One of the thoughts that dominated my playtime with Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag was "Oh I hope the next game is a viking-themed game!". I felt that the open-ended sailing and naval combat would work well in a viking setting, complete with raiding coastal villages as an extra way of obtaining wealth and loot (in addition to plundering trade ships in the open sea). Black Flag was so good, it seemed like a sure-fire, slam-dunk idea! What could possibly go wrong?
Well, it turns out: almost everything could go wrong.
I've been hoping for a viking-themed game ever since Black Flag.
For starters, I refused to buy Assassin's Creed: Valhalla at its release because I did not want to give any money to Ubisoft, which has had ongoing legal issues regarding multiple sexual harassment and sexual assault allegations against high-level managers and executives. Like the Catholic Church, Ubisoft may have systematically hid these alleged transgressions and protected the executives who were committing them. Even the company's HR department has been accused of being complicit.
So fuck Ubisoft and its executives, who (if these allegations are true) should all be in prison, and the company's ownership should be given to the employees who were wronged. I wasn't going to give that company a dime of my money, so I waited and watched eBay for cheaper, used copies to show up. I specifically filtered for "used" copies -- none of that "new, sealed" wholesale scalping nonsense that is all over eBay. Buying a sealed copy from an eBay scalper is the same as buying a new, retail copy, as far as I'm concerned. Several months after release, I finally bought a cheap, used copy for about $30 from someone who claimed to have played the game and got bored of it, so that my partner could kill time while stuck at home during the ongoing pandemic in 2021.
She played through the entire game, and liked it just fine. I played a little bit, hated the early hours, and stopped playing it so that I could work on other projects. I only came back to it later (after she had finished) to see if the game had any redeeming qualities. And even then, I did not even come close to completing the game because it's just too damn long, and I have much better things to do with my time.
You had one job, Valhalla! And you couldn't even get that right!
Assassin's Creed: Valhalla is a tedious, repetitive, drawn-out, copy-pasted, glitch-laden, slog of a game and story. It tries to copy the one thing that Black Flag did so well, and which inspired all future sailing mechanics for every Assassin's Creed game that followed, but it actually somehow manages to remove that thing! That's right, there is no naval combat in the game at all. Worse yet, there is absolutely nothing to do with the longship except use it as a vehicle for moving about the empty, sterile seas and rivers. There isn't even much in the way of islands to discover out in the open seas, so even the exploration incentive is gone. The Norway map has a few islands, but the England map has virtually none. In fact, you don't even use the longship to sail the seas around England; you only use it to sail up and down rivers looking for villages to raid. The key selling point of Valhalla, the longship, is nothing more than a glorified truck, and the rivers that run across England are basically just roads.
The longship is little more than a truck, and the rivers are little more than roads between raids.
Things are spaced out a bit more than I usually expect from an Assassin's Creed game. The map isn't quite as littered with mindless collectibles, even though it is still littered with mindless collectibles. But the map still isn't quite big enough, the distances still not quite far enough, and fast travel is still accessible enough, that I never felt it necessary to use the boat as the most efficient method of traversal. If you're stopping at every village to raid, to search for every collectible, and to play every side quest, then you're better off just using your horse, because any time you would save from using the boat will be offset by the extra time it takes to board and unboard the thing everytime you stop for a side quest.
It's like Ubisoft took the castle sieges from Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, stripped out the Nemesis system that gave those sieges context that made them worth playing, and then just put rivers between all the castle gates so you'd have an excuse to attack from the boat. But the longship feels completely unnecessary to the game. Early in the game, the longship feels like it might be a more integral part of the game, when you're sailing around the seas, fjords, and snaky coastlines of Norway, and crossing large bodies of water is necessary. But then you get to England, and the map is almost completely land-locked, save for those traversable rivers. [More]
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Tags:Assassin's Creed, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Ubisoft, viking, Norway, Denmark, England, longship, open world, sailing, raid, pillage, plunder, monastery, Warner Brothers Interactive, patent, nemesis
Souvenir board game!!!
During a holiday in Europe, I procured a few souvenir board games to add to my collection.
I didn't have room in my luggage for the larger Stonehenge Anthology Game or the Ring of Stones game. So instead of buying them in the Stonehenge gift shop, I ordered them online and had them shipped to my house. They were both waiting for me when I returned home from the trip! The Ring of Stones game was purchased directly from the English Heritage online shop's Stonehenge gifts section. The Anthology game had to come from Amazon because it isn't available from the English Heritage online shop, but I got a really good deal on it!
There was also some Stonehenge Monopoly and playing cards, but I'm not into those sorts of novelty variations that I can get anywhere. It was the unique games that caught my eye.
The third game that I brought back from Europe is a medieval Viking game called "Hnefatafl". I had seen it in the Viking Ship Museum gift shop when I was there last November, but I didn't buy it at the time because I wasn't sure if its rules were written in English or Danish. I didn't want to buy a game that I'd never be able to play because I couldn't read the rules. So when I saw the same game in the British Museum's gift shop this summer, I decided to go ahead and get it.
My European souvenir board games include 2 Stonehenge-themed games and a traditional Viking game.
I already talked about the Stonehenge Ring of Stones game and the anthology game, so today I will talk about the game that I should have bought in my first trip to Denmark: Hnefatafl (The Viking Game).
The Viking Game: Hnefatafl
While the previous Stonehenge-themed games are modern inventions, the Viking Game Hnefatafl (ne-fe-ta-fel) is a classic Norse game from the early middle ages. It was invented around 400 CE. It has some similarities to chess, but predates that game by at least 500 years. Besides, chess traces its lineage to India, so it's unlikely that Hnefatafl is a predecessor of chess.
Basically, Hnefatafl is an asymmetrical, chess-like game in which the single king and his defenders is ambushed and surrounded by the other player's pieces. All pieces move vertically or horizontally across the board (like rooks in chess), and pieces are killed/captured by flanking them on two opposing sides. The objective for the king's player is for the king to escape to any corner of the board; while the attacking player's objective is to defeat the king by surrounding it on all four orthogonally-adjacent spaces.
Hnefatafl is an asymmetrical, chess-like game in which a single king tries to escape from an ambush of attackers.
One of the things that makes the game a bit challenging (compared to chess) is that attacks can come from any direction, and every piece can hypothetically move the entire distance of the board... [More]
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Tags:Hnefatafl, Viking Chess, the Viking game, Viking, chess, board game, king, pawn, rook, Denmark, Viking Ship Museum, Europe, ambush
Last November, my girlfriend and I took a trip to Denmark and visited the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde. That was a great trip, and the ship museum was pretty great, but there were a couple things that we wanted to do, but which we couldn't because the ship museum doesn't operate them in the winter. For one thing, the museum has a collection of reconstructed Viking ships, including a full-size longship. These ships are usually docked in the harbor, along with some living exhibits of the construction and maintenance of these ships and the ropes and sails used to sail them. During winter, the exhibits are closed and the ships themselves are brought onto land and covered in order to prevent ice from forming and damaging the ships.
More importantly, the museum offers tourists the opportunity to go out sailing the reconstructed ships with a couple of museum guides. This service is also only offered in the summer due to weather restrictions, and we decided that we wanted to go back to Denmark so that we could sail a Viking ship!
Big Ben was the first of several Civilization
world wonders that I'd get to see.
She found affordable tickets to London, and we allocated two weeks to spend in Europe this summer. My dad also expressed an interest, and we offered to take him with us and pay for part of his airfare and lodging expenses as a combined Father's Day and birthday gift (his birthday is in May). We ended up deciding to take him to London, England, to Coppenhagen, Denmark, and to Munich, Germany.
London, Stonehenge, and Shakespeare
Our first stop was London, England on June 26th. We did some of the usual tourist things, like visit the Tower of London and walk by Parliament and Big Ben (one of several Civilization wonders that I would be visiting during this trip!) and Westminster Abbey. We also had fish, chips, and beer in a pub and started two week's worth of gluttonous eating! Despite walking 15 to 20 miles per day, I still gained 3 1/2 pounds during the trip.
The British Parlaiment building was covered with scaffolding, apparently being repaired or remodeled. This would actually become a recurring theme during this trip, as many of the places that we visited would be covered with scaffolding.
We visited the Imperial War Museum, including the Churchill Warroom.
I tried on some World War I-era clothing, which was very uncomfortable and itchy.
The second day (Tuesday), we visited the Churchill Warroom and the Imperial War Museum. I had previously visited the Imperial War Museum in Manchester during my trip to the U.K., so this time we got to see the larger museum in London. I was a little bit disappointed that the museum didn't cover British Imperial history prior to World War I. There were no exhibits about colonial British sailing ships. The museum starts with World War I, and then goes through World War II, the Cold War, and the War on Terrorism. It also included an exhibit on the Holocaust, which was interesting because the exhibit started on the top floor, and then descended to the lower floor as the exhibits shifted from persecution of the Jews in Germany to the full-blown "final solution" period. It was a clever bit of symbolism to descend into the fullest horrors of the Holocaust.
On Wednesday, we did a day-trip with a tour company to Windsor Castle, the Roman bathhouse in Bath, and to Stonehenge (another Civ wonder!)... [More]
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Tags:Europe, holiday, vacation, travel, passport, AirBnB, London, England, Stratford Upon Avon, Bath, United Kingdom, Coppenhagen, Denmark, Roskilde, Warsaw, Poland, Munich, Germany, Bavaria, Dachau, Zugspitze, Salzburg, Austria, Imperial War Museum, Viking, Viking Ship Museum, Land of Legends, cosplay, sailing, beer, William Shakespeare, Royal Shakespeare Company, Titus Andronicus, Mozart, Stonehange, Neuschwanstein, Big Ben, UNESCO World Heritage Site, English Heritage trust, British Museum, London Museum of Natural History, World War II, Holocaust, concentration camp, allergies
Back in the summer, my girlfriend and her brother saw that Norwegian Air was offering direct flights from Las Vegas to Copenhagen, Denmark for relatively cheap (under $400 round-trip). So we bought some tickets, made reservations at a hostel in Copenhagen, and spent our Thanksgiving holiday traveling to Europe and getting some more stamps on our passports. This was only my second trip to Europe and the second set of stamps that I got on my passport.
The flight was pretty grueling. Ten hours in economy seating is not the most comfortable thing in the world. The time-zone difference also meant that the flight effectively wiped an entire day off of our calendar. Ah well. We bought a transit card called the "Copenhagen Card", which gave us free use of the public transit systems for the entire week. It also granted us free admission to some public facilities such as castles, museums, and parks. It was a very handy thing to have!
Gløgg is a Scandinavian holiday wine.
Apparently, the Danes really like Christmas. One of the things that struck us almost as soon as we got off the plane is that the entire city was decorated for Christmas. Whole buildings were covered in lights, street lights were lined with garlands, and there were multiple Yule Markets (outdoor gift and food stands) lining the streets and squares of the city. Since the Danes don't have Thanksgiving, they apparently don't have any reservations about putting up Christmas decorations in November. We walked through some of these street vendors and Yule Markets and tried our first Danish delicacy: gløgg. Gløgg is a Swedish and Danish drink that mixes hot mulled wine with cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, raisins, and almonds. It's kind of like a sweet hot tea, and it's a very strong drink with a somewhat overwhelming fragrance. It was good in moderation, but its overwhelming sweetness meant that it wore out its welcome for us very quickly... [More]
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Tags:Copenhagen, Roskilde, Denmark, Malmo, Sweden, Europe, vacation, passport, Norwegian Air, Generator Hostel, hostel, public transit, Thanksgiving, November, Christmas, holiday, glogg, Paper Island, Viking, longship, museum, National Museum of Denmark, Viking Ship Museum, Rosenborg, Kronborg, Malmohus, castle, renaissance, Tivoli Garden, Elsinor, Hamlet, William Shakespeare
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