This is an interesting position for me to be in. It seems that last week’s review of Avatar had some people wondering what movie I’d actually seen, since I didn’t instantly fall in love with Pandora, nor did I gas myself into oblivion to be reincarnated as a Na’vi.
…Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but still, a few folks at the Escapist thought I was mistaken in drawing a comparison between James Cameron’s latest money machine and a little film from last year called District 9. They further didn’t seem to get why I considered District 9 a better film, since it too is a sci-fi action drama with a message and a unique alien race never before seen by humans. I was going to fire up District 9 on the Netflix Instant Queue because I couldn’t think of a better way to spend an evening than streaming a film this good directly into my eye sockets, but someone very astute pointed out I’d already reviewedDistrict 9 and while I haven’t given it the ICFN treatment, I’d just be repeating myself for the most part.
But you know what we haven’t had in a while? A cage match.
So let’s toss these two into the mix together and see which emerges victorious. I will attempt to remain as objective as possible for the benefit of all you Avatar fans out there.
I wasn’t sure I was going to be doing this. Reviewing a Chuck Norris film from 1980 involves two problems. One is that diehard fans of the martial arts genre might chalk a lot of the problems with The Octagon up to different standards of production and fight choreography from 30 years ago. The other is that saying bad things about Chuck Norris might have fans of the most memetic badass ever to be referenced on the Internet trying to sneak into my bedroom in black pajamas to practice their neck-snapping techniques on something other than the local squirrel population. However, given that the past week has been somewhat chaotic with moving and changing commutes and ensuring my cats know to attack wannabe ninjas on sight, I really have no choice but to review The Octagon.
Chuck Norris is Scott James, a martial artist and former soldier who’s hung up his nunchuks to lead a more peaceful life doing odd jobs and helping out in the community. His last mission put him in the unfortunate position of watching his best friend get murdered, so it’s no surprise that he’s been trying not to punch people in the face to earn a living. However, his past catches up with him when a wealthy & good-looking woman meets him almost by accident and recruits him to take care of some mercenaries who want her dead. It turns out that these mercs are actually part of a vicious group of terrorists who have been trained in the deadly and ancient art of the Ninja, an art Scott himself learned as a boy with his brother, or possibly just a rival, or maybe he’s an Easternized clone or something. He’s played by Tadashi Yamashita. Anyway, it turns out that this other guy from Scott’s past is behind the ninja, and only Scott can punch, kick and slice his way to the truth, or justice, or the end of the plot at the very least.
Let’s get a little praise out of the way first. Chuck Norris knows action. When the scenes that involve Chuck and a fight happen, they’re engaging. It’s nice to know that this was all practical effects and stuntwork. The lack of wire fu and CGI not only means that these guys worked their behinds off to make the scenes work, it also lends an old-fashioned charm to the action. And the action is pretty much all The Octagon has going for it. When you first see Chuck and realize he is without his beard for this film, you know you’re in trouble. He really could have used that extra fist.
Not that he couldn’t give every terrorist in the world a roundhouse kick to the face without his beard, but seriously, it’s a sure sign of trouble.
This film has a real pacing problem. A long, tedious and overly wordy scene of exposition will cut inexplicably to the training at the ninja camp, which seems like it might be building up to some real tension or at least a bit of action. Then, WHAM, right back to awkward exposition. It makes the film frustrating to watch, and this was after I’d had a few beers in me. Normally at that point I’d be willing to admit that Jumper has some interest effects or that I like Jason Statham and Ray Liotta even when they’re in something like In The Name Of the King while laughing at the badness. I wasn’t laughing at The Octagon. I was too confused to laugh.
At one point, you get to see what good actors and bad actors do in a movie like this. Lee Van Cleef, pretty much the ‘go-to guy’ for classic Western villainy, tries to breathe a little life into his role and the film in general with his smirking gun-loving militia type character. On the other end of things, you have Karen Carlson, and… wow. If you ever feel the need to suffer through a performance that makes Hayden Christensen look like Harrison Ford, look no further. Using the words ‘stiff’ and ‘wooden’ to describe this woman’s work in this film would incur the wrath of corpses and trees alike, and I’ve already got to be on the lookout for ninjas. Her character is an utter contrivance, a walking plot device of the worst kind and she just sucks what little life there is right off of the screen. Those overly long and tedious expository scenes I mentioned that make you forget this is a martial arts flick? She’s in most of those. And Chuck looks just as bored as we feel when he’s in them.
I think Lee was bored, too. I think he got his ear pierced during production just to stay awake.
Speaking of Chuck, if The Octagon is to be believed, there’s a huge echo chamber in his head. When we hear Scott’s inner monologue, it’s in a hushed tone of voice that bounces around between the speakers because apparently the makers of this film wouldn’t know good storytelling if it sat in their laps and offered a happy ending. Instead of showing us the moral conflict of the protagonist through any number of film-making tools, Chuck narrates his character’s feelings, and his tone of voice is so soft, the echo so ridiculous and the accompanying score so melodramatic that you need specialized ninja training just to understand what the fuck is going on. We are told things, over and over again, instead of being shown, and this extremely bad form of telling a story coupled with the tedious expository scenes and inexplicable jumps between locations makes the whole affair almost sickening in its badness.
After over an hour of this crap I was ready to consider the whole thing a failure on the scale of Attack Of The Clones. But at the very end, The Octagon seems to wake up from some sort of ninja-induced torpor and suddenly starts kicking ass. Well, Chuck does, at least. The last twenty minutes of this film has somewhat decent action, with Mister Norris infiltrating the ninja camp and confronting Yamashita-san. There’s a hefty dash of good atmosphere, some suspense and even a little drama. However, when the confrontation is over, so is the movie. It’s an ending so abrupt and inexplicable I can’t even put it into words. Also, when the climax occurs it’s clearly nighttime, but after the fight ends we see Chuck Norris sihouetted against what it clearly a sunset. Did the director think that a sunset and a sunrise were interchangable? Did they believe that fans of Chuck Norris would be too dazed by post-masturbation afterglow to notice the difference? Were they high?
Kyo, here, shows us that the most badass of ninjas have no subtlety whatsoever in their fashion sense.
We also get no real explanation as to how the conflict between Chuck and Tadashi began. We see what we assume is a mini-Chuck and mini-Tadashi being trained in flashbacks, with rivalry and lessons learned blah blah faux brotherhood blah blah I will never forgive you blee. I was reminded of the rivalry between Ken & Ryu in the Street Fighter series of video games, and you know what? I’ve read Street Fighter fanfiction with better characterization, pacing and action than this film, and no I’m not talking about that one where Zangief bends Blanka over a bench press. Or where Cammy is telling Chun-Li she doesn’t need a man in her life and can take care of her own needs. Wait, what was I talking about? Oh, right, The Octagon.
The forum in which I saw The Octagon was perfect. There were lots of friends, beer aplenty, and easy access to the bathroom should vomiting commence. Do NOT watch this film alone. Not even the mighty roundhouse-kick-to-the-face beats-the-odds-with-his-fists kidney-liquefying-glare-delivering power of Chuck Norris can save it. If you can find a way to just watch the last 20 minutes without sitting through the awful first three quarters, that’d be a fun lunch break. But you might still want someone to watch your back. You never know when your viewing of a film involving ninjas that reveals their secret, ancient and deadly training will be interrupted with a ninja sneaking into the room and breaking your neck.
Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.
All right, before I go into detail about Iron Man 2, let’s get the nerd-wank out of the way first: How cool is this? We’re actually going to get a live-action Avengers movie. The threads are coming together more and more and I couldn’t help but gasp like a little girl at the growing implications of it. I know, I know, it’s a couple years away and I had a feeling the thing at the end of the credits was going to be what it ended up being, but still. Holy crap. HOLY. CRAP. The Avengers movie is actually happening. It’s TOTALLY HAPPENING. GUYS. THIS IS GOING TO ROCK SO HARD.
You good? I’m good. Let’s get on with this.
Iron Man 2 picks up right where its predecessor left us, with Tony Stark smirkingly admitting to the world “I am Iron Man.” Six months have gone by, in which Iron Man has stabilized east-west relations, saved a ton of lives and made PMCs think twice about their business decisions. On the surface, Tony seems as arrogant, charming and intelligent as before, but his behavior is growing more and more erratic. The truth is, the palladium that powers the arc reactor keeping his heart from being perforated by tiny slivers of shrapnel from one of his own weapons is poisoning him. Unless he’s able to come up with a solution, the miracle of science that both keeps him alive and powers the Iron Man suit is going to kill him.
“Lightning in a bottle, huh? Let me see what I can do.”
This is really the central premise of the film, allowing director Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. to build the character of Tony Stark. We don’t quite reach the bottom of his character arc, but there are shades of ‘Demon in the Bottle’ here and there. The first act of the movie, for the most part, is just Tony being a somewhat erratic douche, clearly riding high on the tides of his success partially because that’s who he is and partially because he doesn’t want people to know how sick he is, especially Pepper. The scenes between Tony and Pepper have a lot of the same chemistry as in the first film, and contributes to the sequel’s overall success.
The unfortunate side effect of putting Tony’s internal conflict front and center is that the villains of the movie are given secondary status. In the first film, once you got over the idea of ‘The Dude’ being an envious power-mongering weapons mogul, the villainy really wasn’t as interesting as Tony’s growth from carefree genius playboy to self-sacrificing superhero. Here, we get two villains, as we must inevitably in comic book sequels, but in this outing, the reason for their teaming up doesn’t feel contrived in the slightest, unlike the Riddler & Two-Face in Batman Forever.
“Armor? Pfft. Real men need no armor.”
In Iron Man 2, we discover that the aforementioned arc reactor was actually a collaborative project between Tony’s father Howard and Russian physicist Anton Vanko. Anton’s son, Ivan, is very upset that Tony’s done so much with his father’s technology but hasn’t acknowledged the Russian’s brilliant assistance once. So, he miniaturizes the arc reactor himself and equips it with a pair of very nasty electrical whips. The other bad guy in this outing is wanna-be Justin Hammer, a weapons manufacturer who has Tony’s sort of money but none of his smarts, charm or bravery. He wants to try and put both Stark and Iron Man out of business but just doesn’t have the tech to do it. When he sees Ivan in action, though, he thinks he’s found a way to not only catch up to Stark’s level, but surpass it.
As I said, these guys are hanging out in the back seat for the most part, while we’re focused on Tony and how he’s continuing to grow. Integral to that growth are his friends, especially Pepper and James Rhodes. Pepper’s made CEO of Stark Industries which leaves Tony free to be Iron Man, while Rhody tries to convince his buddy to stop shouldering his burdens all by himself. While everybody in this movie does a really good job of inhabiting these comic book characters with humanity and emotional weight, Don Cheadle in particular steps up to have Rhody be the kind of best friend someone like Tony needs – a straight-laced, orders-following guy who still puts his friends first and isn’t afraid to put foot to ass when necessary.
It’s hard to consider a movie a failure when you get to see something like this.
This might seem to be a glowing review so far, but unfortunately Iron Man 2 doesn’t quite measure up to its predecessor. The energy, whimsy and pioneering that set the first Iron Man film apart is somewhat lacking here. Some of the more glaring problems are one or two plot holes, a couple gags that go on just a bit longer than necessary and the shoehorning of tie-ins to future projects. Don’t get me wrong, I love the hell out of Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury, and in the words of MovieBob, the best way to describe Scarlett Johanson as the Black Widow is “HO-LEE…”, but honestly, there’s no need to pick up a metaphorical bullhorn to announce “THE AVENGERS MOVIE IS COMING.” We got that. We’re geeked for it. Tone it down and focus more on what’s happening right now. That said, there’s a gag involving something from an Avenger that, while slightly contrived, still struck me as very funny. I laughed at it hard.
Still, this does stand out among comic book movie sequels as one of the better entries. While it falls short of hitting the mark set by Spider-Man 2, it doesn’t miss by much. It’s fun without being stupid, action-packed without being terribly contrived, and errs on the side of humanizing the characters rather than reducing them to caricatures. I know there are some people out there who felt this was confused, messy or even boring, but I for one never felt bored watching the film. When there wasn’t action, there was good dialog, and when there wasn’t dialog there was character development. It’s not the best writing out there, to be sure, but you can certainly do a hell of a lot worse. It’s flawed, loud and might occasionally be a little annoying, but it’s also charming, fun and awesome – not unlike Tony Stark himself.
It’s totally his boss’ dirty laundry.
Stuff I Liked: The Hammer drones (or “Hammeroids” as Tony calls them) are neat, the moment that Tony has regarding his father about two thirds of the way into the movie, and the interaction between Downey and Jackson. Also, I’m glad we got more ‘Happy’ Hogan, even if I had to smirk at the one scene with him and Natasha in the car, considering Hogan’s played by the director. Stuff I Didn’t Like: As I said, there are a couple holes in the plot, including the Grand Prix sequence of events and the whole Hammer-Vanko-bird thing, and some of the gags don’t quite hit the mark they’re going for. The SHIELD stuff, while not bad, still seemed to be more for the benefit of upcoming projects than supporting this one and thus felt a bit unnecessary. The final confrontation and resulting ‘race against time’ bit felt a tiny bit rushed and a little messy. Finally, while I really appreciated how they did the sequence and I’m aware I was supposed to feel this way, the scene where Tony’s drunk and in the Iron Man suit made me a little uncomfortable. Stuff I Loved: The Mark V suit popping out of the briefcase. Whiplash’s manly first appearance on the Grand Prix track. Pretty much everything ScarJo did with her character. The continued and real-feeling relationship between Tony and Pepper. War Machine. Just… War Machine.
“It’s called ‘being a badass,’ Tony.”
Bottom Line: If you haven’t seen this in the cinema already, you might want to check it out, especially if you’re a fan of the first. I’ll probably pick it up on DVD when it comes out, because as flawed as it is, it’s still a pile of fun and has some great character-building moments and action sequences that are worth watching. It’s not fantastic, and not as good as the original Iron Man, but it’s still pretty damn good.
The year was 1993. When it came to the childhood fantasy of space flight I still clung to with the tenacity of a baboon hanging from a branch over a cliff, two computer games had dominated most of my free time in the previous years. When I wasn’t playing a LucasArts game (back when they were interested in smart & funny adventure games and not just squeezing more life out of Star Wars), I was playing either Elite Plus, the seminal space flight & trading game that had finally made it onto DOS systems, or one of the games in the Wing Commander series, which not only let me shoot at alien invaders with lasers from a space fighter cockpit but also featured a branching storyline with winnable medals and multiple possible outcomes. Even now, to me this seems like a great way to tell a story in a video game. So back when I was fourteen, this blew my fool mind. Two years and several expansion packs after that first foray into character-driven space shooting, I learned of the release of a game called Wing Commander: Privateer. When I found out the premise behind the game, seeing it as a combination of the aforementioned games, I think blood shot out of my nose or something. I can’t clearly recall. Seriously, at the time, chocolate and peanut butter ending up in the same mixing bowl had nothing on this feat of gaming alchemy.
Cue 16-year-old me jumping up & down like I was 10 years younger.
Normally this would be where I break down my thoughts on the title into what I like and don’t like. If I loved it, I’d end with what I love, and if I hated it, I’d sharpen my verbal knives and get to stabbing in the last paragraph. But I can’t do that with Privateer. There isn’t anything I don’t like about the game.
Privateer casts players in the role of Grayson Burrows, a guy just getting his start in the somewhat untamed Gemini Sector of the galaxy thanks to his grandfather leaving him an old, beat-up scout ship. The military organization of the Wing Commander universe, the Confederation, is busy keeping the feline Kilrathi at bay but, for the most part, Grayson has nothing to do with that sort of military drama. Instead, Privateer sets you on the tracks of a pretty standard science fiction plot: “Here’s an alien artifact, go talk to nerdy scientist X on world Y about precursor species Z.” It’s not a world-shattering epic by any stretch, but the simplicity of the story keeps it from getting in the way of the game play.
Clockwise from top left: The cramped cockpit of your starting scout ship, the docking bay area of one of the game’s many ports of call, the fat cat who gives you Merchant Guild jobs and the reasonably hot secretary working for the Mercenary Guild.
Long before Grand Theft Auto brought out the kind of open-world game play mechanics that everybody and their mom would try and emulate, Privateer‘s Gemini Sector was designed to be a very particular kind of sandbox. Instead of sand, dump trucks and toy soldiers, this sandbox is full of stars, asteroids with valuable minerals and space pirates. But don’t expect to need to mine those asteroids like this was EVE Online or even Mass Effect 2. All that hard, boring work is done for you.
The most work you have to do other than not getting shot at by the aforementioned space pirates is keeping track of what sells cheap on which world, and where you can sell it at profit. This is what hearkens back to the days of Elite Plus and even Trade Wars. However, trading is not your only option for earning cash if you can’t get your head around the “buy low, sell high” rule of thumb or if you just find it boring. The Merchant Guild will pay you to act as their own personal Planet Express, and the Mercenary Guild is always looking for pilots willing to expose other pilots to hard vacuum using energy based or mass accelerated means. You can also take odd jobs from fixers in bars or public terminals, or you can just eschew the whole “missions” mechanic entirely the red-hot second you get a tractor beam, and embark upon a life of piracy. While you don’t necessarily need a tractor beam to blow things up, pulling in cargo containers left spinning in the void after you liberate them from their legitimate owners tends to pay the bills a bit more effectively.
Kilrathi blow just as good when you’re a merc as when you’re a Confed fighter jock, but the pay’s better and nobody in a uniform yells at you when you mess up.
Chances are, by reading this far into my review, you’ll know if this is the sort of game for you or not. If you think EVE Online would be improved by removing the floating rocks that require mining and replacing them with bloodthirsty cat-people and religious fanatics with laser guns, or you remember long nights of Trade Wars wondering what your ship might look like outside of ASCII art,Wing Commander: Privateer is going to deliver hours of entertainment. Playing the game without dealing with commodities is possible, as I’ve mentioned, but it’ll actually take a lot longer to get yourself a decent ship that’ll survive some of the later space battles.
The best news for fans of the game or newcomers who might be interested in Wing Commander: Privateer is that it’s not just for DOS anymore. While applications like DOS Box can help you play the old retail version if you really want, some diehard fans recompiled the game with a new graphics engine and real 3D spaceflight. And best of all, it’s free. That’s right – FREE. Gratis. You don’t pay a dime, and it’s available in Windows, Linux and Mac formats. Look up Privateer Gemini Gold for all the details. I fired it up on my middle-aged laptop running Ubuntu and it loaded and ran without any major problems. Considering the sort of experience it delivers and the fact it’s now available without any cost other than some download time and hard drive space, I think it’s very, very hard to go wrong. For both a shot of space sim nostalgia and solid space trading gameplay that works to this day, as evinced by EVE Online, Wing Commander: Privateer doesn’t just delivers the goods, it does so in a turbo-charged spacecraft bristling with ray guns. And really, what more could you ask for?
I’ve discussed Assassin’s Creed previously, though not at any significant length. I couldn’t even call what I said a ‘review’ with any fairness, since I only played a bit of the game. There were a few things I liked about the first game, such as the environments, the framing element of the story and the stealth-focused means of assassinating people pretending to be pious. However, the seemingly shameless padding of always restarting from the top of Alamut, doing a specific set of tasks to gather intelligence and the inevitable rousing of Desmond from his recollections of his time as Altair for some exposition dispensed in the somewhat bland near-future setting. The sequel of that game begins by sneaking up behind those elements, breaking their necks and tossing them from the nearest balcony.
Sam Fisher wishes he looked this good.
Assassin’s Creed II begins with Desmond being liberated from the laboratory of Abstergo Industries where Dr Breen Vidic has held him hostage. Kristen Bell Lucy orchestrates this liberation and takes him to a secret hideout where a snarky British bookworm and a relatively cute tech-inclined girl have assembled an “improved” version of the Animus device that took Desmond back in time to relive Altair’s memories. This time, they need him to enter the persona of a different ancestor, in order to actually learn assassin skills rather than just watching them happen. The ancestor in question is one Ezio Auditore de Firenze, and if I’m honest, he very quickly became one of my favorite video game protagonists of recent memory.
When we first meet Ezio as a young man, he’s a brash, carefree, womanizing and somewhat selfish rich kid. But he’s also charming, handsome, cares about his family and isn’t unintelligent or dull. The setting of the game, Italy during the Renaissance, is incredibly immersive, partially because of the painstakingly rendered cities and partially because of the voice acting. Maybe it’s the talent and maybe it’s the Italian, but the passion of these characters comes through the pixels very easily and pulls the player in almost immediately. The characters aren’t quite as realistically rendered as in, say, Dragon Age, but it’s rare to see the characters in Assassin’s Creed II come down with the “BioWare face”.
The point to this is that Ezio exhibits growth, which I really appreciated. The young man we meet when Desmond first enters the Animus is not the same man who travels to Tuscany and later Venice as he hunts down his targets. Speaking of the Animus, the scenes outside of Italy back in the near-future have been cut down significantly to a few key scenes throughout the game. The nice thing about this, other than spending most of our time with Ezio doing pretty much whatever we like, is that the near-future scenes never feel terribly superfluous, as we learn more about what the struggle between the Assassins and the Templars is like in the near-future as opposed to how it works in the Renaissance.
The story in Assassin’s Creed II also becomes infused with the kind of material that make the conspiracies of Hideo Kojima’s games seem like a badly written episode of Heroes. From his previous over-exposure to the Animus, Desmond has acquired the ‘eagle vision’ used by his ancestors, and found some messages written in blood back at Abstergo by the room’s previous occupant, ‘Subject 16’. Slightly insane thanks to Abstergo’s experiments, he managed to hack the Animus and place clues throughout the landscape for Desmond to uncover, leading him to the ‘Pieces of Eden’ that the Templars desperately want to acquire. These are ancient artifacts of unspeakable power that have been handed down through the ages, and the Assassins and Templars have each struggled to get their hands on them. No further information on Subject 16 is available, but his voice is so familiar…
Possible identities of Subject 16…
Instead of restricting the player to a specific series of tasks that need to be completed before stabbing somebody, Assassin’s Creed II allows you a lot more freedom. The free-running game-play is just as fun and intuitive as the previous title, though some players might be frustrated by sections that actually require precision platforming to do some puzzle-solving. Also, there’s a side-quest involving Ezio acquiring art and fixing up storefronts around his home villa to increase his income, but other than buying better weapons you never really need as much money as you get. While I appreciate the fact that there’s an in-game explanation for money being a non-issue for Ezio, there comes a point where you’re getting a lot more money than you know what to do with, and the best armor in the game is actually available for free if you can stand the aforementioned platform puzzle bits. You don’t even have to touch the villa if you really don’t want to, and don’t mind coming home to a termite-infested flophouse every time you have Leonardo decipher another few Codex pages, as the side missions all pay you money anyway. Of course some of the locals can smell the aroma of flesh florins on you, and wandering minstrels come out of the woodwork to ply you for some with badly-sung ballads they’ll warble at you until you shut them up, be it with coin-tossing or the back of your hand. I’m probably getting a bit nit-picky at this point, but bear with me, I’ve only got one more nit to pick, and that’s the combat.
I appreciate that the game allows us to see how badass Ezio becomes, and since he’s so impressively killative, the combat never feels terribly challenging once you master the counter and dodge moves. While this might seem a little too easy for some, and I for one never felt like Ezio was truly in mortal danger, the player has the opportunity to sit back and try different things when a fight happens. Bored with the sword? Pull out the dagger for a bit. Do you like that poleaxe a Brute is trying to shove down your throat? Grab it from him and hit him in the face. The options available to Ezio do ease the tedium of the combat a bit, and I’d even go so far as to say that the tedious nature of combat works in the game’s favor. While it isn’t hard for the most part, being tedious means a player might not want to waste time with it, opting instead to hire a few hookers as a distraction, parkour themselves into place for an optimum kill or find other creative ways to clear the path between Ezio and his unfortunate target. As an aside, try poisoning one of the guards and then throwing money at the feet of a nearby crowd. Trust me.
Stuff I Liked: The music, voice acting, story elements and controls remain some of the better points of this growing series of games. Also, the ending of the game first has Ezio do something incredibly ballsy and awesome and follows that with some of the best busting of the fourth wall I’ve seen since I read the Deadpool comic book. Stuff I Didn’t Like: I would have much rather gotten more use out of Leonardo’s flying machine or more dialog with Paola or Bartolomeo than have as much to do with the villa as we did. Stuff I Loved: There’s an incredible sense of freedom to be experienced in Assassin’s Creed II that I for one really appreciated. Provided you don’t run around hacking up innocents, you can do pretty much anything you like in the beautiful setting of Renaissance Italy, and that in and of itself is tons of fun. “Everything is permitted” indeed.
Bottom Line: I recommend that you rent the game first if you’re unsure about it. Also, playing the first game isn’t a requirement, but you might have a better understanding of the game and its setting if you do so. Either way, there’s a lot to like about this game, and I consider it worth the money of a purchase.
