{"id":14288,"date":"2011-11-29T14:13:25","date_gmt":"2011-11-29T19:13:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=14288"},"modified":"2011-11-29T14:29:36","modified_gmt":"2011-11-29T19:29:36","slug":"assassins-creed-2-ep28-shark-jumpers-creed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=14288","title":{"rendered":"Assassin&#8217;s Creed 2 EP28: Shark-Jumper&#8217;s Creed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/KUEKOHSLRZk\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=KUEKOHSLRZk'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>9:05 &#8211; Really? The guy delivering the SUPER EGG just jumped over a canal by hopping onto one of those barbershop poles in the middle of the water.  Was nobody worried about this thing falling to the bottom of the canal? Does this guy have some alien blood in him like Ezio does? Is this really the most reasonable way to transport this thing across the city, or was this the way that made things easiest on the game designers?<\/p>\n<p>14:35 &#8211; Game designer says, &#8220;Ha ha! GOTCHA!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>16:29 &#8211; After having a lone courier prance over the rooftops and over canals with the SUPER EGG, they&#8217;re suddenly all obsessed with ceremony and making sure it&#8217;s in a nice package.  Perhaps we should wipe the dirt, sweat, and blood off the thing first, no?<\/p>\n<p>16:37 &#8211; Ezio says, &#8220;The Spaniard&#8217;s here?!&#8221; Earlier Josh said that we were following the egg because we wanted the Spaniard. But now we&#8217;re surprised to find out he&#8217;s going to show? So now I don&#8217;t understand the in-world justification for not just nabbing the egg and walking away.<\/p>\n<p>17:28 &#8211; Stay in formation? The contrast between this parade and the earlier parkour is rather striking. What ARE the bad guys thinking? Do their actions make any sense, or was this the way that made things easiest on the game designers?<\/p>\n<p>18:30 &#8211; So you have an escort which does nothing to protect you from other guards or even from being jostled by civilians.  In fact, your &#8220;escort&#8221; will ditch you if you get hung up on peasants! How to we explain this? Did the guards really act in this incomprehensible way, or did the animus fail to simulate their behavior? I can&#8217;t help but think of the joke Rutskarn made about Ezio de-synchronizing because the Wienermobile drove past. This really does feel like the game isn&#8217;t playing by its own rules.  It does this in order to add &#8220;danger&#8221; or &#8220;tension&#8221; to an otherwise boring sequence.  But rather than break the fiction of the gameworld, I think a better solution would be to <strong>not have boring sequences in the first place<\/strong>.  <\/p>\n<p>20:30 &#8211; I now officially hate Ezio.  <em>What&#8217;s your goal here, Ezio? Was it to assassinate that one guard? No? Then why did you give up your surprise advantage by killing him? You needlessly killed someone who wasn&#8217;t the target, thereby making it harder to kill the person who WAS the target.<\/em> After spending 20 minutes punishing the player for slight failures in detection, Ezio pisses away all your efforts with a childish bit of macho showboating. Remember this moment when we get to the end.<\/p>\n<p>20:37 &#8211; Uhhh.  The guy falls, and Ezio is standing there still holding the box.  His hands are around the bottom of the box.  Didn&#8217;t he need one of his hands free to pull that off? <\/p>\n<p>20:58 &#8211; &#8220;How many people have died for this?&#8221; He did not just say that!  For those of you watching at home: Rodrigo has personally killed one person. (And actually, you had to finish him off.) Ezio has killed dozens, even in the hands of a merciful and careful player.  <\/p>\n<p>21:36 &#8211; Fight the old man who is immune to the hidden blade, extremely durable, as nimble as a ninja, immune to gunshots and smoke bombs, and&#8230; this is just shockingly childish and lazy. I can&#8217;t believe that the plot of this game requires us to fight this guy TWICE.<\/p>\n<p>22:49 &#8211; Is this still going on?  This is the stupidest thing I&#8217;ve seen in a long time. <\/p>\n<p>23:16 &#8211; &#8220;Guards!&#8221; WTF?!?! So half a dozen guards were just standing in that alley, but they never made any effort to intervene until Rodrigo called for them?  Remember this when the assassins run out in a few seconds.  Were the assassins and guards waiting in the alley TOGETHER? <\/p>\n<p>24:27 &#8211; <strong>Wooo! Jump that shark! Jump it, baby!<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>26:29 &#8211; I started doing these timestamp annotations because I was dumbstruck during the episode.  But now I am, once again, dumbstruck.  This game has abandoned any pretense of telling a coherent tale.  I have no stake in the story because it&#8217;s clear this is a plot driven by convenience, not reason and logic.  This fight even LOOKS ridiculous.<\/p>\n<p>27:11 &#8211; I love how the game just spent the last 10 hours convincing you that your allies were smart, capable people. (Except for the Thieves&#8217; Guild guy, obviously. He&#8217;s always been inept.)  And now the game pisses them all away by showing them to be completely incompetent. Rodrigo evidently knows he&#8217;s got Plot Armor, since he hasn&#8217;t run away or retreated to the alley where he couldn&#8217;t be surrounded.  He&#8217;s evidently confident that he can dispatch your entire group.<\/p>\n<p>28:17 &#8211; Poof! The fat man runs away from you and ALL OF YOUR COMPANIONS. Including the Fox. Come <em>ON<\/em>, Ubisoft.<\/p>\n<p>28:37 &#8211; Ezio says, &#8220;I don&#8217;t care about your prophet.  I came here to kill the Spaniard.&#8221;  Ezio, you lumbering dumbass, your actions over the last eight minutes say otherwise.  If that was your goal, you could have handed over the box and pounced on Rodrigo instead of pointlessly murdering the guard.<\/p>\n<p>29:17 &#8211; &#8220;You are all assassins? Paola? Volpe?&#8221; Yep, Ezio.  They are.  Now your follow-up question should be, &#8220;WHY DIDN&#8217;T PAOLA ASSASSINATE THE DOGE AT CARNEVAL?&#8221;  <\/p>\n<p>30:18 &#8211; These are the scribblings of a child.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) 9:05 &#8211; Really? The guy delivering the SUPER EGG just jumped over a canal by hopping onto one of those barbershop poles in the middle of the water. Was nobody worried about this thing falling to the bottom of the canal? Does this guy have some alien blood in him like Ezio does? [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[208],"class_list":["post-14288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning","tag-spoiler-warning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14288\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}