Chamomile Has A Blog

Assassin’s Creed Unity being bad was a cold take in the Obama years, but I never did finish it all the way through and I’ve decided to do that, just to finally scratch the completionist itch.

Most Assassin’s Creed games have bad openings. The only one with an opening that didn’t suck at least a little was maybe the first one, and even that one’s tutorial section in Masyaf was pretty egregious. The rest throw at least one hour of story setup at you before they let you parkour around Florence/Havana/Paris/Wherever and assassinate people. Somehow it has never occurred to Ubisoft in like fifteen games that they should start in media res and explain how Ezio’s family was killed/Edward Kenway found a dead assassin and stole his pajamas/Arno met his Templar girlfriend/whatever after they’ve got you stuck in doing some assassinations.

Assassin’s Creed Unity is possibly the prologuiest Assassin’s Creed game yet made, though. It starts with a prologue about the Templars being persecuted in France and hiding a technomagical laser sword, then moves on to a prologue about Arno as a child that as far as I can tell exists exclusively so it can cross over with the epilogue of Assassin’s Creed Rogue where you get to play this section as a Templar and assassinate someone instead of a small child who steals an apple, then continues into a prologue where a young adult Arno is established as being a very tiresome sort of rapscallion who has an illicit(?) romance with a noblewoman named Elise and is framed for the murder of Elise’s father, which leads to a prologue where the wrongly imprisoned Arno must escape the Bastille whilst it is being stormed by revolutionaries, and at that point you are in the proper open world map of Paris that the main game takes place in, although you do still have to complete one more mission to join the assassins, getting you a proper assassin outfit instead of your Bastille rags and a hidden blade so you can assassinate people instead of having to sword fight every guard right in the face.

Depending on whether or not you count the last one, that’s either four or five prologues, one of which exists purely because the idea of Unity’s prologue being Rogue’s epilogue probably sounded cool in a pitch meeting. You could’ve started in the Bastille, established Arno’s relationship to Elise and that he was falsely accused of assassinating her father when he turns up at her house after his escape, and just cut the 14th century prologue establishing the laser sword entirely, leaving you with one and a half prologues, which is positively restrained by Assassin’s Creed standards.

Yes, Your Grace is one of those games where you sit in a throne room choosing option X, Y, or Z in response to petitioners, with the goal being to keep various resources above the negative. Unlike Ur-example Reigns, which seems more like a prototype for the concept than an actual game, Yes, Your Grace has a plot about assorted royal intrigues and all of the petitioners have specific stories rather than just being generic “oh, no, bandits!” (although one of the specific stories is “oh, no, bandits!”). You’re being invaded by a bandit who held you up thirteen years ago and demanded your first-born daughter’s hand in marriage in exchange for letting you go, and since then this random bandit has found his way into a barbarian army and is invading the kingdom. Hilarity ensues.

In addition to the petitioners having unique dialogue and stories instead of just a randomly shuffled deck of problems, the game also has a map that you can dispatch royal agents on (specifically a general, witch, and hunter) and you can invite nobles and fellow kings to come visit you, causing them to show up in the petitioner queue in the next turn. These are both really good additions.

Unfortunately, there’s also a paper-thin mass combat system and some adventure game bullshit, which are really bad additions. The mass combat system is ultimately just a bunch of set dressing around a question of whether or not you’ve stockpiled enough resources to win. The two battles in the game are pivotal moments, so having them last longer than just “we did indeed pay for enough improvements to win” is a good idea. It’s a video game, so having that longer battle sequence be driven by player decisions instead of just playing out with no interactivity is also a good idea. The problem is that, with only two battles, the game doesn’t really have time to establish any real mechanics for the battles, which means you basically just guess what the right decision to make it whenever you’re asked to send a unit into battle. That, in turn, means there’s basically two kinds of decisions: The blindingly obvious, and the totally arbitrary.

I think there’s only two real solutions to this problem: Drastically overhaul the game to make the combats less important to its plot, then reduce the combats to “did you prepare enough resources y/n” and get them out of the way very quickly, or revise the combat system completely so that it’s a real system and not just a series of “pick X, Y, or Z” questions with no consistency to which might be the correct answer. That’s not to say that a series of “pick X, Y, or Z” can’t be the primary mechanic, just that, like the rest of the game, those questions need to be part of a system you can understand rather than trying to guess what the developer is hinting at. The simplest example would be to have three troop types in a rock-paper-scissors relationship, you can see what troops the enemy still has in reserve, and you have to pick a troop type to deploy next in hopes of guessing one that beats what your enemy has picked. I’m not going to go into another twelve paragraphs of detail, but you’d also want to add further complications like deploying an initial frontline versus keeping troops in reserve and having your agents able to modify the outcome and so forth. Pure RPS would also just be guesswork, but you can use it as a foundation for a system where you can make informed choices about what your enemy is most likely to do next and how you can counter that.

But this would require a whole lot of extra development time and resources, and I never feel good about proposing a solution to a problem in a game that requires more resources than the game as it is. The majority of games can be improved with more time and money poured into them, but those things are finite.

The adventure game bullshit, though, that could’ve and should’ve just been left out completely. You can get up off of your throne and go talk to other characters around the castle, which is a good way of delivering the story without having your daughter queue up with petitioners to have an argument over marriage right in front of the royal court. This system of walking around talking to people also gets used for a couple of “use needle on flagstone” style adventure game puzzles, though, and they’re abysmal. The best you can say for them is that at least they’re fairly straightforward and they make up a small fragment of the overall game, but the game would be better off not having them at all.

The title is both the bottom line summary of the game and also literal: Going Under is a roguelite dungeon crawler about being an intern at a tech start up who, in the way of internships, gets all the unpleasant chores foisted upon you, like going into dungeons and killing all the goblins. It’s made in a 3D version of that Corporate Memphis art style with the purple-and-orange skin tones that exclude everyone equally and the weird proportions. You know the one.

And “Corporate Memphis, but ironically” is the bottom-line summary of Going Under. It’s using this godawful art style to its fullest, packing as much personality as possible into the characters made with it, and it’s using the art style because it’s about how corporate startup culture is just the worst. It’s a weird combination of brick-like unsubtlety and restraint, where the entire game is made with this hideous art style, making the joke totally unavoidable, yet they never feel the need (at least, not as deep in as I’ve gotten, which is half-ish of the way through) to state the joke directly. The writing is clever, the satire mostly lands, the gameplay is at that workmanlike level where it’s good at everything it does but isn’t doing anything particularly exceptional or new.

And that makes it kinda hard to talk about, because, like, yeah, it basically works. If you really like roguelike dungeon crawlers, to the point where you’ve already gotten through Darkest Dungeon and Enter the Gungeon and Rogue Legacy and Binding of Isaac and stuff, and if you can get past Corporate Memphis, you should probably play it. That’s two pretty big qualifiers, but hey, a niche is a niche.

I appear to have gotten the bad ending in Minoria. The violently deranged princess is still full of self-loathing from the horns she’s been cursed with, even though they don’t seem to have any impact on her life except a purely symbolic association with witchcraft. She’s burning the witch forest of Minoria down over and over again, but it never stays burned.

Apparently, to get the good ending, when she said not to kill the end boss witch so she could do it herself, I’m supposed to refuse – which is actually refusing to kill the end boss witch entirely, rather than insisting on doing it personally, which is how it scanned to me. Having looked it up on YouTube, the additional end boss against the princess seems pretty easy and straightforward, so I’m guessing that the reason for this is because the more obvious way to offer the choice – picking whether to support the princess or the witch before you’ve beat the witch into submission, rather than being asked to about-face after you’ve seemingly already been railroaded into picking a side – would’ve left the good ending with a really lackluster final boss.

They could’ve at least made the final choice less ambiguous. As it is, the princess says “let me kill the witch myself” and your responses are “as you wish, Your Highness” and “I refuse.” Changing the second one to “I won’t let you kill her” would’ve at least signalled your very suddenly switching sides after just barely beat the witch down.

I’ve played a bit of Minoria and I don’t dislike it, but I don’t think I’d recommend it, either. I can feel myself giving it a lot of slack it doesn’t deserve, because I kind of sympathize with an imagined creator my subconscious constructed unbidden and now insists was probably the guy who made this thing. I don’t know a goddamn thing about the guy who made this thing, but I’m sympathetic to this hypothetical creator, and that’s biasing me in favor of this game.

So enough about my weird neurotic reaction to it, what is the actual game like? It’s a Metroidvania with the now standard estus-and-bonfires system about a sexy nun fighting evil witches. The sexualization is not subtle, despite generally being somewhat low-graphic this game still took time out to give several characters jiggle physics. I’m not really here for the sexy nun bit. My sympathy is more meta than that: This is a game with the basics of a genre (in this case, Metroidvanias in a post-Hollow Knight world, though the Castlevania influence in particular is very strong) but no real innovation on it besides a self-indulgently fetishistic aesthetic, and that is most probably the first video game I would make (indeed, might make soon) before moving on to other projects.

I wouldn’t expect that game to launch my career. It would be a learning exercise, and I’d make it really self-indulgent because the primary purpose of the game isn’t to have broad market appeal anyway, so why not make the characters all really sexy for me, personally? But as part of that exercise I’d want to make a totally complete and playable game, at which point I may as well toss it onto Steam for $5. Probably a couple of people would like it, the trickle of sales would be better than nothing, and if later games end up really popular, I might end up making more respectable returns on that first game just from people buying my entire backlog.

And hey, Minoria’s considered Very Positive after 1200 Steam reviews, so clearly “Metroidvania where you are a sexy nun” isn’t so niche it can’t find an audience, so who knows, maybe my weird self-indulgent learning exercise of a game would find a niche, too.

This is a weird, minor thing, but I wanted to tell somebody about it and I have decided to dump these weird thoughts into my blog. Sometimes they turn into longer, more interesting posts. Not this one, though, this one is short and weird and probably no one but me cares about its subject.

The Spyro Reignited Trilogy is, of course, three different games remastered together and released as a set. The original games did not have achievements. So you’d think that whoever it is that was making achievements for the trilogy would’ve been the same person or people making it for all three. But the Year of the Dragon achievements all have descriptions prefaced by the world they’re found in, which isn’t the case for any of the achievements in the other two. For example, Spyro 3’s achievement The Money’s In The Bag has the description “Sunrise Spring: Free Sheila the Kangaroo,” while the Spyro 2 achievement Buggin’ Out has the description “defeat 5 buggies while charging” – no mention of Canyon Speedway, the level where the buggies are located.

I’m trying to keep me streak of three posts a week going, but unfortunately I’m mostly playing the Spyro Reignited Trilogy right now, and there’s not a whole lot to say about that. I played the first game as a rental when I was a kid, and could recognize the remastered levels, especially in the first two worlds, which I played and replayed a lot. For some reason worlds three through five of the original have pretty much completely vacated my memory, even though I remember playing the final boss and finding it surprisingly easy. I kept expecting each segment was gonna be when the hard part started and it never came.

Spyro is good enough at being what it is that I don’t really have any suggestions for it, though. Its hub-and-levels design allows for exploration while still giving a clear goal and way forward, which is good because this is a platformer and not a Metroidvania so a player should never feel lost. The different games don’t all have the exact same setup, but there’s some kind of main collectable that you can, but don’t have to, collect all of, which is a good way to add optional challenges to the game, making it clear that if a specific dragon statue/power orb/whatever is too hard to get, you don’t have to keep banging your head against it, without siloing those statues/orbs/whatever into entire optional levels. The basic controls are really fun and responsive, the charge, fire breath, and gliding make Spyro feel like a dragon, and the gliding in particular makes for platforming challenges that are very different from most 3D platformers, where gliding is usually a temporary power-up when not completely unavailable. The health system of having a little guardian dragonfly that changes color as you accumulate more damage is fun, and recovering health by chasing down local wildlife like sheep feels appropriately dragon-y.

Running around accumulating a huge hoard of treasure is also pretty draconic, although it’s something that basically all platformer protagonists do, and it would’ve been nice if that accumulated treasure could actually be seen piled up somewhere rather than just a number in the corner of the screen like every other game. Crash Bandicoot doesn’t particularly need to be able to make snow angels in the huge pile of wampa fruit he accumulates over the course of a game, but Spyro’s a dragon, he should totally be able to lie on (and, energetic young ‘un that he is, run across and glide around) a huge pile of gold and gems. Maybe there’s something like this for reaching 100%, but it should be something available at any time, from the first hub world of each game, some spot that’s barren when you have no treasure and gets a bigger and bigger pile after certain treasure thresholds. 100% should just put the finishing touches on the hoard with, like, a giant gold statue of Spyro or something.

And the climbing animation for the second game of the remaster is absolute garbage. Look at it:

If you’re reading this from some point in the future and the embed link no longer works, rest assured it is very dorky. I can’t find any footage of the original Spyro 2’s climbing and I never played that one as a kid, but I’m guessing it had basically the same climbing animation, except it didn’t look nearly as out of place in the blocky, low-poly style of the original. Spyro himself was already a rough approximation of a dragon, so his climb animation being a rough approximation of climbing would’ve been fine. Now that Spyro just looks like an actual dragon, the climb animation doesn’t work.

Still a fun game overall, though. I got all the dragons from the first one but didn’t bother hunting down every last gem before moving on to the second, which I’m half-ish the way through now. Hopefully none of what I’ve said turns out to be totally wrong because of some development in the third game.

Evo Morales was the 55th president of Bolivia, elected in 2005 as the candidate for leftist party MAS with long-lasting (though recently waning) popular support, winning over 60% of the vote in the 2009 and 2014 elections, before receiving just under 50% of the vote in 2019 but winning anyway because the remainder of the vote was split between two other parties. The subsuequent coup de’tat installed a fourth party who received an absolutely trivial fraction of the vote, but this story has a much less widely reported happy ending: Facing the threat of mass strike and possibly even armed revolt, the coup regime ran new elections in 2020, which Evo Morales’ finance minister Luis Acre won handily with 55% of the vote (in a three-party system, no less). During his presidency from 2005 to 2019, Evo Morales enacted a number of left-wing economic policies, with lots of government intervention in the economy, an emphasis on inclusion and equality between the European descended and native American peoples, and a strong welfare system.

Fidel Castro ruled Cuba under a variety of different titles as they shifted nominal government from nationalist independent immediately after Castro was installed by violent revolution to Soviet-aligned Communist after the US tried to have Castro forcibly removed from power through a variety of means (most dramatically the Bay of Pigs invasion) to more nationalist independent focus again after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. In practice, Castro was unilateral dictator from his 1959 ascendance through to his 2008 soft-retirement, and still wielded considrable behind-the-scenes influence until his death in 2016. Under Fidel’s rule (and continuing today under his brother Raul Castro), all political dissent was banned, with protesters receiving sentences over a decade in length for acts as tame as shouting a slogan at Castro. Efforts to leave the country were also illegal, and famously many of Cuba’s prisoners of conscience were arrested for creating homemade rafts and trying to sail to Florida (others tried to hijack regular rafts, which is more obviously a crime even for a free country, but also speaks to the desperate lengths people are willing to go to in their efforts to leave Cuba). Cuba remains the least politically free country in the entire western hemisphere.

According to Not For Broadcast, these two guys are basically the same.

Continue reading “Not For Broadcast” →

Gang Up On The Human is a video game trope in which NPCs that are supposed to be on different teams will ignore each other to attack human players. Sometimes this is because the AI is too weak and the game needs to let them cheat to catch up, and having multiple AI opponents team up despite a nominal free-for-all is actually a pretty low-key way of doing that (compared to, for example, giving the AI extra resources or abilities that players don’t get).

Gremlins, Inc. is a video game in the genre of video games that are kinda like board games, where you take turns going around a board and stuff, but taking advantage of the computer to have mechanics that would be a pain to calculate out by hand for a board game. It has several single player scenarios. The early ones have the AI set to a proper free-for-all, but later scenarios up the difficulty by having the AI players gang up on the human. That would be fine, the AI here isn’t exactly AlphaGremlin and it could use an edge to keep up with humans.

The problem is that winning despite three AI players ganging up on you often means a lot of the game is less fun. I just finished a single player scenario where I played against three AIs willing to gang up on me, one where the highest score player wins after fifty turns. Fifty turns goes by pretty quick in this game (it took me about 45 minutes), and the last 10 or so of those turns were really nail-biting as I had to use my character’s special abilities (assigned at the start) to burn down longterm income for short term gain and quickly gain the victory points needed to come from behind. I went from 11 points behind the game leader to exactly 1 point ahead on the very last turn. Thrilling!

The problem is that the first 40-ish turns were really frustrating and dull, because the reason why I was even in a situation where I needed to almost double my score in 10 turns is because the AI had been so effective in ganging up on me that I’d spent about a third of my turns in jail. You see, there’s lots of police spots on the board, with a 1/6 chance of police throwing you in jail when you land on them. Certain cards let you throw the police onto another player instead, either putting them in jail if certain conditions are met or, in one case, just throwing them in jail automatically. And with three AI all aiming these police cards at me whenever they have them, I was in jail a lot for over half the game. There’s gameplay in jail, but no way to get victory points (with very rare exceptions, none of which proc’d for me), so I just sat there, accumulating wealth, making a break for a spot where I could turn that wealth into victory points, and ending up thrown back in jail before I could make it.

One of the other scenarios has just one AI opponent, but gives that opponent a huge score advantage to start with, immediately throwing you into the need to work out a cunning come-from-behind victory, and it’s much harder yet also much more fun.