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Lost Cities – Lost Cities Master

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Finally completed all the single player challenges to become a Lost Cities Master.

The last challenge of not having a single card in the discard pile prove especially difficult especially against the CPU player.

Devils Attorney – Completed

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Max finally got to his last case, I won't spoil the game but just to say that it is very tough & you will need to carefully think about which powers to use & when. After winning the case you get to choose your ending. I tend to spend most of my time on iOS playing multiplayer games so it is good to sit back and enjoy a single player experience.

Assassins Creed 4 – Completed

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The past few years, Assassin Creed games have been Christmas gaming for me & this year AC4 did not disappoint with a swash buckling pirate adventure. It is the Journey of Edward Kenway from a man leaving England looking to make riches whatever the damage he may cause to eventually finding a purpose & a meaning to his life.

I did not enjoy the ship battles in AC3 but in this game they have been redesigned & you have full control of your Jackdaw. All the weapons are available with easy access from he mortar, fire barrels & heavy shot. Once you have damaged an enemy ship enough you get the option to board which then involves you killing a certain number of the enemy crew & other small tasks depending on the ship. The option to repair your Jackdaw after a boarding is an easy way to avoid your ship getting destroyed when taking on a fleet.
























There are so many side quests in the game from Assassin contracts, Mayan puzzles, Treasure Maps, Underwater wrecks, Kenway's Fleet mini game & much much more that you can very easily get distracted from the main quest. I managed to complete most of these with only a few shipwrecks left to explore, on the world map you can also collect animus fragments & chests but these don't really reward you much in the game & I had begin to tire of the 'gotta collect them all' gameplay.

Playing the game on the PS4 with all it's hardware prowess really made the experience that much more enjoyable & the share ability allowed me to take screenshots & create videos with ease.























The Ubisoft formula (main quest will added pointless filler collectibles) being applied to almost all of their releases like the AC, Far Cry & upcoming Watch_Dogs is getting very predictable but where do excel is in the main quest & relevant storyline which is why I expect that next Christmas I will be playing the next assassin creed game in the series.

LA Noire: completed!

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I had only a few missions to complete in that game, it turns out, all of which involved hunting down various corrupt officials and getting them to talk.



I think that shooting him in the leg was probably a bit excessive, but as I said previously the game has taken control of my character's actions in order to progress the story.  This has just got worse as the game's progressed - it's not longer merely Phelps being over-zealous in questioning; it's now Kelso shooting people during cutscenes.

Still, at least I get to drive between these and watch people being shifty.



The endgame saw me exploring a creepy dilapidated house, in which a madman had been holed up.  The game carefully told you that he was mad several times, before showing him folding origami cranes over and over again.  Finding these in the house was quite a shock.





The final missions turned into a run-and-gun cover shooter, with the madman seemingly able to convince dozens of men to lay down their lives just to keep me away from him.  Naturally, that didn't work, but it was pretty tense, running around the sewer systems and popping out to shoot people.  It felt pretty familiar in some ways, reminding me of gameplay in Red Dead Redemption.

I finally found the flamethrower man, who turned out to be someone that Phelps and Kelso had served with.  Funny that all the main characters turned out to be linked in some way, given the size of the city the game's set in.


And then the end of the game sees Rockstar killing off the main character again, but this time I have little sympathy left for him - even after he helped to save everyone else.


After the credits, you can go back and play in free roam mode, which means that you no longer need to worry about how much damage you cause when driving.  I enjoyed that, and ended up with some amusing accidents.


Overall, a great game, but the story was crowbarred in a little, which spoilt the interactivity somewhat.  I hope a sequel could improve on that.

LA Noire: am I overly moralistic?

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Games, as interactive experiences, put the player into the character they control. The player determines how the character progresses, whether they succeed, and how they act. This, of course, is a challenge to game scriptwriters, who have to determine how players can all get to the same ending no matter how they behave. Some games get this more right than others.

I've mentioned before about how I feel uncomfortable playing certain games - Bulletstorm, for example, didn't keep my interest as I felt that the characters were unlikable. I've played around half an hour of Gears of War before tiring of the macho idiocy. LA Noire has hit it from a different aspect, however. For the first couple of sets of levels, there's not too much of a running story, other than an up-and-coming policeman getting promoted. By the time you start on the Vice Desk, however, there's a much grander story happening, and Cole Phelps - your character - gets a little too involved. The end of the vice desk cases sees Phelps exposed as an adulterer.

So no matter how I play the game, whether I stop at red lights, I am forced to play the part of an adulterer. My character gets thrown out of his home and demoted, whether that's how I was acting or not.  It's a sudden break in the immersion which is entirely unwelcome.

Anyway, I've done a few cases on the Arson Desk now and I feel the game's coming to a head. I'm no longer playing as Phelps - probably just as well since I have no empathy with him - but he's cropping up from time to time.  Maybe I can complete this soon ...