Welcome to the Paris fashion show: Home to chic design and fabulous murder.

One of the things I am grateful to Absolution for is that it forced IO Interactive to seriously improve on the sneaking/stealth mechanics of Blood Money. Where we once had this terrible binary of “detected/not detected”, there now exists a ton of states and transitions between those states.

Hitman didn’t have any of the things you’d expect from stealth games, like detection notifiers, searching/suspicious states, distractions, etc until Absolution. For all of the things it did well, this was an area where even Blood Money faltered.

I disliked Absolution when it came out, and frankly I still dislike it. But in a weird way, this episodic Hitman game almost redeems Absolution in retrospect. Without the new engine, gameplay improvements, additional mid-mission challenges, and UI adjustments, we wouldn’t have this game. We might have a different Hitman, but it’s doubtful that they could make a game of this level without first having worked on many of these ideas in Absolution.

So in a weird way, thank you, Hitman: Absolution. You suck, but you also made a good game possible.

Today, we finish the tutorial.

There’s some dispute over whether or not this section can be treated as part of the tutorial. I lean on the side that it is part of the tutorial, because it makes sense if you treat like a further escalation on the Freeform Training.

At the start of the training, the game focuses purely on the mechanical aspects. It introduces the mechanics in ways that make sense and guides players through their first attempt.

Once that’s complete, the player, armed with their knowledge of the first attempt, is given a set of basic tools and told to try the mission again on their terms. Further, they are allowed to reattempt the mission over and over until they are comfortable working on those terms.

This can thought of as another step in that chain. The player has been guided through the level, and then told to go through that same level Freeform-style, but with the knowledge they gained. Now that they have been indoctrinated in the mechanics and thought patterns, the game removes the guardrail of knowledge from previous runs. You know the mechanics. You know what to do. And now it is time to apply those skills in a new, unfamiliar scenario.

However, this is still a relatively small area compared to an actual episode’s map, so it’s not a full-fledged mission. It’s Hitman in miniature, so the game designers still haven’t thrown you to the wolves yet. By the time you’re done with this mission, you should be more than ready to head to Paris for Episode 1…

…which we’ll do in the next episode.

Welcome to the smartest Hitman tutorial IO has ever made.

I really can’t stress how smart a decision this was for the tutorial. While any tutorial can be used to introduce the basic mechanics, the mechanics themselves are only half of a Hitman game.

The other half of teaching someone how to play Hitman is teaching the mentality required to get the most out of the experience. This is something Blood Money failed to understand. It taught the mechanics, but not the mentality, which is why getting lost in the first mission is such a common experience.

But here, in this game, they were much smarter about it. They guide players through their very first mission in a somewhat scripted sequence to familiarize them with the mechanics and the map. Once they do that, they release the guardrails and give the player more freedom. They’re not totally defenseless, because they game provides some basic tools and they are still armed with the knowledge from the scripted sequence. But the game escalates and expects them to be able to practically apply what they’ve learned.

Even better, once player’s finish this “Freeform Training”, the game encourages them to go through again and again until they feel comfortable acting and behaving like a Hitman should. Not only does this help ease new players in, but it also introduces the idea of replaying missions over and over again. Once we’re out of the tutorial, this becomes very important.

But we’ll get to that another day.

Welcome, my friends, to a World of Assassination.

I never went through the tutorial for Blood Money when doing the LP for it, and there’s a very specific reason for that. Said tutorial is so poorly done that it makes my blood boil ever more than the White House mission.

It’s does teach the basic controls and mechanic for the game. However, it does so in such a staged manner, where most of the game elements are introduced outside of contexts where you’ll realistically use them, that it’s quite useless beyond that. It’s very common for people to complete the tutorial mission in Blood Money, and then enter the first contract and have no idea what they’re supposed to do.

This tutorial is different from that. Mechanics are introduced in contexts where players can be expected to make use of them in actual missions. It guides you through the assassination, but not enough to be annoying or to undermine the player’s development.

And once this part of the tutorial is over, it handled training in the best way for a game like Hitman. But we’ll get to that next episode.

Anyone who knows about Blood Money knew this episode was coming, but it is the finale and the natural place to end an LP of the game.

I’m a little disappointed, because I was prepared to go into a large tirade about how difficult this gunfight is, because I died so many times to it.

But then I went and killed everyone the first time, without need to give it a second shot, ruining said tirade.

Like the White House, it’s a cool idea. However, for it to really work, the player needs the ability to mow down all the mooks with little difficulty. I’d probably have given 47 extra defense or outfitted the enemies with weak weapons that don’t do much damage.

Instead, it’s just the usual guards and guns. Players will probably die countless times to it before they get it right.

Fortunately, this is all just a prelude to my next project. See you next time, when we play the new Hitman, which will start on Monday, September 19th.

We finish the worst, and final, mission in Hitman: Blood Money today:

Last time, I wrote about how awful it was that this level runs you through a linear sequence of rooms like the tutorial.

But now, we can finally understand exactly why that is. This level culminates in a set-piece where 47 is forced to enter into a trap and have a conversation with the other assassin that gets nothing done, doesn’t advance the story in any way, and serves no purpose other than to tell the player how “awesome” the target is.

Afterwards, the player has no choice but to follow him up to the roof to engage in a shoot out. And as we’ve already established, the gunplay in Blood Money is terrible. If I hadn’t gotten lucky with that first shot, I would have probably been even more frustrated.

In all likelihood, this finale was probably developed last and had very little budget remaining. However, it still highlights the problem that video games tend to have very poor endings. It left me with a sour taste in my mouth back when I first played the game, and I grow less and less fond of this mission the more I play it.

Today, we break into the White House to stop the president from killing the Vice President:

With the exception of the tutorial, which is only linear so that it can teach players about the game’s mechanics, this is the worst, most linear level in the entire game.

No matter which disguise you use, no matter how stealthy you are, no matter what you brought in with you at the start of the mission, that window is the *only* way to get into the White House proper from the start at the Museum.

In a game that is defined by the number of different, varied, and creative ways any single assassination can be executed, this is a terrible example of what not to do in a Hitman game. And even if it wasn’t, it’s problematic b/c  of the finicky nature of the game’s controls. With correct timing, it’s still largely up to whether the game recognizes that you want to enter the window and starts the animation.

On top of that, there’re so many camera that it is unreasonable to expect players not to get caught by them. That’s not too bad since the evidence tape is really close to the level’s starting position, but it does add an extra layer of frustration to an already annoying level.

It *is* possible to get Silent Assassin in this mission, but I have no desire to play it enough times to figure out how.

Today, we finish up our Vegas activities.

Another thing this mission highlights is the thrill of system/simulation-driven design. Every NPC in this mission has a set routine, and the player succeeds by recognizing those routines and exploiting them, either with disguise. Though he spoke about it in the context of Deus Ex, Mark Brown and Game Maker’s Toolkit did a great video on it here.

Today, we talk about one of the most legendary scenes in Kingdom Hearts 1:

I’ve talked about my feelings regarding how Kingdom Hearts’ combat feels more plausible than that of its sequels way back when I thought I was good at writing game reviews without scores. (Also, holy shit, that was two years ago.) Generally, the more like DBZ fight scenes become, the more I detached I get from the anime/game I’m watching/playing. There’s nothing wrong with those kinds of fights, and they look really cool, but they don’t have the same weight to me.

The other thing we really need to talk about is Kairi’s place in the game.
It’s really common in fiction for female characters to have a dramatically reduced level of agency in the story. Kairi is, unfortunately, not an exception to this rule. As we have seen, she spent most of this game as an empty shell, her heart locked inside of Sora’s for safe keeping.

But after fighting Riku possessed by Ansem, Sora frees her heart and allows her to finally take action. And when she’s able to, we see that she’s not just some fragile flower. She stops Donald and Goofy and absolutely refused to leave until she’s able to go back and save her friend, Sora. (Sorry, Riku) She restores his human form and is even able to use her light to knock back the heartless.

So when Sora doesn’t take her along because it’s “too dangerous” and she would “be in [his] way,” it is a little annoying. I understand the underlying reason is that we’ve already got an established party that’s gotten through the most of the game, but it does feel like some token effort could have been put in.

This gets even worse in the context of Kingdom Hearts 2, but I’m not ready to get into that just yet.

Today, we return to Vegas in order to have a party.

This mission is a great example of how Hitman uses it’s disguise system to create interesting scenarios. Each section of the level is governed by it’s own set of disguises. In a sense, you can treat each costume as a “key” to getting to a different part of the level.

Shame I screw up so bad that I kinda ruin it.