For me there’s a lot of video gamey ness to the AC series. I don’t find this breaks my immersion because the character I’m playing as is canonically in a simulation.

If the Animus wasn’t there as a framing device there’s a lot of stuff that I would find extremely hard to look past. I think it’s a great way to justify loads of stuff that would otherwise marr the experience.

The game character coming out of the Animus appears a lot up to AC3. There’s sections in AC 4 in the game dev’s offices, I’ve not played Unity, and there’s the stuff with Layla in Origins (incidentally, it’s only just occurred to me that I went to school with someone called Layla Hassan!).

There’s a lot more of it in the Desmond games, including part of AC3 where one gets to do assassin shit in modern times.

Sounds like you’re talking about the Animus as sections where the player isn’t in the historical period rather than what I mean, which is that the historical experience takes place in an in-universe simulation.

It was an example to illustrate my point, not the entire line of reasoning. There’s loads of other stuff I feel the Animus side of the setting works well for, I just didn’t feel like writing an essay so provided just one example to support my line of argument.

Maybe they should just ditch the whole Animus plot.

I think if that was going to happen it would have happened after AC3.

Personally I’m glad the Animus is there, it makes it much easier for me to suspend disbelief about so many things in those games. I wish AC3 hadn’t messed up Desmond’s story though, I wanted a cool conclusion, rather than having Desmond get Poochied.

But for me, it was always the annoying immersion killing part.

I’m always exactly the opposite! For me it lets me forgive all the gamey-nonsense. Why can’t I leave the map? Because this ancestor never did so there’s no data for anywhere beyond here.

Yeah, I was expecting a race and got a Let’s Play and quickly lost interest. Nothing wrong with that, but it wasn’t what I was interested in watching.

They listed it in the race category and declared a winner at the end too, which muddied the waters a bit more than I’d like.

Still, glad you enjoyed it!

Runs I enjoyed:

• American Idol
• Grandma, No!
• Balatro
• Super Mario 64

Not as much stuff as I’d usually enjoy. I still need to watch a couple of runs but my biggest disappointment was the Super Mario Maker 2 troll “race”. Felt more like a Let’s Play. Normally Mario Maker is the highlight of the marathon for my wife and me, so perhaps our expectations were too high.

Not originally.

|| Battle Beast ||. A friend had it when it was new and the art style always stuck with me.

Happened to me with Banjo Kazooie. I got to Grunty and found it needlessly hard, extremely boring, and decided that the fun bit of the game was done. I didn’t need to see the ending.

I think we’ve found one of those mythical people that reply to questions people ask online with “I don’t know”.

I’ve had an account for nineteen years. I think some of the stuff I’ve got is irreplaceable due to its obscurity.

Is this thread really for you then?

You’re allowed to swear here and MDs weren’t proprietary.

UMDs were though.

A hardware upgrade for hardware that wasn’t designed to be upgradable?

Cool, I’ll adjust the number of Xboxen I’m buying by the same percentage.

0 * ~0.8 = 0

Jokes aside, the old prices weren’t close to a compelling proposition. These consoles have been out for ages and I still haven’t seen much in the way of reasons to buy in. I love my 360, had lots of fun with my Xbox One X, and even the original Xbox had some good stuff (I loved Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, Sid Meier’s Pirates, Crimson Skies, Splinter Cell, XIII, and various others). I’m still waiting on why I should give the slightest shit about the Xbox Series X/S and they’re rapidly running out of road.

That’s unfortunate. Expected, but unfortunate.

I like gaming. That like is not strong enough to extend to that price point.

I was thinking the same - i hadn’t realised that it ever went away (as I don’t play the genres traditionally associated with in game ads).

Similarly I gave up trying to keep up with the ever evolving mail server requirements. I’d wake up to find my emails weren’t reaching people because Google and MS had strongarmed some change into place again.

These days I just use inbox.eu for my email.