AC: B TL;DR The assassin recruits are a cool addition, being in one city the whole game not so much, I don't like the npcs anymore
AC: R TL;DR This game feels wrong, but I do rather enjoy making bombs, city is way too small.
There, you happy? Didn't think so.
This time around I'm talking about relationships. Yes, those kinds. Gamers (not recognized as a word by Chrome's spell check by the by) have long had a bad rap when it comes to relationships. The quintessential gamer, as portrayed in most media, is over/under weight, lacks social skills, lazy, is the definition of the word nerd and has never been within 25 feet of a girl if they weren't sitting in class with them. The neckbeard as they have been so coined. And while they do exist, and I have met a few, most of the gaming community is just normal people. The caring father that works 40 hours a week, takes care of his kids then goes online and tags and teabags 12 year olds (fuck that sentence sounds bad) in CoD after the kids go to bed. The suburban mother who got tired of Sudoku and picked up her son's 360 controller only to get hooked sawing Locus in half. The 65 year old retiree who's running the world as a tyrannical Gandhi in Civilization. We're out there and in bigger numbers than people seem to realize.
So at some point you'll probably have a relationship with someone and no matter how long you try to hold it off, they are going to figure out what you're doing staying up until 4am every night, aside from the porn of course. In my limited experience, girlfriends (I would do boyfriend as well, but I've never had one of those so I don't know how that works out, sorry ladies) come in three flavors in terms of their reaction to having some form of gamer as a boyfriend.
1. The Disapproving Mother
They hate your "video games" (I don't know why, but when people say "video games" it makes my skin crawl). They can not figure out what's so fascinating about them and they're mad about how much of your time it takes up, how much money you spend on it and your general inattentiveness to them while you're playing. I had a girlfriend at the time Black Ops came out who was like this. My roommates and I had gotten into Zombies with a passion. She ended up turning off the Xbox when we were at wave 56 because she came over and we were still playing and she was tired of waiting and did not understand what the big deal was, "It's just a game." The relationship did not last much longer.
2. The Casual
They've played some games, probably some console games in their younger years. They might still show some signs of life in iPhone games or something like Bloons or, god forbid, farmville. They have a better appreciation for your gaming habits but are generally rather confused and overwhelmed by whatever you're playing at the time. You've probably tried to branch out to them. "This game is hard/confusing" is a common phrase after the tenth death to some shit talking 10 year old on Xbox Live or the first guard in the first area kills them in a 1 on 1 fight. But at least they have some idea where you're coming from.
3. The Gamer Girl
Full disclosure, I've never actually dated a "Gamer Girl" in the full sense, but I have been friends with quite a few over the years. They're better than you at some games and you're better than them at some. They've been playing for as long as you have and they've put up with more harassment online than you knew existed. But they will support your gaming habits as long as you can put up with the mutual shit talking in any slightly competitive games. And stay away from Mario Party, that's a sure way to kill off any relationship.
I'm seriously not trying to offend anyone or pigeon hole the entire female gender, this is merely my observations from my life as it has unfolded. Please don't kill me.
I started dating my current girlfriend a while ago, but obviously not that long ago since this is a different one than the Zombies story I was talking about. She knew before we started dating that gaming was a pretty big part of my life, which always makes things easier. She falls into the "Casual" segment I mentioned earlier and she's always been supportive and tries not to mess with me too much after an all nighter because I had to kill those assholes in Dishonored. And she even enjoys watching me play some of them. When I was doing my AC marathon, she was very interested due to her love of all things historical in nature. I've tried to get her to play a couple of things with me to some success, but nothing really caught. In her words, "I like video games, I'm just not very good at them."
So for a while, we sat at kind of an impasse. I like difficult games, I always have. I get upset when the "Hard" difficulty is locked at the beginning. She likes games that don't move too fast and don't require overly precise movement or mouse skill. I like Super Meat Boy, she likes Portal. But all you have to do is find one game. One game that you can both enjoy together and that's what we found.
Last week, Steam was running it's Thanksgiving/Autumn/Insert Politically Correct Holiday Season Name Here Sale and something interesting popped up, a game I had lost an entire week to about a year previous, Terraria. It was $3.50 so I bought it, gifted it and when we got back from visiting my parent for the holiday, we started off.
If you've never played Terraria, first you're missing out on something magical and second you might not know exactly what it is. On the surface, Terraria is 2D Minecraft. In the beginning for the first hour at least, you'll be saying "This is the most shameless ripoff I've ever seen." And it's almost true, for the first hour. You are thrown into a harsh and unforgiving game world with the worst tools imaginable and they say, "Go." You build a tiny house out of wood to keep the zombies out and spend your nights crying in the corner of your house making tiny crafting tables and metal forges so maybe you won't die instantly the next time you run into a slime.
But Terraria is more game than sandbox where as minecraft is more sandbox than game. But the most important part about Terraria is it starts slow and scales perfectly until you're doing some crazy things you never thought you'd be able to. At the end of the "game" part of minecraft, you have diamond everything, some good weapons and a shit load of bricks to build random stuff out of. At the end of Terraria, you have a lightsaber, a shark that shoots bullets, wings, rocket boots, a three pronged grappling hook and you walk around in a tuxedo killing 1000 foot long mechanical worms for fun in a world that is constantly changing in real, noticeable ways. Seriously, go play this game.
So I run the server since my computer is overkill to Terraria's humble system requirements, my girlfriend logs in and we spend the first half hour walking around the woods chopping down trees. What she doesn't realize, is that just by walking around and cutting trees she's already learned how to move around with WASD, and how to use the mouse and keyboard at the same time without thinking about it which is an incredibly hard skill to learn if you're new to PC gaming. The first night, we didn't know how late it was until the sun came up and she now completely understands how you can just get lost in a game.
We played for 30 hours the first four days, basically did nothing else with the remainder of our respective vacations. When we started her comments were, "Jumping and moving at the same time is hard." "How do I kill things?", now we've moved on to, "Do we need more ash? I'm going to the underworld for more hellstone so I can just grab a stack while I'm there." "I'm going to go run Eater five times, be right back."
Finding common ground is key. You and your SO might bond over being a medic-heavy in TF2, playing hotseat Civ or maybe you just need to build a castle and dig a hole in the ground together to find it.
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