Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Red Dead Redemption
Lot of single player action today, in which I get through an entire chapter of Assassin’s Creed: Bro-hood, and move on to Red Dead Redemption. First is the festival of crazy that is the four-mission chain that you have to complete in Assassin’s Creed when you break into the Castello with the mission of killing a couple of dudes, only for you to totally give up on that mission to instead save yourself a bit of tail that you were banging a couple of months ago, Caterina Sforza. The missions were kinda all over the place, with poor directions on where you were supposed to go, and having to do things that you haven’t had to do before. One thing I haven’t been liking is the secondary mission goals that will determine whether you fully sync or just kinda sync with Ezio, because if you mess up and get spotted in a mission where you shouldn’t have been, it just means you have to do it again later to get 100%. I don’t want to do the mission again. There are so many sidequests, why can’t you just give me full credit for doing each one?
After I managed to break Caterina out of jail by kidnapping some lady (Ezio can’t kill ladies, it’s against the Assassin’s code or something), you then finally get to recruit assassins to your cause and make your little nest of awesome dudes that you can send on missions. I got six of them recruited in short order, and were sending them all over Europe to ruin some shit. I also got a few unrelated missions about killing some slave trader until Leonardo makes his appearance again, looking old as hell, and he builds me some awesome upgrades and tells me that he’s been tasked with building warmachines, so I should really fuck those up so that the Borgia don’t use them to win their war. So I find some plans and mess up some machine guns, although not before I totally use that stuff to kill 60 dudes, because if you’re not killing 60 dudes in every mission, it is not a modern-day action adventure game.
(Craziest about all the above: Disregarding the parts about Ezio, all of this stuff totally happened. The Borgia took Caterina Sforza captive, Leonardo da Vinci did work for Cesare Borgia, etc. I like how they did all the research on this and weaved in the part about the top secret assassin. I fully expect my final confrontation with Cesare to be on a castle wall in Spain.)
In Red Dead, I churned through the missions because goddang this thing should be over already. The time spent on the farm with Bonnie MacFarlane feel like a long lost memory at this point, and I just want to get on with it. First a bunch of missions with the racist anthropologist, who cannot stop talking in a way that is just painful to modern ears, and I’m glad he’s gone. I also had to stop a bank heist by Dutch, and the game is doing a really weird thing with Dutch. This guy is the Big Bad, the person whose death will mean that Marston is homefree and the game will be over. So you’d expect him to be hard to find, hidden even better than Javier Escuella, but…
You see, the writers wanted to really push the relationship between Dutch and Marston, so they had to have them talk a lot. However, this being pre-cell phone, they can’t just call each other up and have a spot of color between them. So you need Dutch to physically show up and talk to Marston. This would be fine if they gave Marston more of an incentive to not just shoot Dutch. The pseudo father-son relationship between them means little against the pile of evidence telling him why he should just full-auto on the old bum. But instead they have a number of civil conversations in which Marston is holding a gun and does absolutely nothing with it. At least fire at him and miss, John. And why aren’t the G-Men working harder to kill him? It feels like Dutch is riding into Blackwater three times a day, I’m sure you can find a way to waylay him and shoot him. You’re above the law with your pre-formation of the FBI. Just kill him already.
No comments:
Post a Comment