Money and Games

Games I've bought in the past two weeks, organized in the batches I bought them in:

Desperados 2 - Cooper's Revenge
Assassin's Creed
Gothic 3
Peter Jackson's King Kong
Warcraft 2
Heroes of Might and Magic 3
Caesar III

Fallout
Fallout 2
Fallout tactics
Age of Empires
Age of Empires - The Rise of Rome
Age of Empires II
Age of Empires II - The Conquerors

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell - Pandora Tomorrow
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell - Chaos Theory
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell - Double Agent
Spiderman - Web of Shadows

I suck at having money. Granted, it was far from as expensive as it seems, but still.
I suck at having money.

Beggars and Fists

I'll nerd on a bit more about Assassin's Creed, because I've spent a fair bit of time playing it the past few days. I've learned something pretty fun today. First of all, if there are any amongst you who do not know this yet, in AC you play Desmond, who is playing Altair. Instead of a health-bar, you have a synchronization-bar, designed to show you how in tune with Altair Desmond is. This goes down if you do things that Altair didn't do, such as get hurt, or stab civilians in the face. The interesting thing here, is that my favorite occupation of stabbing beggars to death costs Altair about a third of the sync-bar. If, however, and this is what I've just learned, you instead decide to put down your blades and elect to beat the poor woman to death with your own hands, a process taking several times as long, and involving, I presume, quite a bit more emotional stress on the part of the victim, the cost is only about a tenth of the sync-bar.
This has endeared me to Altair somewhat, because I can only assume that he hated these women as much as I do, and wanted them to know it when he killed them, he wanted to make it personal, perhaps to make a distinction between his working hours and his spare time.

Failed Balls and Murder

Today I have eaten what I must presume to be the most unhealthy thing I have ever seen a person bake. The Nightflyer wanted to make Chocolate Balls, (the english name for which, I have just learned, is "Chockladbollar". Thank you, Wikipedia) but we only had about half as much oatmeal as we needed, so we took some kind of extra-fiber version, and at the end they wouldn't stick together. So we did the next best thing, put everything in a pair of bowls, sprinkled some nib sugar on top, and ate it, so we both had about .7 of a liter worth of sugar, fat and cocoa each. It was awesome. I named it the HealthBucket.

I also inexplicably felt like describing a few things about Assassin's Creed, which I started playing again the other day. There are a few important lessons in here somewhere, I hope.
Number one, if I save you from a bunch of guards wanting to kill you, the correct answer is something along the lines of "Oh, thank you, I will repay this kindness". If you say "Thanks, I guess, but I could have taken them myself" and sound like a beggar, then you just bought yourself a fresh ticket to having a metal spike shoved through your face. Speaking of beggars, number two, if you ask me for money, I will stab you to death. The same goes for any person who shoves me for any reason, no matter the situation. If you shove me, you die. By extension, if you stumble around, sound like a retard and generally look like you might potentially shove me at some point in your life, I will stab you until you die.

Now that most of the homicidal tension is out of the way, I'd like to point out a few differences between AC and InFamous, since they are the only two games I have played that are comparable to one another. First of all, AC looks a lot better. The animations are smoother, the climbing looks more like climbing and less like a vertical frog on speed. The interaction between the main character and everyone else was also a lot better in AC, you get the feeling that all the civilians are actually people and objects, which I felt was lacking in IF.