writing my review of Assassin's Creed Shadows and reckoning with the fact that this video game series has been part of my life for 15+ years which is about half my life

and also this is the first AC game I am actually writing a review for which is wild considering how much this series has been in my life

I took a whole section of the review to talk about that context, I just had to, its like how the Baldur's Gate 3 review was me providing a bunch of context of my interaction with other video game RPGs

I have written the Context and Mechanics sections of the review, tomorrow I'll write the Narrative section

its good to be reviewing a game which I have a bunch of thoughts about again

the first AC game came out when I was 14 lmao. I was a very different person back then

if I ever have ridiculous amounts of free time I want to do a retrospective let's play video series of all the games that were formative for me and see how I feel about them in my current context

so that's uhh - Assassin's Creed 2, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, Halo CE

of these I have replayed Halo CE a number of times since I first played it as a child because of it being in the Halo Master Chief Collection and my general thoughts on Halo CE is that the game is still very good for the most part (the Library level still is a pain in the ass though)

haven't replayed NFS HP or AC2 so idk how either has aged

I wouldn't mind if Ubisoft did a remaster of the Ezio trilogy AC games, those games are old enough that they would benefit from such a remaster

I really doubt Ubisoft is interested in such an undertaking at this point however

Need for Speed....well EA has that franchise and yeah, don't think I need to say much else about that lmao

the heydays of Need for Speed are long in the past that's for sure

NFS Hot Pursuit, Most Wanted, Underground, Underground 2, Carbon was one hell of a run that's for sure

Most Wanted was definitely my fav, spent a lot of time in that game as a young one

also lmao I remembered one of the first car based games I played was Midtown Madness and Midtown Madness 2

speaking of formative games...I somehow completely forgot about Grand Theft Auto - the amount of time I spent playing GTA 3, 4, Vice City and San Andreas was A Lot

kids these days don't even know that the CJ "oh shit here we go again" meme is from GTA San Andreas smh smh

/joke

core memory is figuring out that the blocked bridge in GTA 3 that is unblocked at a certain point in the main story can be bypassed if you enter a certain cheat code that made cars fly and then got a certain car that picked up enough speed to fly across the gap in the bridge and get to the part of the city that you weren't supposed to yet

GTA 5 didn't resonate to me at all, by the time I got around to playing that I found the writing and characters to be meh and the sandbox not as fun to mess around in as San Andreas

I know that the multiplayer for that game is huge but GTA was always a single player series for me so I never interacted with the multiplayer

idk what to expect from the next GTA game Rockstar is working on at this point

knowing Rockstar its gonna have a large number of cringe jokes about "woke" and "cancel culture" or whatever

love to go to a video game's Wikipedia page and see "Platforms released on" include Google Stadia

oof