“Momma, momma, many worlds I’ve come since I first left home”
~The Grateful Dead
I played the first Assassin’s Creed back when it was a new release. I liked it at first, the concept of parkour was unique at the time to anyone that didn’t own the third Playstation. That interest didn’t keep up though, the game descended into gratingly melancholy repetition in boring copy and pasted environments. I think I got maybe five or six hours in before putting it down forever. It wasn’t no Super Zesty Quest 64, no, not by a long shot. It was the only AC game I’ve played.
So let’s move it down the line, I don’t know, a decade.
Assassin’s Creed 4 comes out, with swashbuckling and allegedly hardcore pirate shit. All the reviewers, even those who claim to not like the series, claim this game is a dramatic outlier and absolutely must be played by all people.
I gave the Amazon man twenty bucks and he sent AC4 on down the line to me. Alright, place ya bets. Was this going to be high-seas swashbuckling adventure, or another boring uninspired soulless disappointment? Turns out the Amazon sent me something more boring and unplayable than a broken cinder block covered in Minnesota tar.
Playing Ass Creed 4 is like sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s office until you pass out from hunger. I would rather do long division. The gameplay is more bland than the taste of plain white printer paper. I played Ass Creed 4 immediately after I played Shadow of Mordor so the combat in Ass Quest 4 felt like the cardboard cutout of a protagonist downed half a bottle of ambien and put on some waders before hopping into a chest-high pond with bricks tied to his ankles. The enemies surround you but only engage you one-on-one, which is a fighting style I’ve only seen in Assassin’s Creed and Austin Power.s You could have more fun cleaning gutters.
Townes Van Zandt once said livin’s just a means of wasting time, or something like that. This is just from memory.
“Livin’s just wastin’ time” (Or something like that? This is from memory)
~Townes Van Zandt
Well if old Townes was right then the most efficient way of living is to play Assasin’s Creed 4, because you’d waste less time sitting in place and staring at a wall for six years straight.
The characters of Ass Creed 4 don’t deserve to inhabit the back of a cereal box. The Hamburgler contains more human depth and compassion than the entire cast of this clown show. You know what? This isn’t even a clown show. It’s just a juggalo shitting in a parking lot.
I hate this game and I hate myself for buying it.
You guys ever have regrets? Ever think about them crossroads you navigated in your life, the forks in the road and the consequence of decision? Episodic memories, fleeting, no hard dates or times but locations and seasons. Rivers and ponds surrounded by autumn leaves. Empty bottles beside a mattress directly on the floor. Broken guitars.
We’re the sum of those decisions, we are, and not much else besides. Immutable in construction, we cannot change our decisions in the past, we can only hope we seen past our foolishness enough to learn a thing or two of our mistakes.
It ain’t just us, though, and it ain’t just me. There’s infinite mes, fractaling throughout space and time. Every fork in the road, every decision, there’s an alternate existence that continued the other choice, and that alternate choice births separate persistent realities of it’s own, and somewhere out there in that holy matrix that only God can comprehend is a me that didn’t have to play Assassin’s Creed 4.
Keep on Chooglin
-Geomatic