The Favorites - My Top 7 Assassin's Creed Video Games

Since it is the end of the year, I felt like returning to the world of the Assassins. Ubisoft has released some more DLC and even free DLC at that. I don’t know if I’ll play any of it though. I got a couple of posts that I’ve wanted to get up for a while now.

First up is a post I thought would be a struggle. Of out of all of the AC games, which ones do I consider to be the my favorite? It’s a tough question because all of them have a lot of good things and few bad things. It ultimately comes down to a few factors like story, protagonists, gameplay, and just overall fun. Another thing that could make it tougher is the fact that there are 13 mainline games (including Liberation which I never played). It’s tough to make a top 10 of that, which is why I made the corporate decision to make this a Top 7 list. Here are my favorites from the franchise.

"It's a Video Game" - My Time with Mass Effect Legendary Edition: Part 2

The moment when you feel that you've played one of the best games ever.

Yes, it's Christmas Day, and I'm posting this. We got a little break in the day, so I thought I'd come on here and get these out. I actually did plan on doing this last night, but sleep swept upon me. That tends to happen when you're wrapping gifts and watching some Space:1999 while recovering from a crapton of food-eating.

Anyway, on to the point of this post. After my time with ME1, I jumped right into one of my favorite games: Mass Effect 2. Now this felt like home. If Mass Effect 1 made me fall for the series, Mass Effect 2 is what keeps me coming back. Yes, it lacks some of the customizable details like upgradable weapons and armor, but everything else is good. It takes what ME1 built upon and just expands on everything. The lore of this universe is expanded on. The combat is thankfully retooled and done well. The story is really good, and the most important aspect, the characters, are so well done. 

Unlike ME1's revamp, ME2 doesn't get the same unfortunately. Heck, the game was pretty much firing on all cylinders back in 2010, so nothing really needed to be done to it. Things do look a bit fresher, but that's it. I do wish it could've gotten a bit of a graphics upgrade, but this are fine as is. I didn't take too many pics this time though. I think I was having too much fun in the game. Still, here are some good ones.

Movie Talk - The Animatrix

Well, we got a couple of days until The Matrix Resurrections is released in theaters. Like most, I’ll be watching from home on HBO Max, but I know this would be a good theater experience. Now that I got that retrospective out of the way, I can finally talk about the Animatrix. This was an anthology film that was released in June 2003 at around the same time Reloaded was out. Man, WB was pushing it hard with this series since Enter The Matrix was released on the PS2 about a month earlier. I really never got around to watching the Animatrix until just recently. I think I ended up seeing a bit of it airing on TNT a few years ago though.

The Animatrix houses nine short films that are supposed to fill in the backstory of the franchise. The Wachowskis were producers and even wrote the scripts for some of the films. Each film was helmed by an anime director. This worked out pretty well since anime has influenced the Wachowskis’ work. I don’t know of them too well, but a lot of these guys worked on big things like Akira, Cowboy Bebop, Afro Samurai, and Aeon Flux. If you’re looking to compare this to anything, it would be Batman: Gotham Knight, a movie that uses the same format to tell stories about the Nolan version of Batman. A review of that is also here somewhere.

Random Thoughts On... Re-Evaulating the Matrix Trilogy

Since The Matrix is making a comeback to movie theaters, I’ve been a bit stoked. I’m actually looking more forward to this than the other movie coming out at around that time, Spider-Man: No Way Home. I think that just shows how uninterested I am in MCU’s Spider-Man. Heck, I haven’t even seen Far From Home yet. Maybe I’ll see it when Andy turns 5 or something…

Anyway, I had been revisiting the Matrix trilogy on HBO Max for a while now. While the first one still holds up well (well “Not like this” is a bit funny), the sequels are still okay at best. My son started crying when the Architect showed up, but that may have been because he was hungry. I think my term “Overblown Epicness” still applies for those last two movies. I had talked about the trilogy years ago on the blog. I was going to go ahead and talk about the Animatrix which I finally saw a couple of weeks ago, but I think it’s time for me to reevaluate what I think of the trilogy. Yeah, others have done it, so I might as well throw my two quarters in.