Kanah Belflower

Howdy y'all, I've been...well, I would say busy, but I really just prioritized different things this week. You likely noticed that there wasn't a drop this morning, and that's because I legitimately had nothing to talk about at the moment. Because, to my utter disappointment, I have wasted around three afternoons attempting to get Skyrim's Level-of-Detail to work right on my system with DynDOLOD. I've done this before, many a time, but for some reason I just could not get it to work like last time on this new modding load order. So, I decided tonight to just screw it and deleted all mods that could change the landscape itself, focusing on scripts and quests and so on. LOD doesn't look as good as it could even still, but I'll trudge on. I'd like to do a post about my new Skyrim playthrough and what I'm wanting to get out of it, but that'll be for another day. In other news, Saturday will be my Halloween postmortem. We'll be discussing my f...

Howdy! I haven't been playing games or watching movies as much this week, so I don't really have anything entertainment-related to talk about. But since I'm here, and I have time, I suppose there's never been a better opportunity to just talk about myself. Hi, my name is Kanah Belflower. It's pronounced like cane-uh, but smoother than however you just said it in your head. I'm a 21 year old guy, living in the dead center of the State of Georgia - which is already the heart of the American South. I take three classes per semester at a nearby technical college and I'm on my third year of that right now. It's taking longer than I would have liked, but I prefer the three-class structure because working 45 hours a week at a furniture store takes a good chunk of my time anyhow. I'm primarily a warehouse grunt, but on Wednesdays they'll have me schedule delivery trucks, and on Saturdays they've got me supervising the warehouse. And I happen to be th...

Here we are, the end of Unity Hell. The conclusion to my co-op infused saga of desperation. The water for my weeklong thirst. I don't wish to preamble any longer. Let me speak of my woes, and my triumphs. The Damned UI The user interface for this game, paired with the input changes made for the parkour and combat, gives me a migraine. Especially when coming out of every previous game with a relatively unchanged set of inputs to get me through, only for this new game to bloat my UI with co-op RPG shenanigans and throw my muscle memory out the window. Even after learning the inputs, the interface continues to bug me - why does everything look so sanitized to me? AC1-Rogue all had this techno interface as part of the Animus and present day hook, but the Unity UI seems somehow more detached than ever. The pause menu is cluttered to the nines, holding more random shit that I have never touched than things I actively need to use. I interact with three things on that list: the progress tr...

Dearly beloved, I realized as I sat down to write my finale to the Unity experience that I had erred. In light of a recent game I had started playing earlier this past week, I made the fatal mistake of forgetting about my Sonic review. To make amends, this post will be dropping about twelve hours before the Unity conclusion so that there is a touch of wiggle room betwixt the two. Enjoy :) My First Sonic I have almost never interacted with a Sonic game prior to watching these movies. I know how to play Sonic, I have - in fact - picked up a videogame within the past forty years. But I hardly paid attention to what I was playing, in large part owed to me simply not caring enough for whatever reason or another. I had bigger Pokemon to fry, if you catch my meaning. So, with little to no clue about the nature of Sonic's story or his friends or his history aside from the most surface level, merchandisable stuff, I decided to watch both the Sonic movies from Paramount in anticipation for...

 I had intended for this to be my final thoughts on Assassin's Creed: Unity, after beating the main questline and a large chunk of the side content. However, the last mission of the main storyline has sufficiently whooped my ass up until now - it is 12:15 in the morning on Saturday, and I have yet to beat the game. In light of this, I couldn't very well *delay* my scheduled post...so I came up with a new post idea.  This is a collection of my early, early thoughts on Lay of the Land - a voxel-based survival game, designed in the same vein as Minecraft but with a focus on greater build detail. It is in Early Access, release number 0.8.0 at the time of writing this, and I have a monthly subscription to the developer's Patreon which gives access to updates and new builds. The game has very little tutorialization, meaning that the learning process has been a mix of religiously checking the crafting recipes and following my gut. Let's get started. Lay of the Land (which I...

NOTE - I have not completed Assassin’s Creed: Unity yet, nor am I anywhere close. I have played to the point in the story where Arno has gained his robes, and been given command of the Cafe Theatre. These are my initial thoughts, not a final judgment. Let’s get started. The Movement Coming off Black Flag, Freedom Cry and Rogue, Unity’s parkour looks awesome. But playing with it, as someone who has completed the first few sequences and had a fair bit of time to warm up to it, has had the opposite effect. Moving around Paris with this new system is quite clunky and inconsistent, requiring a level of restraint in order to get what you want out of the inputs and punishing your idiocy if you fail to maintain said restraint. Sometimes I will try to climb up a wall, and accidentally eject backwards off it onto an empty street. Other times I will be in a chase through the streets, desperately racing to tackle a target, at which point I’ll see a parkour opportunity and think that...

I thought that my standards needed a tune-up because I liked Assassin’s Creed: Rogue when it came out. But the truth is, my standards always needed a tune-up. This game just made me happy. It doesn’t have that Ezio Trilogy rizz, or the standalone emotional weight of Black Flag, but Rogue does something that I can’t help but enjoy: it references everything . If there was ever a game in this series that had it’s hand in every pie, it would be Rogue. You get a version of New York shown off decades before Assassin’s Creed 3, an icy North Atlantic to sail through with your own ship (via Black Flag), a River Valley reminiscent of the AC3 Frontier which you can traverse by land or by sea, and more things to collect and do than you have any chance of completing in a timely manner. There are numerous locked armors, alongside your own hideout in New York’s Fort Arsenal, and each of the three mentioned worldspaces have plenty of Forts and Gang Hideouts to conquer before you can access a region’...

Alright, I decided to talk about Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag - Freedom Cry. I couldn’t stand to handle AC: Rogue without first handling the DLC to Black Flag, it just didn’t feel right. So, I’ll talk about what I enjoyed the most about Freedom Cry by itself, and in comparison to Black Flag. The Rebellion meter is a feature that took crew recruitment missions in Black Flag and turned them into a thematic, interesting story mechanic. In Black Flag, you could acquire crewmates by freeing people from oppressive soldiers, saving shipwrecked sailors, capturing ships and so on. But the only real benefit of this was that your crew count would increase, which made it easier to board ships in the ship combat sections. Freedom Cry takes this concept and expands it; now, rather than freeing people for the sake of expanding your ship’s crew, you can help to free slaves. Whenever you free a group of slaves, they are added to one of three separate manpower counts: there is the ship’s crew, exac...

I missed Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag. I played it on Xbox 360 when it first came out back in 2013; many school nights were lost to the Golden Age of Piracy, sailing the Jackdaw to its next glorious bounty. But somewhere along the line, I completed it. And then I completed its poorly timed follow-up, and then I hit a budgetary wall as neither I (jobless child) nor my parents (employed adults) could afford the Xbox One back then. Thus I played my 360 Slim to hell and back, enjoying what could only have been 1000+ hours of Skyrim with zero mods and not a care in the world. When I did eventually receive the gift of an Xbox One S, the Golden Age of AC had fallen to ruin. I played (and enjoyed) Origins and Odyssey, and I still plan to open my copy of Valhalla back up one of these days, but until this past year I neither owned (nor cared to purchase) Unity and Syndicate. I liked the first game but don’t much love the need for the backwards compatible song and dance on my Xbox One, an...