Puzzle Strike, Familgia, Castlevania: Harmony of Despair, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood
A little of column A and column B today, with some two-player tabletopping. I won a couple of games of Puzzle Strike, mainly by aggressively pursuing combines and strikes. There are some chips that do some awesome stuff, like Mix-Master, which breaks up your opponent’s gems and gives you a combine, and Iron Defense, which guarantees you have a strike when you need it. Again the phantom of not being able to counter being hit arose, which I’m not sure I like. There’s just not enough time in the game.
Gave Familgia another spin, and the game holds water in its simplicity, if its aesthetic is pretty terrible. My opponent was going out of his way to grief me, picking up the exact guys I wanted by nefarious means, so I was blocked a lot, but I used the pitchhitters and a couple of well-placed punches to snag the level 4 boss of two of the gangs, which helped me win in the end.
Then I played some video games. I hadn’t played Castlevania: Harmony of Despair since I’d purchased a larger TV, so I turned it on to see if it was actually fun now that it was visible. It was…okay. I easily made it to the boss of the first level with only a few jumping troubles, only to have him completely swamp me. I just don’t understand why that jerk has so many hit points, considering everything else I fight goes down in a couple of hits. It just feels unbalanced, and there’s a lot to the game that’s undecipherable.
Then I lost a lot of time in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. Not that I want it back, but it just sucked me right in. I tried out a couple of missions of the new DLC, and it’s good, if a bit wonky in some of the story elements. For example, Mona Lisa finally makes her appearance, and it’s just as obnoxious as you’d imagine. Then I have to storm this villa, which is staffed by the laziest, deafest guards in the worlds. There are at least half a dozen times when Ezio should have been spotted but wasn’t. At one point you walk into a room only to watch a guard leaving the room and apparently not bothering to check again. There is a guard lounging on a fountain that you vault off of! And this after the guards were specifically told to double security by some crazy lady. What’s worse? Once you get inside, you chat up the enemy and convince her to give you a painting in exchange for sex (actual plot point) and she calls the guards into the room and tells them to leave the painting outside uncovered by the side of the road. They do not even blink and acknowledge that Ezio is standing right there. Then, two minutes later, you decide that you don’t really want to put your thing in that diseased mess and tie the lady up and bail, which gets all the guards’ attention, including the exact same guards who were told to move the painting. Fission mailed, right? No, because apparently the painting is already outside waiting for you. It took them literally seconds to move the painting, and it never occurs to Lady Death to not back out of her end of the bargain. So hey, free painting.
I also went through an entire set of missions for a sequence somehow, in which La Volpe spends the entire time being a bit of a dick. You want to save some actor from being killed so you can soak him for a key to the palace, but the Fox is far too concerned that Machiavelli may be a traitor, and refuses to help you because you’re willing to trust him. A whole bunch happens, mostly involving riding horses past guys holding boxes, and you eventually crash a passion play to stop an assassination attempt. Then, as luck would happen, you see the real traitor standing on the side of the road, just chilling, and you hunt him down and kill him. With the knowledge of the real traitor in your hand, you have 80 seconds to stop La Volpe from killing Machiavelli, something that he had mentioned he was going to do. I just didn’t think that he would be doing that RIGHT NOW, a good couple of hours after saying he would. This came out of pretty much nowhere. But everything is good, Ezio becomes the official leader of the Assassins, and now it’s time to do that thing we completely failed to do earlier in the game.
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