AssCreeThree

Imagine, if you will, a video game in which you play as an orphaned hero whose whole hometown was burned down by a dastardly villain. After years of combat training under a wise old hermit, he returns to society to join a secret resistance movement of freedom fighters to help them overthrow the evil empire that is trying to take over the world. 

Sounds exciting, doesn't it? Well you need not imagine, dear reader, for this amazing video game is real, and I have played it.

I am speaking, of course, of Assassin's Creed III.

"That is not what you expected the guy to sound like" -- videodonkey.com, Mess Effect

Here, I'll give you a nice unrelated picture to space things out in case you need time to recover from the epiphany I just gave you and gather up the bits of your blown mind:

Ay fam, you good? Aight, I'mma letchu finish.

In fact, one could easily point to the American Revolution as the main reason that these tropes have become such worn out cliches in the first place. So don't think of this as a stereotype, "playing it straight" or a cliche storm. Think of it as our entertainment culture coming full circle. Or something like that.

Anyway, you actually start off playing as Haytham Kenway instead. This is fine because Haytham is a pretty cool dude, aside from his uncanny resemblance to Judge Claude Frollo from Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame. 

Or wait, that's not quite the beginning, I think there was something else... some generic guy running around a cave?  

i dunno lol

Meh, close enough.

As per usual there's the hours-long prologue; in this instance you're doing some suave secret agent stuff shooting fools and stabbing sods. I had already cottoned on to what the first major twist was going to be after noticing the conspicuous lack of hoodies and Charles Lee specifically yelling FOR THE ORDER!, like aren't you leaving something out there buddy, it couldn't possibly be important could it?

Stuff happens, and we transition to the main chap, Ratohnhaketon, and I think the romanization is somewhat imperfect because the Ks sound a lot like hard Gs. I'm klad though that the memory begins when he's a young child, and not as a newborn infant, because that would be really awkward and very painful to sit through, especially if you were running it on a below-spec computer which ran at four seconds per frame at the lowest settings even on the cutscenes. Haha, what a funny hypothetical situation. Childbirth. Haha why did I say that I can be so random sometimes ecks dee.

 As a small child Ratohnhaketon is still fairly helpless, possessing no weapons, armor, or clothing dye of any kind. Pressing the run button makes him skip instead. This childhood scene introduced me to the traditional Native American game of "hide and seek", an integral, unique part of their culture. Unfortunately being the clumsy paleface that I am, I had to use his superpowers to cheat my way through. 

The resulting segments of Conna's childhood will be recited in poetic meter. 
So mote it be:

Iiiin west New York he was born and raised

On the treetops was where he spent most of his days

Chillin' out hopping, droppin like a scamp

All collecting some feathers outside of the camp

When a couple o guys who were up to no good

Started making trouble in the neighborhood

He got one little threat and his mom was dead

And said, I'm moving in with some guy at the Davenport Homestead!

Not entirely accurate I suppose, but it's in the same way that this game was accurate to US history. Turnabout is Fresh play, as they say.

So I found myself running about this generous tract of land, performing mundane errands when suddenly:

I get the feeling he doesn't want me going this way.

WHOA-HO-HO there, Ahkilleez! That is one mighty long piece of wood you're working on there. Maybe we ought to let those lumberjack bros handle this instead? Oh wait, we can't because they're too busy fighting each other and when I try to stop I somehow end up just standing there uselessly for eternity.

For real though, that "break up the fight" homestead mission is a total crapshoot. The first couple times I tried to do it, the control bars didn't show up at all and I was given zero indication of what was supposed to happen. After exiting the mission and restarting multiple times I resorted to looking up guides on gaymefax and youtub, which described some bizarre dual-stick tug of war minigame. This still didn't solve the problem because the game was literally not responding to any of the proscribed button/key inputs. What eventually got it to work was the rather strange process of force-quitting the whole application in the middle of the mission and then relaunching it. This shouldn't be necessary. Ubishit needs to stop treating all their non-microtransaction projects like disposable cash cows, this gayme is turning 5 years old and there are still so many BUUUUUUUUGS.....

It's not all bugs and glitches though. There are indeed parts of the game that frustrate you entirely on purpose. Take the most recent Homestead mission I started: 
Norris the miner wants me to stand guard over him while he does some mining stuff. 
"It's not far, just outside the property," he says. Okay, so I start following him. Then the dreaded screen fade to white occurs and he has suddenly vanished into thin air.
The quest prompt tells me to "Meet Norris in the Frontier." 
The Frontier being outside the Homestead, which is already like a couple acres or more across. Kinda segregating gameplay and story a little here, but fortunately I can use fast travel to get to the entrance. He said "just outside" so it should be close by, right?

Nope! It's a kilometer and a half away in the middle of nowhere wilderness. No fast travel4u.

That's enough of the negativity, let's look on the bright side. For one, adult Connor is a serious hunk. This incarnation of the assassino outfit is rather lacking in swag, but his brawny beefcake build sort of makes up for it. Eazy-O always seemed scrawny compared to the mercenarii and armor bros, but as Connor it feels like more of an even match against the jaegers and big kilt boys. 
There are plenty of gimmicks to distract you from the plot and characterization like:

• Naval combat
• Lesser known European board games
• The bow counter
• And my favorite pastime, AIR ASSASSINATING ANIMALS

PREPARE YOURSELF, VERMIN!

That hare put up a good fight, but my blade was superior. Yama, motha nature.

I also gave the multiplayer mode a fair spin - it's not a gimmick. It's a legit PvP game that could have had eSports potential, if Ubisuck gave a damn about competitive balance(For Dinner). Only problem is that not too many people are on the servers these days.
It's like that song goes - we all need someone to lean on.

A view askew

Pioneer X Independent confirmed

 Well, there are multiple songs that say that, but you get the idea.

Snaaaaake

I was on my way home on the sidewalk yesterday, when suddenly I heard a strange rustling by my feet. No, it was not my jimmies like you might expect, nor was it a flying lawnmower or an amused gorilla. I looked down and there appeared to be nothing, but widening my search I saw a strangely curved brown branch just off the sidewalk.

I then realized the branch was actually a snake, lying very still besides its flickering tongue. I probably should have taken a picture or something, but it was Friday and I was very done with life so I just kept walking.

polaris, the demon star

Aw shucks, I missed this blog's fourth annual anniversary. By six days. Could have been worse. But wow, it's really been four whole years since I started this thing, huh?  We've sure come a long way since th- Uh, never mind.

Well, nothing particularly interesting happened on that day anyway, which is April 2nd, if you're too lazy to do an archive trawl or basic mathematics.


In syntax there's the "prepositional phrase", or PP for short, which is also the term for how many of a move you have left in pokermans. Saying that out loud is a blast.


OLL RAIT! IT FINALLY CAME OUT:

"I've been waiting for you" -- the boss baby

March Sadness

My shoes have been squeaking way too much lately. I try to walk on carpeted and metal surfaces but sometimes there's just no avoiding those smooth tiles. Something is up with the soles, which I can't be bothered to find out. It's not raining, and they don't appear to be wet. What a puzzle. I do worry that the squeaking will aggravate nearby people, but as it turns out the person who is likely aggravated the most is me, the nearby-est person of them all. 
[Speaking of nearby people, this girl sitting nearby just farted, AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA]
 But let us cease this mincing of words. I know that you and I both long for those bygone halcyon days of 2013, when I would do crazy things like make 5 whole posts in a single day. I think what enabled this was that they were shorter than my average rant nowayears, and my standards were lower. Alas, perhaps we shall never see their like again in this world.

Dreams consigned to Oblivion

I thought I would post in February about this weird dream I had, but I never fleshed out the details in the draft and it's been so long that I've forgotten most of them. I wanted to leave something here at least before March ends, so instead this brief stint will be about THE ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION, which I recently started playing again. The faces are potato but the memes are terrific.

"Yes... you are the one from my dreams. Gods give me strength." --creepy old guy

I spent around three to five hours revising my character's appearance in Oblivion. Keep in mind, I wasn't creating one anew, figuring out who they were from scratch. No, I was modifying a character whose appearance I had already decided was "good enough" at some point in the past.
If you aren't familiar with it, Oblivion's infamous facial feature controls consist of a large array of sliders, many of which are connected to each other in arcane ways that are not immediately obvious. For example, moving the nose sellion width slider not only slightly affects the other physical aspect of the nose, but strongly determines how close together the eyes are. Add to that the fact that there's no button or feature to undo your most recent changes, and you get a fragile system where every time you go in to change things there is a high possibility that you'll end up looking even worse than before.
 
You may be asking, Why go through with this hassle? Why not just go to a modding website and download one of those premade faces instead?
For one, they're mostly weeb anime trash. Secondly, I value my character's "uniqueness". That's right, out of all the premades and save files out there, none of them will quite have the exact specifications of a face I, or anyone else creates themselves. Gotta be a special snowflake. I'm already using the Oblivion Character Ogrehaul Version 2 Mod, which greatly raises general attractiveness and reduces one's capability to create a true monstrositybeauty. 

I think this is somewhat related to the current buzz about Ass Erect: Androgynous? Maybe, I dunno what to say about that. Anyways, here's a screenshot of the aforementioned character:

I actually didn't realize my horse was in the shot. It just adds to the cinematic feel, doesn't it?

See anything wrong with this face? If you do, please keep it to yourself because I'd like to actually play the game rather than worry about my character conforming to societal standards of beauty. Also, that's a Spelldrinker Amulet currently equipped, it gives a great practical benefit of 20 points spell absorption and is totally not there just because it looks prettier than the five other necklaces in my inventory.

Please believe me.

Thundersnail

Let us ring in the first post of the new year with an in-depth discussion on questionable ethics in video games. After all, it's not every day that one is faced with such a difficult, nerve-wracking, make or break decision:

I'm glad to announce though, that this decision in particular was not one of those. I swiftly chose the option on the right without hesitation, as you can tell from the strange red shape used as the selector.

Now I can just imagine the shocked gasps of the imaginary masses, some of which may be echoing the sentiments of the character who asked this pivotal question, an anthropomorphic sword-wielding snake named Marid.
"B-b-but animu [sic] IS real! Please, say it ain't so!"

Oh, sweet child of summer, a phrase oft-quoted in popular culture from J.R.R. Tolkien's much beloved classic fantasy novel, A Crown of Swords. Or was it Crown of Horns?
  
In any case, it is a hard and fast truth of the world that all of your precious chinese cartoons, even the best of them, are in fact completely staged. They are as false as the farce that is professional wrestling. But in spite of this I still enjoyed playing through the world of Overwatch, Volvo Corporation's hallmark Real Time Strategy game that's looking to hit its first/second anniversary this year.

As per usual it seems I won't be making a post on everything I said I might earlier. But the spice must flow, so there'll be something to look forward to in the months to come.

When you shoot yourself in the foot

Oh boy oh boy, have I got a good low quality youtube video lined up for you. It's so old you can see the jpeg compression artifacts. Now I know what you're going to say, that I used a term that only applies to a particular format of image and not to videos, but hey, DO I LOOK LIKE I KNOW HWAT A JAY PEG IS? I JUST WANT A PICTURE OF A GOT-DANG HOT DOG! Anyway, here it is:

That was quite painful to see, right? Oh yes, with all the racially charged events that have occurred over the last few years(like the Cincinnati Zoo shooting), I just had to rub salt into an old wound, didn't I?

But there's a lesson to be learned here. We need to start asking ourselves the real questions here, in search of the deep philosophical essence that defines our humanity. 
Like, why is there suffering in this world?
Why do we as human beings perpetrate such acts of senseless violence on each other?
As one commentator on the video so succinctly pointed out, this instance is yet another example of a police officer shooting a black man for no good reason.

Lest I'm accused of merely promoting more racially charged nonsense, I am compelled to point out that in this case, the black man was armed, and he clearly shot first.

Unlike in those other cases, I'm not defending the police officer, I still think he should have lost his job for that. I'm not going to say he was acting in self defense, because that's definitely wrong. 

No, in fact it was quite the opposite. I guess you could say he was acting in....

...self offense.


YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH

The dull static of helpless sanity

It's ten in the morning, I have a skull splitting headache and fifty other things I ought to be doing right about now. A perfect recipe for b-b-b-b-blogging, in fact.

December is essentially halfway over now, and I've just realized there's about 7 days left until Christmas. You know what this means, right? I've survived more than two weeks of this forsaken month without being barraged by holiday jingles and other commercial crap!

"Oh, so you're one of THOSE people, the ones that can't appreciate holiday cheer" --you

I can only assume this is the German equivalent

Yo, like you can't just say that mayne. Check your privilege.

So the question that's been gripping my mind for the better half of this month has been the future direction of this blog: Do I continue being an edgy goofball, or start doing lame crappy serious posts?
Okay, I wasn't actually thinking about that the whole month, but the answer is quite clear.
Making goofy, meme-filled posts with witty remarks takes actual creative muscle and thought, whereas in lame crappy posts I am merely repeating the events of the day.
I've decided to do a little bit of both for this post, so here's the lame crappy part. storytime start!

S'kunawald

"oh yeah aw yeah eh eh eh eh eh eh eh" -- Bruno Mars

Man, I'm feeling really tired right now and there's an ache in my neck. But I am doing this short post anyway because it's been over two(three?) months since the last time and I gotta keep this piece of crap alive so I can continue to feel ashamedproud of myself when I look back on it later. Lots of things have happened in this time, some of which are deserving of their own posts that I will hopefully make later on, including my thoughts on Gaylo 4, more IRL automobile shenanigans, and perhaps even commentaries on the mysterium xarxesalt-right if I'm feeling brave enough.

So Vine is dead now, which is a good thing I guess. I got into the cancer that is Counter-Strike GO, among other things.

My fickle gayming friend told me he was going to sleep at 2:40PM in the afternoon. Apparently he's been up "a long long long time in a place far far away" whatever that means. Aliens. Actually this is pretty hypocritical of me since I wish I could be sleeping right now too.

The gist of it is, this blog is going grimdankdark now. That's right: 

My armor is contempt

My shield is disgust 

My sword is hatred

IN THE EMPEROR'S NAME, LET NONE SURVIVE

(ayo hol' up fam, so you finna saying dat, we wuz....spehss mehreens 'n shiet?)

Hyaku Paasento Hafu Raifu

Welcome. Welcome to the majestic month of Augustus. It's a very important month to me. Why? I'll leave that up to your imagination.

Well bart? We're waiting

Anyways it has come to my attention that despite being listed as one of the topics of discussion on the About This Blog page (which grows increasingly more cringe inducing and loathsome to look at for me with every passing year), none of my blog posts have actually been about my adventures in video gaming. They've certainly implied such activities have transpired but we never really got into the meat and potatoes, so let's get farted.

Around three months ago (May 17th) I finally ascended to my rightful place in the PC Master Race by building my own computer, which I am blogging on at this very moment. That's right, I have entered the fantastical realm of 1337 PC GAMING LOLMGWTFBBQ!!!!!111ONe

HOLY TOLEDO

LAND SAKES ALIVE

HOH MY GOD

THE GRAPHICS

THE QUALITY

THE PIXELS

YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Okay it wasn't that rad, not even in the ironic sense. The specifications are decidedly mid-range and wouldn't impress anyone who actually knows their way around computers. Like me *wink* *nudge* *subtly implies I am a knowledgeable gentleman, for you, m'lady* *chokes on leftover foam from all the rabid excitement*holy hell why do I do this to myself
But considering what I had, it's way better. What prompted me to upgrade was that half my STEEM catalogue was literally unplayable on my old craptop(which I still use when I'm on the go, it has served me well and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future). We're not even talking shitty frame rate here, that I could deal with, no, they wouldn't start up and gave an error dialog saying muh graphics not good enough. Especially Transistor, which was patently ridiculous as it's not even 3D.

Rough specs:

• ThinkChip: AMD FX-8350. It's the Black edition, whatever that means.
• Wam: G.Skill Ripjaws 16 GB DDR3. Two 8GB modules, asia is superior
• Mainboard: Asus M5A97 
• Dispray Adapter: Dell Nvidiot GTX 660. Yeah, Dell makes graphics cards too, who'da thunk?
• Storage: Sandy z400s 256GB SSD + Oceangate 1TB HDD (We're still in that awkward transition phase where everyone has two kinds of drives)
• Disc Drive: Yes, I'm a dinosaur
• Box: Carbide 200R. I need to put my name on it or some kind of distinct marking because it looks generic as hell, I've seen so many other builds that use this or something similar.
• Skreen: 27 inch(o baby) AOC 

The assembly itself was smooth and quiet. There were hardly any issues since I've been prepared to do this for literally almost a decade. I was a wee lad when I first acquired a small stash of Maximum PC magazine from 2002 and 2003. Ah, what colorful characters and vivid imagery they had. It's still being published today, but their website has sadly been subsumed by its parasitic twin, PC Gamer. Ripperoni in pepperoni. I found an archived version of one of the more famous issues if you wanna take a nostalgia trip: https://archive.org/stream/Maximum_PC_April_2002#page/n0/mode/2up

You can laugh at me if you want, but 1080p at 60FPS is kind of a new experience for me. League of Cancer runs at like 200FPS on high, props to Rito james for optimizing their piece of crap so well.
Having the OS on the SSD reduced boot time to like 12 seconds, even with it being an offbrand and not Samesung overrated. Solid State is truly the path of the future.
 
My early experiments with overclocking ended in glitching and sadness. I just run on default hardware settings nowadays so I don't have to worry about weird crap happening.

With all that off my chest, I'd like to discuss my most recent adventure: A complete 100% Achievement completion of the second installment of 50% Radioactive Decay period, on the hardest difficulty.

here's the proof, although if you really needed it you don't deserve to know me

I suppose that if I really wanted to "present" this I should have recorded it, but I didn't see the point. There's probably hundreds of video play-throughs already, what makes mine so different from all the rest?

Well actually I do recall one specific deviation. I don't know how rare it is because they don't keep track of it, but on my first run I got neither the "Defiant" nor the "Submissive" achievement. Sure, they're mutually exclusive, but it's also a false dichotomy. You may think that since the copfag's blocking your way you have to do one thing or the other in order to progress, but that's actually untrue. I didn't put the can in the trash, yet I also didn't throw it at the Metrocop. In fact, I didn't even pick it up. I had made a new friend in the form of a metal barrel carried all the way from the previous area. I just put the barrel down in front of him (presumably they are male), jumped on top of the barrel and then jumped over his head. 

Since I already knew all the puzzle solutions from a previous, non-steam playthrough I could focus more on the shooter aspect this time around. My preferred strategy is a classic, ye olde shotgun corner camp, wherein the comrades get fed up and follow me around the corner only to receive a double shotgun blast to the face. I learned that one from Frozen Synapse, which isn't even an FPS. 

So from here I could go on to 100% Episode One and Two, or screw around in the original. Or maybe even something completely different, like an axe or a spear, if you know what I mean. Anything is possible...at zombocom, widescreen edition.