(no subject)

[damselfish]

Thanks to Tumblr, I decided to give Assassin's Creed 3 a whirl. I spent a couple hours playing it last night, and here are my thoughts:

I Need an Arrow To Tell Me Where My Dude Is
Let's forget, for now, the totally inadequate UI and the green objective pointer that floats laconically around the screen, indicating nothing. I need some way to know which guy is my guy. I am a dude in a dark blue coat with a tricorner hat fighting a bunch of dark brown or blue dudes in tricorner hats. I have had more than a few fights going "hit him! Oh my god I'm mashing these buttons as hard as I can, why are you standing there like a lump on a log? HIT HIM I'M DYING," all the while watching the dangerous looking enemy making his way over with fancy twirls and backstabs and stuff.

Only to realize: the dangerous looking enemy is me, and he is flailing wildly due to my button mashing.

How on earth am I supposed to know when to counter or disarm when I can't even properly keep track of my dude?

The Controls Are Finicky and Sloppy
It took me a long time to figure out that the firearm crosshairs existed. It's a tiiiiiny white circle that, in the shooting tutorial, appears on the white ground. It's also hard to aim because the target is tiny and the controls swing wildly about, so you spend 45 seconds twitching the analog stick to move the crosshair millimeter by millimeter, and chances are you'll still overshoot your target. But fine, now I know how to use my pistol. Away I go, firing on my enemies!

Until I reach a point where I am surrounded by dudes on buildings firing at me. "Shoot the enemies on the roof" the objective tells me.

"Can do!" I say, and aim my shiny new musket. Nothing happens. The crosshair is squarely on top of the dude, but I'm not allowed to shoot him. I try to cozy up to cover because maybe my dude won't shoot unless he's in cover, but no good, possibly because one of my NPCs is just standing there taking up space (with a musket which he won't fire, why you gotta be wasting precious cover space if you're not gonna use it!?) ...Okay... I go to the other side of the wagon and try to shoot the guys on the other building. Nothing. Drop the musket and aim with my pistol. Nothing. I do the cover/no cover dance for a while until finally I get the "you can shoot this" glow and kill them. I don't know what I did that allowed me to shoot them.

Then I have to go back to the others. I hide behind one building, try with musket/no musket, pick up a couple new muskets in case mine just hasn't been loaded, no dice. I hide behind another building. Again, I can't shoot. "Just let me fire wildly, then! I can hit them from here! I'm targeting them!" No. the game thinks I am too incompetent, or something.

I am flailing in rage now. I run across open territory, jump onto the building while farmers go "wat" and kick the crap outta the enemy dudes. Yeah I shot you. With my fists!

What the Fuck in the Actual Plot
I bought AC3 expecting a stealth/puzzle jumper set in revolutionary America that would involve lots of killing people. I fired the game up and got: "Surprise! You're a schlub in the modern day."

What.

No really.

What is this? Fine whatever.

Th opening monologue, which was clearly intended to introduce new players like me to the universe, only served to make it into the most ridiculous, over-the-top parody of every game I've ever played. If I wanted to parody the silly plots of video games, I couldn't do it better than the first 10 minutes of AC3.

I am some modern day schlub who is sucked into a computer game who plays as his historical ancestors via... some kind of genetic memory... blah blah pseudoscience pseudoscience pseudoscience MAYAN APOCALYPSE, which was told to me by some ancient "master race" who is clearly based on the Maya because of the December 21, 2012 thing except she is ridiculously, exceedingly, 110% Teutonic (I guess the AC franchise couldn't let Mayans be the "master race," that would offend white people or something). Anyway Mayan Blondie gives me some magic macguffin of DESTINY and there is this RANDO CONSPIRACY of... master races and historical assassins and templars and stuff. That my modern day schlub is a part of. I am told I need a key, presumably by Mayan Blondie. I am in an ancient temple because ancient people were much smarter than people now, and I wonder why the precursors didn't just handle it themselves because it looks like they had magic. There are also silly video game words like "bleeding effect," which worried me when my schlub passed out because I thought that meant he was dying, but apparently he was just in a coma. And he can talk while in a coma!

Handy?

So as far as I can tell: I am a woman playing a video game about a man who is playing a video game?

Also I'm not even playing as the advertised dude. I am a random historical schlub in a tricorner hat.