Lightning Reviews

I am not a forum girl.

I visit for a while, sometimes make a few posts, and then inevitably disappear off the face of the planet after a while. (Kind of like with this blog.) After a while, I realize that there's no reason for me to stay on a forum if I'm not going to stick around and stop trying to go to them. Then a year or two passes and I'm back where I began.

Recently, I decided to browse the forums at HellDescent.com after getting an email from the webmaster saying he'd redone his site. I'm not really sure why I got this email, but it caught my attention, so mission accomplished. I browsed his news to see if there was anything new about Silent Hill 8 that I'd missed, and when there wasn't, I checked out the forums.

As stated in my Assassin's Creed II Review, I am no more familiar with the Templars than your average American (or maybe less so). Since playing 2, I did watch a couple History channel specials on them and the Illuminati, so I have a little more background - and armed with this, I began Assassin's Creed, the first entry in the series starring Altaïr and set in the Middle East during the Third Crusade.

When I first started the game, I absolutely hated it.

I have a really bad habit of doing things out of order when it comes to a series. When I was a child, for instance, and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was first published, I read it before I'd read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (and thus, it remains my favorite in the entire series, regardless of the fact that most consider it the worst. :( ) I've done this again and again throughout my life, so I didn't really consider it odd when I picked up Assassin's Creed 2 before having played the first. I'd been assured by my brother and my friend that 2 would make plenty of sense without having played the first (mostly true, looking back) and that the story in 1 wasn't exactly tied in to 2 (kind of true, barring the entire underlying story with Abstergo, Lucy, Warren, and Desmond, which I guess I consider more important than most people do).

To be fair, I was originally uninterested in Assassin's Creed 2. The most I recall about it is that it came out on the same day as Resident Evil 5, and the GameStop I frequent was having a midnight launch for AC2 so I was able to get my copy of RE5 at midnight as well. There were a lot of Assassin's Creed fanboys at GameStop that night. My brother received the game for Christmas (2009) and I watched him play the beginning of it and found myself mostly turned off of the game because of the graphics (which I will get into later).

However, my good friend V (who you can find at her own gamer blog, Bat Romance) was also a big fan of the game, and eventually I decided to give it a shot as well. I picked the game up and took it home…

(Originally written on March 7, 2010.)

Before I begin my review, I want to explain something to you all by use of Muppets. In my recording of the famous "Mahna Mahna" song, it ends with the Hecklers saying, "That was great! That was wonderful! Well, it was alright. It was pretty good. It was okay. I didn't really like it. There were some parts that could have been better… I didn't like it. It was awful! It was bad! It was terrible! Boo!"

I am very much like the hecklers in this song. Something is really good while I'm playing or watching it, but then, soon enough, I'm thinking over it and noticing the flaws. Within 24 hours, I know for sure whether or not something I've finished playing or watching is actually good or just really bad. (Sometimes, absence doesn't always make the heart grow fonder.)

So, how did I feel about Heavy Rain?