Assassin's Creed II: Assassination Complete!

I finished! It was totally awesome! Post done! Back to Minecraft! Just kidding, I'm not done, though I do admit I probably would be if the server was up... ANYWAYS...

I'll be trying a more structured system for this one, like I did with Dragon Age way back in the day, because I said most of what I wanted to say in the last post.



For those of you who don't know, Assassin's Creed II is an action-adventure game (what would you call it?) imbued with platforming. It's developed and published by Ubisoft. They're not one of the huge publishers, but they're one of the bigger ones and they've got quite a few game development studios. This one was made by the Ubisoft Montreal team, and they've got others all over the place. (Check out the Wikipedia page. So many!) The first game was pretty good, receiving solid reviews (81 aggregate on Metacritic.), but was critiqued mainly for its annoying and unrealistic stealth system and incredible repetition.

Does Assassin's Creed II get past these issues and become a much greater game? What do you think? Read on and find out!



Gameplay

I climb up the rear of a building, finding and reaching for handholds in the facade. I reach the top in mere seconds, and begin to slowly make my way towards the other side. A guard on patrol begins to turn around, but falls to the ground as I fling a knife to his gut. I continue on, reach the edge, and look down towards my planned targets. There they are, four knights guarding the entrance to a codex page bearing untold secrets. I leap towards the edge, and fly down like an eagle swooping to the ground to catch its prey, and smoothly kill two of my adversaries with my dual hidden blades. The other two look up and begin to shout in alarm, but their voices gurgle and fail as my blades reach their throats. I enter the building and retrieve the treasure, now mine for the taking!

Yes, you can really do that. No, it's not a setpiece. In fact, you can do that literally dozens of times in the game! The combat in the first game was pretty neat, aided by the innovation of the free-running that is the series' signature. It's even better in this game, with many more choices for weapons, ranging from many simple swords, to short, brutal knives (you can use a cleaver), and massive hammers. There's even a metal cestus you can use. (A cestus is basically a really heavy metal glove you use to hit people with. Not as lame as it sounds...) You can also buy armor, with four different suits for sale and a fifth available to earn. The combat system is also much deeper than the first game, with most of the abilities you gained in the first game available from the start, and more learned as you go through the game. (Ironic, considering how most games have to take away the stuff you learned in the previous games, and in this one you're playing as an entirely different character!)



The biggest difference though, is in the platforming. It's enough better that there is an entire section of the game (6 dungeons, basically.) devoted to platforming. Let me tell you, those were my favorite parts of the game, bar none. It's just so fun, swinging and jumping from beam to beam, rising higher and higher towards your goal. It actually feels like you're doing something other than just holding the stick down, like it does when you're climbing. The interesting thing about this is that it's mostly just polish and level design. I can only think of two new abilities off the top of my head.. wait there's a third... anyways, the first is a high jump when you're wall-climbing, allowing you to climb walls with longer gaps between hand holds. The others are variations of wall jumps, one where you jump straight out from where you're hanging on to a wall, and the other that's more like classic wall-running: run towards the wall and kick off it to the side when you get up there. That last one in particular looks really cool!

Those make a relatively small difference, though. The real kicker is the incredible level design. It appears that Ubisoft Montreal learned a lot from the first game! The roofs are no longer flat, but it doesn't really matter as the simple free-running and climbing is much smoother now. They seem to have done a lot of polishing with those mechanics in this game, as you're more likely to go where you want to go. It's also much easier and faster to get up onto a building without just climbing up the side because of all the crates on the street and beams and lamps and balconies on the sides of the buildings, often forming a path that you can jump up almost as fast as you could run on the street below. The only issue with this that it seems contrived sometimes, but it's not that bad and helps so much it doesn't really matter.

The last addition is an upgrade system. You get a villa early on in the game, and you earn money and discounts at stores by upgrading the town you protect. These improvements range from a brothel and barracks to upgrades to the four kinds of stores in the game: Blacksmith, tailor, doctor, and artist. These improvements, along with items of all kinds, including the tons of collectibles, increase the value of the town, increasing tourism and in turn your income.

Speaking of collectibles, there are a lot. Way more than the first game, with its hundreds of flags. (Those were so annoying...) There's one set that come with puzzles and unlocks this really, really freaky video (glyphs), one set that you get by going through those platforming sections I mentioned that unlocks that armor set I also mentioned (Assassin's seals), one that unlocks a couple of items (including the last weapon you were looking for. Oh and it's the feathers), one that just gives you money (statues), and more that just give you more money.. but they're chests, so they're supposed to. The chests are also the only ones that don't net you achievements.


So, in short, they incredibly polished the game, added some new features, and upped the ante for the collectibles. These all help make the game the much better game that it is. On to the next section!




Visuals and Sound

The first game was praised for its visuals. It had sweeping cityscapes, and probably the best building design of any game I had seen. (Kind of important, since you were climbing up the sides of them so much!) Everything but the facial animations, plus some bad clipping issues, was incredible. (Clipping is when two objects go through each other when they're not supposed to. For example, when a cape goes through a leg.) The sound wasn't spectacular - it had a pretty good soundtrack, but the ambient sounds weren't the best in the world.

Assassin's Creed II doesn't improve greatly on these. The soundtrack is phenomenal, I admit, and the water is pretty neat -- important in Venice, I would say! Also nice that it doesn't act like quicksand or pools of acid when you even touch it, like it did in the first game. Also there's a ridiculous amount of customization for Ezio, and the character models are much, much more diverse. Actually, pretty much everything everywhere is much more diverse.

The biggest difference in this category, though, is the architecture. The cities are modeled after their real-life counterparts, and since Florence, Venice, and Rome are marvels of Renaissance and Gothic architecture, this is reflected in the game. Some of the buildings are just breath-taking. There isn't one tower that's just massively taller than the rest of the entire city, like there
tended to be in the first, but there are plenty tall enough to see large swathes of the much larger cities, and man does that look cool!


Story

Now we get to the tricky bit. The story was fairly simple in AC1: you're Altair, an assassin in the Third Crusade who breaks the assassin's code, is demoted to an apprentice, and you have to work your way back up to master assassin by doing the tasks assigned you by your master. You do, and gradually an evil templar plot to take over the holy land (Jerusalem and surroundings, basically), with both Christians and Muslims in on it, and eventually you discover the leader of the plot and kill him. It's obviously much more complicated than that, but that was the basics.

Simple, right? Wait, there's something else: you aren't actually Altair, you're Desmond Miles, his descendant by blood who is being kept prisoner by the Abstergo Corporation, the current face of the Templars, who are trying to find an ancient treasure by going through Altair's memory, hidden in Desmond's DNA, by using a machine called an Animus.

At the end, you find the artifact, Abstergo finds out where all of them are, and something very strange happens to Desmond. He gains Eagle Vision, one of Altair's abilities, and ends up seeing some very, very strange stuff.

Yes, I made that in Minecraft!

This stuff is explained... mostly... sort of... in the second game. Which is just as strange. Of course, Desmond end up joining up with the modern assassins and becomes quite awesome himself, but the story line while you're in the Animus 2.0 (assassin version.. looks so much more comfortable!) ends up being very, very strange.

At first, Ezio is just some kid whose male family is wrongfully executed and vows for revenge, learning the assassin arts in order to kill the ones responsible. He does so, killing some very lame, one-dimensional not even interesting characters in the progress (worst backstep from AC1), but one of the side-quests yields an extremely freaky video, and the very final part of Ezio's story is one of the freakiest things I've ever seen... not to mention putting a very interesting light on a lot of things. The problem is, it's so hard to make sense of it I still don't know what happened, and I finished it several days ago.

Basically, the in-Animus storyline is more about Ezio than the bad guys (I am Ezio Auditore da Firenze, and I am an Assassin. On the back cover, and so, so epic.), but the main, overarching storyline is interesting, but confusing and weird as anything you'll ever see. We'll have to wait until ACIII, or maybe the upcoming Brotherhood, to find out what everything meant.

Conclusion

Assassin's Creed II is one of the best action-adventure games I've ever played, miles ahead of its predecessor, and I'd say the second best implementation of platforming out of any modern game, behind Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. That's just a guess, and ACII may even be ahead. Mirror's Edge would be second, or maybe even first, but it didn't quite work as well as advertised... and it was the main focus of the game, which is actually a bad thing in my opinion. Anyways, you really should play this game if you can. It may not be a buy, as the main reason I would play it again is to get a second crack at deciphering the incomprehensible story.


So, have fun! Also, I'm going to make a snazzy new Review pic, so look for that soon.

And my PS Move post will be coming early next week.

Minecraft!

So, the reason I haven't done the ACII review, or, well, pretty much anything lately, is because I've been playing Minecraft. If you haven't heard of it, it's an indie game being made by one, count 'em ONE guy. The main game is in Alpha phase (before Beta.. kind of...), but there's another version, free, that has the main idea of the game and nothing else, called Minecraft Classic.

My very first creation, at the very bottom of the map. It's gold, now, to fit with the gold city that I and a few others made down there.

That main idea is building. With blocks. Like, 16-bit blocks. It's like playing with Legos, but with less parts, less room, less stimulus (depending), and a lot. more. BLOCKS! You start out with a pretty bit randomly-generated map with trees, caves, hills, and rivers, are given an inventory of blocks to use, and set loose. You can make anything you want with the fairly diverse library of blocks.

But that's the single-player, and it can get awfully lonely out there in the black. (Kudos for those who get the reference that I suddenly had the urge to use.) There are multiplayer servers, quite a few actually, ranging from a dozen or so to 10 times that. I picked the biggest one I could find, on purpose, and it turns out for a very good reason.

It's amazing. Like, seriously awesome. Like, this next picture is only one of more than half a dozen worlds (albeit one of the better ones.)

The Zone2 world, with opposing Red and Blue castles. These are huge, BTW. Those little green dots, prevalent on the right side? Those are trees. Like, 5x5x10 (WxLxH), trees.

The way they manage to keep these worlds so nice and tidy is through a rank system that only allows certain ranks to build on certain worlds. There are only one or two that guests can build on, and these become crowded, busy, and annoying awfully fast. Not to mention full of griefers messing up your awesome creations.

There's a Museum, full of the most awesome sprites you'll ever see, the Zone2 I showed above, with opposing red and blue castles, an entire world for building the above sprites, and an Enterprise world with most of an USS Enterprise that actually fills the entire world.

One of my better creations, fail-modeled after the Spiral Minaret. Except for the cross.

The community is really awesome, too. The veterans (or relative veterans, anyway), are glad to help out a confused newbie, of which there are many, and it's not hard to find people willing to help you with a particularly large and time-consuming project - sometimes too willing. You work on your creations, submit them for review by the admins, and if it's up to snuff and you've played enough time, you get promoted, allowing you access to new worlds and sometimes new abilities (The most important one I know of is making water. You can swim up water, and it doesn't flow, so you can make "elevators" out of water) and admin rights, like kicking people.

Speaking of kicking people, this server does have an issue with griefers, which are people who go around messing other people's stuff up - usually with swastikas. You know, the Nazi symbol? (Well, mostly. The Nazis modified it a bit.) The higher-ranked people are pretty strict about this (Their stuff gets messed up too!), and you seldom see ten minutes go by without someone being kicked. Repeatedly, usually. The admins aren't afraid to ban people, either.

The Enterprise I mentioned. Not 1:1, but still HUGE!

That's just Classic, and absolutely free, too! That's not even talking about Alpha, where it starts getting even crazier! Imagine the capability to build all of these, but with limited resources you must mine for and determine how to create from basic materials, when at night you're under attack by monsters! I haven't actually played it yet, or even purchased it ($13 U.S, I believe), but from what I've heard it's hugely addictive. One article I read compared it in units of addictiveness (Pongs) to being like 100 times as addictive as WoW. (Shamus Young on 20-sided, if you want to know. Specifically, here)

So, yeah, it's awesome, and if you want to play go to http://minecraft.net , and the site for the server I play on is http://team9000.net. (BTW, the server is down right now, which is why I'm not playing. Will edit when it goes back up. Probably.) Oh, and I'll also tell you all about them, since I just love bragging about my own stuff!

At first I was completely lost, and I went down to the bottom of the map and made that Welcome sign, and came up with the idea to make an underground city. Well, I told someone else about the idea, and the following was the result.

Neat, huh? BTW, the one on the left is full of non harmful lava, and that blue pillar next to it is one of those water elevators I mentioned.

That was just the beginning. We made 4 or 5 rooms behind that gold there, none of them small, and all of them completely coated with gold, except for the white signifying the connecting tunnels and stairs. The last one was a fairly neat church with pews and flower beds (There's flower blocks) and a couple of crosses. Behind one of the crosses ended up what looked like a Nazi shrine, the best grief I've ever seen. Wouldn't even have been able to tell if it hadn't been for the upside-down cross he left behind. Someone else removed the swastika. I made a massive sign pointing to the entrance, and a gold road with metal (I suppose it's silver) lining it.

Then I started messing around in the same map, with the result of this triforce, complete with signature (I put it on the tag wall at the spawn point, too. I think it got griefed, though. Should still have a picture) For those of you that are curious, each of those triangles has a base of 15 blocks.

Bit egotistical, you think?

Then I made the tower that's pictured up in the main post. During the middle of construction, they refreshed the guest world (They make new guest worlds periodically when they get full, but they leave the old ones so they can move anything particularly spectacular. You can still edit the most recently archived world, so I just finished it and moved on.), so I didn't have much company here.

After that I just got bored for a while, I'd thought of some stuff to build but it was going to take a while so I decided to wait until I got promoted (which should be happening fairly soon now. First one doesn't take much, I've heard.) to build it. Eventually I thought of something relatively easy to build that I already had some experience doing, and this last one was the result.

My latest creation, and my favorite, just above the tower.

It's a 4 sided pyramid with Triforces for sides and a huge Master Sword in the middle. (Seriously, it's like 7 or 8 blocks high and your dude is only 2 blocks high. Really hard to make something small detailed here, with pixels half the size of your character!

That's all for today, I hope you enjoyed it! I'll do my best to do that ACII review tomorrow, and I've got a PS Move impressions post in the works for sometime... maybe tomorrow, if you're lucky! (I got personal experience at Sam's Club a week or so back.)


*edit* I was promoted pretty much as soon as I logged back on! :) Now I can build on the cool worlds (Literally, cool. Means that cool rank and above can build there.)

The Aldowyn's Musings Podcast Ep. 2: Halo: Reach, SMB's 25th, and more!

In Episode 2 of the aldowyn's musings podcast, Aldowyn, Abujaffer and DarkPC talk about Super Mario Bros. 25th anniversary, Civilization V and the possible return of PC Gaming, Playstation Move, and Halo Reach

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Assassin's Creed II: First Impressions

Today I'm talking about Assassin's Creed II. The first one is one of the two (yes, that few) titles that I have for my 360 that I got sometime last year, because it looked really cool. (Honestly, the AC1 cover is really awesome. I should post a pic of the drawing I did of the creed on the back, with the Assassin's symbol.)

Anyway, it was a good game, but nothing special. Among it's myriad drawbacks were incredible amounts of repetition, unrealistic level design (seriously, those rooftops are literally meant for running around on!), annoying sequences back at Abstergo, and really, really bad AI. Of course, the idea was absolutely awesome, it's the best usage of platforming in a game I've ever played, and possibly seen. Uncharted 2 probably outdoes it, but not by much.

They fixed almost everything. It's just... awesome. ACII has more depth than any action game in recent history: collectibles everywhere, and I do mean everywhere, these really awesome platforming sequences (my favorite part), much, much better pacing and overall story, a whole bunch of new abilities, weapons, and things to customize, and characters that are actually interesting and likable.

First: collectibles. The flags from the first game have been replaced with feathers, of which there are only 100 in the entire (huge!) game, but that's only the beginning! Another minor one is treasure chests. There's 330 of them, and they can have significant amounts of money, but you get more for completing the main storyline and there's no achievement for them. There are also two main side-quests involving collectibles (main meaning hey, they actually have story! Interesting story, too...), the first of which is finding these glyphs left by Abstergo's previous prisoner, known as Subject 16. There's several different kinds of puzzles you have to solve. I haven't finished this one yet, and I have no clue how it's going to turn out. The next one, and my favorite, is the Assassin's Tombs. These are platforming masterpieces unlike anything I've seen. They get steadily more and more complex, from crossing the rafters of a church (harder than it sounds) to a 4-part discovery that.... I haven't finished yet. Still awesome, though. The final one (I may have missed some) are codex pages written by the first game's protagonist's, Altair, that, when decoded, allow you to increase your health or gain new weapons. (One of the first: Double hidden blades. AWESOME!) Oh, and the guy that decodes these codex pages and makes the equipment is none other than Leonardo da Vinci. Who is also awesome. More on that later.

Slightly related is the upgrade system. You use Florins (money) to buy all sorts of things, from weapons and armor, to new shops at your villa (technically it's your uncle Mario's.), and paintings. This system is surprisingly deep, with the ability to upgrade all your different shops, increasing the town's value as well as giving you discounts, and renovating the town with everything from brothels to barracks to churches, which also increase the value of the town. The town's value determines how much tourism you get, and thus how much money you earn. The money is put into a chest every 20 minutes, but you have to come get the money every hour and 20 minutes or it's lost. The only reason I can think of for this decision is to remind people that they really do need to come upgrade the villa and buy armor and stuff, which is actually kind of brilliant--if they did it on purpose.

Oh, and I want to talk about the weapons, and then the combat. There's so many weapons this time around! There's two kinds, swords and small weapons, analogous to the sword and knife from the first game, and there must be well over a dozen of each, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. You can also disarm enemies and use their weapons, which is awesome to the point that you can easily win an entire fight just be disarming enemies and killing them with their own weapons ad nauseum.

The entire combat system is also considerably deeper. Along with the disarm move, there's also a strafe move that can be really cool if used right. One time I was fighting one of my main assassination targets and his guards, and, after I killed his guards, I just sidestepped around his attack, ended up behind him and stabbed him in the back. That move is pretty hard to accomplish, but it looks absolutely awesome when you pull it off.

The pacing is much steadier this time around. The main storyline isn't so sharply split into investigations and assassinations, but there are pros and cons. The build-up is much more enjoyable, with a lot more story, but the actual assassination tends to fail to distinguish itself from what happened before. I kind of miss the main assassination missions from the beginning, where you use all the information you gathered to find the best place to strike, and then go and carry out your plan. The enemies don't seem to get enough time in the lime-light either-- the story tends to focus on the people helping you accomplish your goal, instead of why your target is so evil. There are exceptions, and these exceptions are marvelous, but sometimes it's just a little anticlimactic-- probably my least favorite change from the first one. What I would have done is just made the build-up sequences more interesting forms of the ones from the first game, instead of random-seeming thefts and interrogations like the first game.

My last topic tonight is the characters. The total of likable characters went up from 0 (ok, Malik was pretty cool sometimes. Probably the most fleshed-out of the characters.) to 3. There are two new characters back in the real world, along with Lucy (who gained several levels in awesome) helping with the project, and both of them are pretty cool. Shawn is this British guy who investigated his way into finding out about Abstergo, and the assassin's picked him up before they could off him. At first, he seemed like just a jerk, but after a while he turned into that awesome British jerk kind of guy. The other one, Rebecca the Animus 2.0 tech, is less awesome, but still cool.

Finally, there's da Vinci. So cool. He's just so eager and nonchalant, going about building all these awesome inventions. He comes off as fairly innocent sometimes, but is occasionally surprising. I'm not quite sure why I like him so much, but I do. And I'm sure I will more once I get to test out his greatest invention...

Anyway, Assassin's Creed II is awesome. They've fixed almost everything about the first one, come up with a bunch of new awesome things, and put it all together seamlessly to make a really, really awesome game. Sign me up for Assassin's Creed III!

I should finish it sometime this week, and look for a more traditional review a little bit after that. Early next week, perhaps. Oh, and don't forget to listen to the Halo: Reach podcast that should be up fairly soon! (It's supposed to be up, I'm not quite sure what happened.)

The Origin of Aldowyn the Wanderer

So, here's the origin of my D&D character, Aldowyn. He's a 25 year old half-elf sorcerer, with good INT and CHA ability scores and a really, really bad wisdom score. (4, if you really want to know.) I'm going to try to do a series of posts on his adventures, and this is the first. We haven't played any of this, it's just an intro so the DM can learn about my character and figure out how the PCs end up together. That's why the end is a little shaky, there's no story to put there yet!

______________________________________________________

The Origin of Aldowyn the Wanderer

I was 13 when it happened, when I was abandoned to my fate – maybe 9 or 10 in human years. My mother was an elf, the widow of one of the village champions who had died in an orc attack, decades before I was born. She had never remarried, and left the village for some reason I never discovered – to find her purpose in life, maybe, I don’t know. When she returned, she had a human husband and carried a baby beneath her heart, ready to give birth any minute. My father, that human, left as soon as I was born, leaving me nothing but my name as his legacy.

My mother tried to pretend nothing had changed, that I had just appeared in the woods one night, and tried to protect me from the discrimination of the rest of the village. In truth, the rest of the village treated her differently, to say nothing of me.

I was a bastard -- a half-elf, with a human father, and elven mother, and most of the adults treated me as one. The children, however, remained innocent, ignorant of the bigotry and racism of their elders. They saw me for who I was. With my natural affinity for people and my problem-solving skills, I quickly became their informal leader. We often adventured into the calm woods surrounding our village, foraging for nuts and berries, sometimes just to explore. All in all, it was a good life.

Or it was, until disaster struck me for the first of many times. I was only in my eleventh year, and I do not care to elaborate on the events of that day, even those that I haven’t blocked from my mind. All that needs to be said is that, after all that transpired, a child lay dead, and I was to blame.

I was very nearly stoned out of the village, but my mother and the chief, who had never really paid attention to me, intervened on my behalf, and in so doing saved my life. I know not why he did this – he had locked himself in his hut with an article he had possessed as long as I can remember, and when he came out, he knew exactly what was happening and proclaimed that I must live.

So live I did, though nothing was the same after that. The adults treated me worse than ever, and the children were almost afraid of me after the events in the forest. My mother tried to take me in, but I became almost wild, venturing into the woods alone for days at a time, contemplating my situation and praying for guidance to our god, Corellon Larethian, the Protector. Life passed.

The day it happened, I was out in the woods. The usually bright and cheery woods were dark and quiet, as if the forest itself was afraid of something. I had retreated into the woods because one of the older children had insulted my father and I. After dark, as I was preparing to sleep for the night, I heard a crackling noise. I looked towards the source of the noise, the village.

It was burning. The red glow stained the sky; the smoke obscured the sun. I rushed back, not knowing what I could do, but knowing I must do something to save the village that had succored me in my infancy. I slowed down as I neared the village, using my meager skills to hide in the forest, and saw for the first time those who were destroying my life.

They were drow, dark elves of the Underdark. I had never seen them, but they were unmistakable with dark gray, almost black skin, white hair, and malevolent red eyes. There were over two dozen of them, warriors, rangers, and mages with great evil beasts at their side. My eyes were drawn to one in particular, leaving the hut of the chief. He had the look of confident arrogance, and almost radiated the feel of magic. At his hip hung a cruel-looking scimitar, visibly crackling with electricity. A huge cat prowled at his side as he strode through the village, casting down any of our warriors who dared oppose such a powerful adversary. The last thing I noticed, just as he put it away in his pack, was the chief’s artifact. The drow leader, for such he was, glanced through the woods, and I jerked down, making so much noise I thought a deaf man could have heard me, but his eyes just passed over my hiding place.

I ran. I ran like a coward, no longer thinking of saving the village, just fleeing from that terrible mage with his piercing eyes and otherworldly magic. Before long, I tripped on a tree root and fell on my face. I quickly rolled over, only to see one of the drow warriors standing over me, looking almost as surprised as I felt. I yelled, feeling something stir deep within me, saw a flash of light, and the dark elf fell back, dazed. Not understanding what had happened and barely believing my good fortune, I leaped up and continued my flight. Nothing else of note happened, and I escaped the forest unscathed except for a few scrapes and bruises. I followed the moonlight and starlight to a nearby human town, where I found a corner in a stable and stayed out the night.

The following morning when I woke up, I thought it had all been a terrible nightmare, until the stench of the human’s mounts reached me. It all came rushing back, and with it came a cold, terrible feeling. Right there, in the muck of the stable, I vowed that I would discover who it was that attacked my town and killed my mother. I thought of my father, and reasoned that he would share my thirst for vengeance—as well as satisfy my own curiosity concerning who I was.

Thus my journeys began. I wandered from town to town, seeking information on the dark elves and my father. I learned little, although I did acquire some knowledge of my newfound powers of sorcery. I also acquired a familiar, a raven I named Nighthawk, who became my companion through out my travels.

Years later, as I was becoming disheartened, I fell in with a group of adventurers, on a great quest. Little would I know how this quest tied into my own, and how both would come to shape my life -- and indeed, that of the world.

September Update

Hey everyone, I'm sorry it's been so slow this month. School is nuts, and I've been trying to start up a few things. There's the podcast we've started (DarkPC posted the link to the intro in the last post), and I've been trying to start up a D&D group with a few friends. I've also been actually playing some more video games lately. I was working on Ocarina of Time and Link's Awakening, and I finished Assassin's Creed for the second time, getting all my achievements back. I've borrowed Shadow of the Colossus (awesome game, btw) and FF Tactics Advanced 2, so I've been playing those, and I'm going to borrow Assassin's Creed 2 from a friend.

I'm going to try and get a job at Gamestop, at least for the holiday season. It just fits so perfectly with me... if I can get it in between homework, this, and my actual gaming.

That last bit isn't just video games, either. We're pretty serious about that D&D group. I even wrote up a pretty awesome origin story for my character, which will be the post immediately after this. It'll hopefully be the first of a series about the exploits of my character. I'm hoping to get in a session every week or so, and it should be pretty awesome!

Oh, one last thing. I'm going to try to get published (and paid by!) on the Escapist Magazine. They take articles from the community, and there's some issues coming up that I could come up with a pretty good article for, so hope I manage that!


So, you have the podcast, that new series on D&D, a bunch of random stuff like I've been doing, and maybe some other stuff to look forward to! It's been a crazy month, but it looks like I'll have some more time to work on the blog, so, I'll see you soon!

The Aldowyn's Musings Podcast!!! Ep 1: The Intro

The First episode of the Aldowyn's Musings Podcast is Up!

A Very Quick Intro with DarkPC and Aldowyn!

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@Aldowyn, @Abujafer, and @DarkPCTV

Shoot us an email to aldowynsmusings@gmail.com

9/23 Update: We are now on iTunes!!!!!! Click The Link! >> Aldowyn's Musings Podcast on iTunes!

Directions to download on the Website: Right Click then Click IE: Save Target as, Chrome, Firefox: Save Link As, Safari: Download Linked File

Click on the post title to head to the page with the podcast, and it will be available on iTunes as soon as its approved by Apple!