The 2025 Desert Island Video Game Draft

[hrdboild]

R13.P1 (#145 Overall)
ASSASSIN's CREED IV: BLACK FLAG
​

Format: PS4
Year of Release: 2013
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Genre: Stealth / Open-World
Why I picked it: Pirates!

Yo ho! Yo ho, a pirate's life for me!

This may be the sixth installment in the very popular free-running / stealthy-stabby Assassin's Creed series but I will only ever refer to it by it's proper title : "THE pirate game". If this is the sixth installment, you may ask, then why is there a 4 in the title? Good question! Ubisoft played fast and loose with their math, giving some releases numbers and others only subtitles or in this case... why not both? To their credit, they seem to have realized their mistake because they just dropped the numbers entirely for every AC game since. The good news is you don't really need to know anything about Assassin's Creed to enjoy what they've cooked up here. Yes there is a plot connecting the main story missions together but it's all pretty silly and the less said about the modern-day framing device the better, if you ask me. Come for the pirates and I guarantee you will have a great time.



Gameplay in AC4: Black Flag is divided between on-land portions of the game where the direct lineage to Assassin's Creed games of the past is more apparent and naval exploration portions of the game where you have free reign to sail your ship, the Jackdaw, throughout a map of the Caribbean and engage in naval combat with other ships you encounter. Stealth missions will see you tailing particular characters and eavesdropping on their conversations, infiltrating enemy compounds to assassinate targets, and in one particularly memorable "naval stealth" sequence, navigating the Jackdaw through a misty marsh at twilight before disembarking and continuing the mission on foot. It's the closest we'll probably ever get to a playable version of the original "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride at Disneyland and it is completely awesome!

When it's time to mix it up in naval combat the level of control you have over the whole encounter is seriously impressive. After you've maneuvered your ship into position to unleash a full broadside, you'll need to brace for incoming cannon fire until you've weakened your opponent's ship enough to begin a boarding operation-- The main attraction! Out come the grappling hooks and your crew of ne'er do wells spill over the side to engage in hand to hand with or without you. Leap into the fray and you've got twin swords and twin pistols with which to finish the job. Or for a more hands-off approach, you have the option to fire the deck guns to take out the opposing crew or snipe at them from the rafters. This could be a whole game onto itself and the best part about the way these naval sequences are handled is that there's no break in the action -- you can run across the rooftops in Havana down to the docks and right onto your ship, set sail for a new destination, fight a sea battle or two on the way, and then disembark to trade in your hard won loot for some upgrades and a tankard of grog all without an immersion breaking load screen.



Assassin's Creed has always been a game series that relishes in verticality and while no single city in this game is all that massive (certainly nothing compares to the likes of Paris and London depicted in the other PS4 games in the series) some of my favorite moments in AC4: Black Flag involve scaling a stone fortress while dangling precariously above the rocky shore or climbing to the top of the rigging while the jackdaw is docked in a cove before leaping off, spread eagle, to swim my way to shore. The Uncharted games do similar sorts of things but the fluidity of movement here is tangibly superior. And speaking of fortresses, not all naval combat is ship to ship. You can also sack forts and claim them as part of your pirate empire. Pretty much anything you can dream up for your own personal pirate adventure story can be accomplished here.

Down below, at deck level, the views from behind the wheel of your ship as you sail around the Caribbean are frequently breathtaking. Call out for full sail and the camera pulls back to a chase view while your crew of loveable scalawags break out into a full-throated sea shanty. Every time this happened I was delighted -- it's got to be my favorite little atmospheric detail in a game full of them. Make the journey at night, sailing under a glistening moon with a sky full of stars to greet you and one of these silly little tunes might even bring a tear to your eye. Not mine though, I'm the cap'n dammit! That's just a man whisker caught in there, get back to your post!



I fought with the idea of whether I should include this game or not. After falling head over heels (cue Assassin's Creed swan dive...) for this "life as a pirate" simulator back in 2020, when time felt like it stretched on forever and wandering through 18th century Nassau and Havana was exactly how I wanted to spend it, I ultimately got bogged down in the endless side missions as the siren's call of the open-world quest for completion cast a shadow over those sunny early months of exploration. To this day I've only gotten about 2/3 through the main storyline but I do have a rocking pirate outfit, the fiercest ship on the seas, and a chateau filled with trinkets and gold doubloons to show for my efforts. I'm less enthusiastic now about indulging in the blend of history and acrobatic swashbuckling action that the other titles in the series promise --as addictive as the power fantasy of sword fighting combat and parkour can be, it can also get same-y after a few dozen hours. But I'm happy to return to this tale of Edward Kenway and the crew of the Jackdaw periodically, to walk the colorful streets of Havana and to scale my ship's mast and look out at that magnificent ocean to dream the dream of unlimited freedom that is in the heart of every pirate.

 

[Insomniacal Fan]

Crusader Kings II - PC - 2012​

(Placeholder for writeup)

 

[macadocious]

When I was young, I always had the most recent video game system. We were not wealthy, far from it actually. I also never demanded or really remember requesting these items. My mom just got them for us. We had an Atari when I was little, then we got the first Nintendo shortly after it came out, then a handful of years later my mom surprised my brother and I with a TurbGrafx 16 for Christmas in 1989. The colors! The quality of the images, it was like nothing I had ever even imagined. I had no idea that games could look so good. We doubled our bits people, went from 8 to 16. I had no idea what that mean then, but I knew it was better. Unfortunately, the system didn't have the greatest game selections, but there was one that I got obsessed with. Shocking, another platform style game.

Bonk's Adventure

Format: PTurboGrafx16
Year of Release: 1989
Developer: Red Company
Genre: Platform
Why I picked it: OBVIOUS REASONS!


This little large headed Neanderthal would run to the right trying to save a princes and do jumping spin attacks to kill dinosaurs with his head. Thats it, thats the whole game.

 

[hrdboild]

For my next pick, another with the theme of economics and industrialization, but this time in SPACE!

X4: Foundations -- 2018 -- PC

I'm struggling with how to describe this game. Egosoft, the developers, also seem to have trouble doing so. Their YouTube page has several tries at a "What is X4?" explainer video. I'll give it a shot here.

Visually it's a spaceship shooter, inspired by Star Wars, with various ships and fighter craft flying around, pew-pewing each other with abandon. But The spaceship combat isn't really the point of the game, despite all the assets and artwork that visualize it.

The game world is a set of ~150 space systems interconnected by a set of portals. Each of the systems has a cool skybox, some interesting asteroids and/or gas clouds, and maybe some unique ambient theme music. There is an in-game map, but it starts out completely blank, so exploration is part of the game initially. Visiting all of the universe's systems would take hours, but there is a finite quantity, these are hand-designed, so eventually the player can discover everything. And while it's kind of neat to discover new art, the game isn't really an art gallery.
In (nearly all of) the systems there are stations that you can dock with and walk around on. There are traders on board that you can sell space junk to, and some rudimentary crafting stations. At some stations there are consoles to upgrade your vessels with tricked-out equipment. You can take missions with NPCs; some of which are scripted stories that affect the broader universe and deliver a narrative, and those missions will take you across the X universe. But the production value on these quests is very shoestring. The voice direction is... minimalistic. These scripted missions constitute the cinematic aspect of this game, and the presentation is so half-assed that it's clear this isn't the focus of the game.

The stations produce and consume goods, refining raw ore and gas collected from asteroids and clouds, into refined materials, which are transported by freighters from one station to another. The traffic generated by the freighters transiting goods from one place to another make up the majority of NPCs you make up. The buy and sell prices of the various commodities will dynamically change depending on the current supply at the station, if a station's export warehouse is full, then the station will lower the cost to incentivize external freighters to buy from them. If a station is in short supply of a necessary component of the good it manufactures, it will raise its buy price to attract traders on that end. And *this* is absolutely the heart of the game.
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Everything in the game depends on the dynamic economy, and if it breaks down, then the AI freighters and the player will compete with each other to fill shortages and fix it. If you have your eyes on a fancy new gun for your ship, and the local economy is scarce of a component of that gun, then you are simply S.O.L. until you or the AI figures out what's wrong with the supply chain and fixes it. Maybe you need a shipment of exotic resources from across the galaxy, maybe it means patrolling a trade corridor from pirates and hostile factions. Perhaps you need to build your own factory to fill the manufacturing demands of a local system.

To make this work, the entire X universe is continuously being simulated. This has profound consequences. If you take an action like interdicting trade yourself, the consequences can chaotically spiral out to affect the entire X Universe; rampaging evil aliens could wipe out a faction and turn them into grey goo because you decided to pirate a freighter of silicon wafers for your own purposes. There are some game systems that try to stabilize the world, but they can be broken. And it's impossible to predict exactly how the universe will develop over time.
Imagine doing the game design for this, trying to tweak the rules of the game so that the player has a good time hanging out in your fundamentally chaotic game world. Anyway, here are some screenshots of space ships.

This looks fantastic! Thanks for going back and updating with the description and pictures. I'm planning to check this one out whenever it eventually goes on sale.