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Oh 360. It’s been a while. Certainly since I completed anything on you, anyway. How unloved you are these days. But, since Ubisoft failed to release Rogue on the Wii U, I was left with little choice.
And it’s a shame, because much as I hate the recent boating bits in recent Assassin’s Creed games, they’re made much more bearable (especially in the ludicrous “boat stealth” sections) by being able to use the Wii U gamepad’s massive map. In fact, on Black Flag, I would usually steer the boat entirely by looking at the map. It made it much easier and – most importantly – made the boat bits shorter as a result. Anyway.
In the latter half of the game, Shay starts to wonder if his turncoatedness was actually wise, as he started systematically wiping out his former chums (and chumette) in the Brotherhood. As a result, it was pretty obvious how things were going to turn out, but the trip to get there was enjoyable enough.
Although, in terms of the story at least, Rogue was definitely the shortest “main” Assassin’s Creed game. There’s plenty of optional filler, of course, but the end of the plot seemed to come around rather too quickly. I like what Ubi did to tie it in with Unity though, bumping off Arno’s dad (after briefly meeting Arno himself, as a child) in the final epilogue mission.
It has faults, like all Assassin’s Creed games, and it has bugs (again, like all Assassin’s Creed games), but Rogue is the best one since at least Revelations. I do really want to play Unity now. Only I’ve nothing to play it on. Hmm.
You know when you stumble into the eShop and you’ve credit in your account and you see a game you’d been intending to get for a while but haven’t because you’ve loads of other games to play and you “accidentally” buy it? That.
Shantae is a gorgeous looking GBC platformer, with some fantastic sprites and animation layered on top of a pretty hard platformer. It’s essentially a Metroidvania, where you enter labyrinths (which have several puzzle elements) to both rescue a genie (each of whom provide you with a new power) and recover a mystical stone (protected by a boss).
So far, I’ve completed two such labyrinths, and it’s been a lot of fun. I’ve two powers, activated by dancing specific combinations of moves, so can turn into a monkey who can scale walls and an elephant who can smash through blocks.
Less fun is navigating the world between towns – it’s a long way and some of the monster you run in to are very hard to defeat unscathed. It seems you can collect warp squid to allow you to teleport from town to town, but at the moment I can’t, and things are compounded by poor signposting. I’m told where to go, but not how, meaning I can spend half an hour going in one direction only to end up in the wrong place and have to backtrack. A bit annoying.
But Shantae can shake her pixel bottom so it doesn’t really matter.