Tuesday 31 Jan 2012 by Orphi the AweKid.

OK, so I now have a trippy new computer. I’m still using my existing nVidia GeForce 260 GTX, but now the ageing AMD Athlon64 2X 4200+ has been replaced by a shiny new Intel Core i7 2600K which my dear little sister gave me for Christmas. I love that girl.

There’s something satisfying about opening Task Manager and seeing eight cores. Of course, that’s just the Hyper-Threading talking; the chip actually has four cores, not eight. But hey. And the thing is clocked at over 3GHz. (Although I gather that an automatic system turns down the clock speed if you attempt to actually use all four cores. I mean, you wouldn’t want to achieve the advertised speed, would you?)

Not only that, but the PC is housed in a brand new Antec 1100 case. I’m a bit disappointed with the dust filtration this thing offers; the product blurb makes a really big deal of the dust filters, but they actually cover about 10% of the gaping holes in the case. So this thing is still going to fill with dust in no time at all. But I am very pleased with how much easier it is to work inside the spacious case. And the fact that my gigantic graphics card now fits inside.

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Wednesday 01 Jun 2011 by Orphi the AweKid.

Cake! Cake!!

Um… well, actually, no. No more memes here. (As Gabe N. put it, “if you were sick of memes, I was sick of them way before you”.) So what can we say about this new game? Well, I think Zero Punctuation put it quite aptly: “Is it good? Yes. Is it as good as Portal 1? No.”

It’s still surprisingly short. The graphics are much more complex than before, but still not especially pretty to actually look at. (Although I did like the retro section quite a bit.) The single player campaign (the main bit that I care about) has quite a bit of story and not much puzzle to it. Which is a pity, because the story didn’t really do much for me.

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Tuesday 18 May 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

So having completed Assassin’s Creed, I returned my attention to Cryostasis. Man, this game gets weirder by the minute!

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Tuesday 04 May 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

When I finally got my mum to **** off and stop ruining my life, I got to play some more AS.

First I was sent to assassinate somebody (surprise!), and it turned out there were six somebodies to chase after. And each one of them is inside a courtyard, with two guards and a crowd of people blocking my way. There’s no obvious way to climb in without attracting way too much attention. I did manage to go up to one of the guards and kill him with the hidden blade, and just about get to the other guy and kill him before he noticed. That dispersed the crowd so I could get through the doorway. But then, predictably, I was spotted and a complex, cramped battle ensued.

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Monday 26 Apr 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

Yes, there’s more.

I spent almost the entire weekend playing Assassin’s Creed, so consequently rather a lot happened in-game. Far more than I can actually remember now, so I’ll just include the more amusing hilights.

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Friday 23 Apr 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

I didn’t get to play for very long last night. I tried several routes south; all of them ended up with me in the restricted area. The gap apparently can’t be jumped even on horseback, and when I tried to go back some nutter sliced up my horse. I tried to fight him, but to no avail. Now most guards, if you just repeatedly click the mouse, eventually they die. But this guy is apparently unkillable. Hmm, whatever.

So I tried travelling east instead. In spite of what the status indicator said, I didn’t have much trouble. In one small village I suddenly got chased, but I just galloped to the viewpoint I was trying to reach, and started climbing. I got a few arrows fired at me while I’m scaling the wall, but once I was up high all I got was the flashing yellow alarm. Dive off the top and sit in the hay for, like, 6 seconds or so, and the blue light turns to green, and everybody forgets all about me. Jump out, get on my horse (which has randomly followed me, even though I’m hidden), and off I go.

At another point I got chased. I gallopped off. The alarm turns from red to yellow. I get to the next village and casually walk through, all the time with this alarm going off. Nobody cared. And when the next chunk of the map loaded, the alarm magically went away.

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Thursday 22 Apr 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

So last night I was able to fire up the game again.

As you might recall, I was trapped on a boat. But on reloading the game, I have now magically reached the Assassin’s Bureau. (Which is interesting, because so far I’ve been unable to find it…) So I walk in, and the guy tells me that I need to track somebody down. OK, well I guess I’d better go walk around randomly then?

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Tuesday 20 Apr 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

I played AS some more last night. After going through the fifteen levels of menues to get into the game, I find myself standing in an empty room. So… oh yeah, that’s right. The guy said there are 9 people I need to kill or something. So I guess I need to go somewhere? Hmm.

I walk outside the building and some guy says something about a sword demonstration. Oh yeah, that’s right, now I’ve got my weapons back, it said I could go practice fight technique out in the yard. Well anyway, as far as I can tell, fighting people is pretty easy. Draw your sword, keep clicking the mouse button. The enemy gets a pretty brutal seeing to. If you hold shift, sometimes you can throw people to the ground. (Seems to work roughly 20% of the time, at random.) I still haven’t figured out what the hell “Button 1” and “Button 0” refer to.

For reasons unknown, only one enemy ever attacks you at a time. It’s strange, but it’s true. (And it’s quite helpful.)

Most of the rest of my play session was spent walking to Damascus. Let me tell you, it took a loooooooong time to walk that far. I’m not even kidding.

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