deKay

Assassin’s Creed Unity (PS4)

Posted on 03/03/2016 Written by deKay

A mission for the Theatre (I am still not sure why I’m involved with the theatre, actually – I know it sits on top of the hive of villainy that is The Assassin Brotherhood headquarters, but surely bringing more people in isn’t what you’d want?) involved finding someone called Rose, and then finding three sets of costumes dotted around Paris. Why. It wasn’t a bad mission, but like a lot of the game so far, why am I doing it. Not me, I mean, but Arno.

His dad was killed by a Templar, sure. That would mean he has a thing against them, and I can understand why he want to join the Assassins with that history. However, the man who brought him up and the person whose murder Arno is blamed for, was also a Templar – and Arno seems to want to find out why he was killed and exact his revenge there. I’m not really sure the story is making sense nor is it going anywhere. Still, hunty-stabby is always good, so meh to the plot.

To that end, I was set to take down the King of Beggars, who was hiding in the sewer. There’s a bit beforehand where you need to find one of his underlings, and then you can also block up some sewer chimneys (there are sewer chimneys?) to aid with the mission underground. The King of Beggars himself was in a large circular room protected by some guards, and it was pretty tricky to reach him – if he spots you, you’re killed very quickly as he has a powerful gun of some kind. Managed it after a few attempts, and then escaped through the thick smoke which I’d caused earlier but magically only affected the bad guys and not me.

Had a chat then with the Marquis de Sade, who is an interesting fellow. He seems to live like a prince in the slums of the city, having orgies. Those wacky French. He’s sort of helping me, but doesn’t seem to be an assassin, so I’m not really sure why.

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All Change!

Posted on 28/02/2016 Written by deKay

Yes, it’s another one of those very infrequent posts I make where I say I’ve changed the WordPress theme and this time, no, really, I’ll be creating some more content for the site. Yeah, you’ve heard it all before.

Still, at least there’s a new theme, right? Right.

Assassin’s Creed Unity (PS4)

Posted on 28/02/2016 Written by deKay

After what seemed like a very long period of time just scrambling over rooftops looking for chests and collectables, I finally decided to pursue the main questline again. Well, after a mission or two for the theatre, anyway.

The next mission was the one where you have to infiltrate Notre Dame and assassinate Sivert. Of course, I messed it up a few times mainly by being spotted or not planning my escape. Eventually, I got my act together and did it properly, or at least an approximation of properly, by taking down Sivert’s associate first, nabbing his keys, and then waiting in the confessional ready to do this:

After that, there was some bizarreness involving portals and timeshifting and jumping between servers or something. Frankly, it didn’t make a lot of sense, and required me to avoid trains, climb the Statue of Liberty, not be hit by flying debris and outrun and avoid data corruption. Or something.

Finally, I returned to wandering around doing good deeds, collecting those rosette things, and generally running into people and knocking them over. As you do.

Click to view slideshow.

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Street Fighter Alpha (GBC): COMPLETED!

Posted on 27/02/2016 Written by deKay

There’s no way that Street Fighter Alpha, Capcom’s CPS II based arcade fighting game, would be any good on the Game Boy Colour: A system not just lacking in buttons, but also roughly one ten-millionth as powerful. It’d be like expecting Elite Dangerous to run on a Speak and Spell. And yet, here it is, surprisingly well turned out.

It doesn’t have all the moves, characters or backgrounds. The animation isn’t as fluid (but for a Game Boy title it’s pretty damn good) and the sound effects are limited at best – not least in there’s no speech – but it feels and plays like a Street Fighter game. Most importantly, Ken is Ken, with all his special moves intact and he is best. Ken is always best.

Since Ken is best, it’s him I used to complete the game and in doing so found one major difference between this version of Street Fighter Alpha and the Saturn one I used to play so much: the Game Boy Colour port is incredibly easy. I only lost one round in the whole game (versus Birdie, if that matters) and even that was close. Final “boss” Ryu was a complete walkover.

Crawfish have worked miracles with the GBC hardware to pull this game off. They did it again with the Game Boy Advance port of Street Fighter Alpha 3 too (which I also played, briefly, a few days ago) but somehow that endeavour seems more feasible. At least the GBA is a 32bit sprite-pumping powerhouse to begin with, whereas the GBC is a calculator. Incredible.

Click to view slideshow.

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Sonic the Hedgehog (MS): COMPLETED!

Posted on 27/02/2016 Written by deKay

Sonic the Hedgehog on the Master System was, at the time, quite an achievement. It may not have been as technically polished as the Mega Drive original, but it was a good approximation given the more limited hardware, and it steered away from simply being very, very fast by focussing more on the platforming. I quite enjoyed it at the time.

It has been quite a long time (read: over a decade, I expect) since I last played 8bit Sonic the Hedgehog, and several things surprised me: It was just as easy as I recall. It stands up better today than I expected. Mostly, I was amazed at how I still remembered where all of the hidden Chaos Emeralds were. Except for the one in Scrap Brain Zone which I stumbled across, luckily.

It’s a fun platformer with some excellent music (Jungle Zone was always my favourite, and still is) and one of the best games of its type on the Master System. When you compare it, technically, to earlier games like Psycho Fox and Alex Kidd (both still excellent) this does things unheard of on the console at the time.

And that’s it completed, with all the Chaos Emeralds in tow. Excellent.

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