because they usually exist in a vacuum and end pretty anti-climatically. They should really just use their cutscene powers and just make a good ending happen, instead of forcing me to figure out one final puzzle that ends up killing the tension. Still, a good job overall, and I can’t wait to see how they upped the ante in the second series.

Also more Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, I have all the abilities unlocked now, which means I get to poison people now, hurray. Although, moving straight from this game to Red Dead Redemption, which I did, caused a strange moment of paranoia, where I was terrified of having John Marston move at more than a crawl for fear of bounty hunters, which was completely uncalled for, and I finally broke free and started actually playing the game.

I hadn’t played for a while, having been fairly disenchanted by the constant back-and-forth loyalty seesaw that is the Mexico chapter, but I slogged through it here. Most of the time I was helping the damn Army, and I managed to clear out some of the hideouts that were giving me trouble last time I played. Overall I guess it went alright, everything was competent and I didn’t die for a really stupid reason. Well okay, at one point I lost the mission because some NPC I didn’t even know I was supposed to protect was shot, but it only happened once. Hopefully I’m nearing the end of this chain (I’m down to only one questgiver, the rest have fled to America) so that I can go back to the States again. Sorry Mexico, but you’re just large and boring.