which_chick | (no subject)

Election yesterday, spent the day working the polls which is to say that I played rather a lot of Thief Gold. With only five people voting in person, and four of them poll workers, it was not a real busy day for election stuff. I'm done with the previous mission, which was *supposed* to be about stealing from the Hammerites but turned into Surprise, Assassins! instead. The lockpicks are fun, if time-consuming.

Mission 1: Steal the Jeweled Scepter of Phallic Symbolism
Mission 2: Break Cutty Out of Jail / Find Felix's Map
Mission 3: Steal the Horn of Horniness
Mission 4: Surprise, Assassins!
Mission 5: eVase-ive Thief Theft

The missions are getting harder, which is understandable. As you get better at running the dude, early missions will replay as too easy. They can't expect you to be very good at the game strategy and controls from the get-go. I mean, yeah, it only takes a couple of tries to figure out that going toe-to-toe with dudes in armor is a very bad idea, but you don't have facility with the tools right away unless you do a lot more videogaming than I do. With several levels worth of practice, you get better at sneaking around and avoiding guards and shooting things with arrows and stuff. So, things should get harder as you progress. Building this learning curve the right amount of hard is probably something that game designers work on. (The only person I know who works on video game building plays an awful lot of video games in his non-work time. He's not exactly a n00b.)

Surprise, Assassins! was kind of annoying in that I'm absolutely no good at tailing people. It took me rather more replays than I want to cop to in order to follow the assassins back to their lair. The map was, again, a bare suggestion of the floorplan. The reading materials left lying around were interesting and fleshed out the plot and game world. That was nice. This was the first mission that I heard a female voice in. (Yes, I do notice that sort of thing.) Graphics are aged and I'm not running on high detail, so everyone is kind of polygonal -- I couldn't see a chick if I ran into her unless she was built like Dolly Parton-- but the voice was distinctly female.

On the whole, I liked Suprise, Assassins! It took place in a dude's house. There were people to pickpocket. There were shadows in which to skulk. There were locks to pick and rooms to case and conversations to overhear. Notably, No Zombies. Additional point of note: only two lizards, easily avoided. Thumbs up for lack of suckage, a few points off for not having interesting sewers. Surprise, Assassins! also required an amount of loot from me, which forced a certain amount of world exploration beyond just the mission objective. That was kind of interesting for one go-round but I think I'm going to keep seeing it and that does not seem like quite so much fun. It is realistic, though -- Garrett's gotta make the rent, buy groceries, etc. He's got expenses.

The next mission, eVase-ive Thief Theft (you sneak into the Thieve's Guild and steal a sapphire vase) is bewilderingly complex. The guild is located underneath (?) a casino that is underneath (?) a restaurant. Seems like a lot of digging for a non-mechanized society. Maybe they used slave labor. Anyway, the casino isn't so bad. It's a reasonable size. The Guild, however, is multi-layered and sprawling. It's like six times as big as the casino above it. It has tunnels. It has numbered *things* (vaults, maybe?) and levers that move stuff and spiders that eat you and assorted people not-wearing-armor and other people wearing armor and lots of fireplaces (underground? where does the smoke go?) and raised brick walkways and really, how big is this damn guild? It *feels* huge. It's also crawling with people. And, again, the map is relatively useless and Garrett doesn't know where the vase is. (Not exactly true. He knows that the guild has two dudes in charge. One dude has the key, the other dude has the locked-up vase. The dudes are not very BFF at the moment and Garrett is hoping that he can make off with the vase and have them go for each other's throats. So, yeah, he has a vague idea of where the vase might be, but "Dude #2's quarters" is not helpful when you don't know where either Dude #1 or Dude #2 hangs his hat.)