Finished Assassin's Creed! I wasn't entirely happy with the ending - they may as well have scrawled 'NOW PLAY THE SEQUEL' across the wall (and I intend to, don't get me wrong, but I'd have liked a slightly more definite wrapping-up) - but I can forgive this game, because it fulfilled all my romantic murder needs.
Rafiq: Is everything all right, my friend? You seem distant.
Altaïr: It's nothing, Rafiq. Just a lot on my mind.
Rafiq: It is the men you kill, isn't it? You feel something for them.
Altaïr: How...?
And I thought I couldn't hope for more than my targets intimately dying in my arms! I'm so happy. Please stop looking at me like that.
One night I forgot to check the computers for new e-mails before sending Desmond to bed, and it made me realise that it's probably possible to play through this game without checking the Abstergo e-mails at all.
This is something that fascinates me about videogames: a videogame will generally have a central story, the thing you'll see every time you play through it, but often there will be bits of story that are completely optional. The e-mails in Assassin's Creed, the Voxophone recordings in Bioshock Infinite, the hidden graffiti-filled chambers in Portal, the optional conversations in The Last of Us, the sidequests in RPGs. If you're engaged with the story or the world, you can hunt down backstory and interactions and other details that you might not see on a straightforward playthrough. It's not something you tend to see in other means of storytelling. I suppose the appendices in the Lord of the Rings books might be an equivalent.
I can fall in love with characters in any medium, but the worlds I fall in love with tend to be videogame worlds (although there will, of course, always be a place in my heart for Hogwarts). I suspect it's because, in a videogame, you explore the world and come to know it yourself. Not only can you poke around the place physically, but often you can also unearth details about its people or its history that aren't necessarily relevant to the story at hand.
In case I haven't made this clear, I really like videogames.
The other thing I always did before sending Desmond to bed, aside from checking for e-mails, was walk him into the shower. Even though he never actually took a shower. This troubled me increasingly as the game went on. Please shower, Desmond. Please at least change out of your clothes before you go to bed. Please, Desmond. It's been six days.
I was a bit unsettled by the way the camera switched to a CCTV feed whenever Desmond entered the shower. Maybe Desmond was similarly unsettled by his surveillance, and that's why he never washed or changed? But seriously, Desmond. Six days.
In news unrelated to Assassin's Creed: I knew that repeated patterns were cropping up in my Dangan Ronpa stories, but I didn't realise exactly how bad it was until my terrible revelation earlier today. I have now written three Dangan Ronpa fics in which the protagonist has an intense conversation on a bed with a girl who has low self-esteem and a terrible past. No sex. Just beds. Three.
Apparently this is how you can tell when I 'ship something. I don't write kissing; I write redemptive bed conversations.
Rafiq: Is everything all right, my friend? You seem distant.
Altaïr: It's nothing, Rafiq. Just a lot on my mind.
Rafiq: It is the men you kill, isn't it? You feel something for them.
Altaïr: How...?
And I thought I couldn't hope for more than my targets intimately dying in my arms! I'm so happy. Please stop looking at me like that.
One night I forgot to check the computers for new e-mails before sending Desmond to bed, and it made me realise that it's probably possible to play through this game without checking the Abstergo e-mails at all.
This is something that fascinates me about videogames: a videogame will generally have a central story, the thing you'll see every time you play through it, but often there will be bits of story that are completely optional. The e-mails in Assassin's Creed, the Voxophone recordings in Bioshock Infinite, the hidden graffiti-filled chambers in Portal, the optional conversations in The Last of Us, the sidequests in RPGs. If you're engaged with the story or the world, you can hunt down backstory and interactions and other details that you might not see on a straightforward playthrough. It's not something you tend to see in other means of storytelling. I suppose the appendices in the Lord of the Rings books might be an equivalent.
I can fall in love with characters in any medium, but the worlds I fall in love with tend to be videogame worlds (although there will, of course, always be a place in my heart for Hogwarts). I suspect it's because, in a videogame, you explore the world and come to know it yourself. Not only can you poke around the place physically, but often you can also unearth details about its people or its history that aren't necessarily relevant to the story at hand.
In case I haven't made this clear, I really like videogames.
The other thing I always did before sending Desmond to bed, aside from checking for e-mails, was walk him into the shower. Even though he never actually took a shower. This troubled me increasingly as the game went on. Please shower, Desmond. Please at least change out of your clothes before you go to bed. Please, Desmond. It's been six days.
I was a bit unsettled by the way the camera switched to a CCTV feed whenever Desmond entered the shower. Maybe Desmond was similarly unsettled by his surveillance, and that's why he never washed or changed? But seriously, Desmond. Six days.
In news unrelated to Assassin's Creed: I knew that repeated patterns were cropping up in my Dangan Ronpa stories, but I didn't realise exactly how bad it was until my terrible revelation earlier today. I have now written three Dangan Ronpa fics in which the protagonist has an intense conversation on a bed with a girl who has low self-esteem and a terrible past. No sex. Just beds. Three.
Apparently this is how you can tell when I 'ship something. I don't write kissing; I write redemptive bed conversations.
