27 March, 2009

Keepalive: Heart of Evil, Blood, BioShock, Assassin's Creed

written on Friday, March 27, 2009

I finished posting the Heart of Evil walkthrough (really more of a playthrough) on Wednesday. You'll still be seeing them here every day for another week, but just spending a day letting the uploads to YouTube and MediaFire happen was good. Dragging it out by only recording and uploading ten minutes of video a day was too tedious.

My plan is to record a playthrough of Blood next. But I'm feeling a little iffy about that. On the technical side I haven't tried using my game video capture software (Fraps) with DOSBox yet. Also, the game has movies that switch the screen resolution and I have no idea how Fraps would handle that. And finally, my PC is way overdue for a reformat. I've got less than 10% free space, and that slows everything down.

On the gameplay side, I'm not sure if the pacing of Blood is as conducive to a video playthrough as Heart of Evil (which wasn't perfect, by any means). Also, Heart of Evil provides notes with back story. With Blood, what you see is pretty much what you get. I could point out some of the horror movie references, but that doesn't take long and isn't very interesting.

Long story short, it'll be a while before the Blood playthrough gets underway.

I finished BioShock. Again. I was much less of a pack rat than in my original run through and felt good about that. Maybe I'll use BioShock as therapy and run through it once a year until I can downgrade my hoarding tendencies from pathological to prudent. The game holds up. The art design holds up. I got to play with some plasmids I hadn't used before. Shooting out bees was lame, but the cyclone traps were super handy.

Oh, and I still saved all the Little Sisters. I will always save all the Little Sisters.

There was a one day sale on Steam, so I picked up Assassin's Creed for $10. Early on, I felt I'd slightly overpaid. I was bored with the game before the end of the first assassination. Unlocking more combat abilities has made the combat marginally fun. And I'm getting enough story outside of the main game that I'm curious to see where it goes. Now I'm feeling $10 was the perfect price. Who knows, maybe I'll like it enough to feel like it was worth even more by the time I finish it. Then again, maybe I'll be so sick of doing the same activities over and over I'll wish I never bought it. But it's the uncertainty that keeps life interesting, isn't it?

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