On my world, it means hope.

Bottom line: I loved this game a lot, despite its flaws. I think of it as an imperfect gem.

Gameplay

By far my biggest complaint with the gameplay is that I hated the beginning 3 sequences with Haytham. I could not care less about Haytham (although I did get a kick out of calling him "douchebag dad" whenever he showed up later in Connor's story). If it was really necessary to make us play as the villain and/or show how Connor/Ratonhnhaké:ton's parents got together, I wished the game could've at least cut down Haytham's section significantly, since a lot of that part felt like I had to run around as an errand boy in order to get the Templars together.

Overall I liked the gameplay a lot. The combat is fluid and dynamic and the sidequests are fun and engrossing. Occasionally I had difficulty with some of the main story missions, mostly because some of the forced stealth/eavesdropping missions were pretty punitive and the AI was occasionally wonky, but nothing was too frustrating. Having played this game along with Black Flag simultaneously, I have to say that Black Flag's controls and HUD felt more streamlined (particularly the weapon selection, Eagle Vision tagging, and enemy map icons), but ACIII's were serviceable.

I have to give a shoutout to the glitches, though. My God, the glitches. I don't really mind cosmetic glitches that are hilarious but don't affect the gameplay, but I encountered numerous glitches that forced me to restart missions. Some examples below:

- During the Homestead mission to rescue Lance, I killed all the guards harrassing him but could not get the next cutscene to trigger. I walked into his burning cart, got stuck (couldn't move out of it), and died, and when the mission restarted everything was okay.
- In sequence 10, while trying to steal the mercenary's clothes without being detected, I kept running into this weird glitch where I would somehow not loot the mercenary's clothes "properly" and be unable to progress.
- In sequence 12, while chasing Charles Lee, in the boat, he just stopped and I couldn't trigger the next part of the memory until I restarted.
- Once, when I booted up the game, something was wrong with Connor's character model and colors kept flashing on the screen in a definite seizure-inducing way.

Also, sometimes the follow-NPC sequences weren't timed correctly and conversations would be cut off by cutscenes before they finished, which was a shame.

I wanted to drop a special note about the end-game pivots/cheats—they're absolutely a blast to play around with.

Story

Once again, I hated having to start the game as Haytham. It felt fairly pointless from a narrative standpoint because the first 3 sequences gave us very little additional context on who Thomas Hickey, John Pitcairn, William Johnson, etc. were.

I really wish the script went through a few more rounds of editing for logic/consistency. Many times I felt like the script didn't explain how characters knew about each other (i.e. I would've liked to see who told Connor about Haytham and what his reaction was, and vice-versa).

It was frustrating in particular because I think the story overall had a lot of potential and the themes (freedom vs. order, idealism vs. pragmatism) were really interesting, but the script didn't really go far enough. I would've liked to see Connor argue back more with the Templars, and they really, really should've kept his moving soliloquy in the game.

I like Connor/Ratonhaké:ton a lot and I'm quite sad that his character still gets short shrift by Ubisoft/certain parts of the AC fandom.

History

My sister pointed out to me that ACIII's take on the Boston Tea Party is flat-out inaccurate (for the real Boston Tea Party, the Sons of Liberty dressed up as Native Americans, there were more of them throwing tea into the harbor, and they weren't being harassed by guards while dumping the tea), which makes me nervous about the accuracy of other parts of the game and disappointed as a history geek.

I actually wish we could've seen more of the American Revolution and substituted Haytham's boring introductory blather with more Revolution battles/conflicts with the Native Americans. My sister really wanted to see the Battle of Saratoga, for example. I also wish we could've seen more Native Americans other than just Connor's tribe, and it struck me how there are almost no Native American NPCs just walking around or doing things in the Frontier, which is a disappointment.

ACIII is pretty good with diversity by video game standards, what with featuring Connor/Ratonhnhaké:ton, his Mohawk tribe, and Achilles, but the game still presented a view of the American Revolution that was disappointingly white and male. It didn't show the women that followed the American and British armies, for example, and it would've been really nice to see figures like Martha Washington (who was known for visiting the Continental Army) and Molly Brant, the Mohawk wife of William Johnson, who helped convince the Mohawks to keep fighting for the British throughout the war.

Comments on Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, Part II.

- Goldhagen acts as though the cruelty shown by the Nazis is unique. Never mind the fact that every war has its stories of atrocity. Never mind that you'll find examples of human cruelty scattered throughout history and even in the present day. No, "German" cruelty was exceptional, and clearly the only explanation for it is that Germans are horrible, horrible people! I mean, people never torture the perceived enemy in war, right?

- For a book whose title has Hitler's name in it, Goldhagen doesn't talk about Hitler at all. Well, okay, maybe he discussed Hitler in the sections that I didn't have to read for class, but Goldhagen doesn't blame Hitler for the Holocaust; he blames the entire German society. But I mean, come on, even if you don't like the intentionalist viewpoint, is anyone going to say that the Holocaust would have happened without Hitler?

- What disturbs me most about this book is its take-home message: the Holocaust was a unique event that came about because of the awfulness of German society. Therefore, the Holocaust will not ever be repeated in human history. Other historical events have already proved that to be wrong.

- I'm not very comfortable with Goldhagen's sources and his use of them. He extrapolates a lot from photos: "Look, Germans are smiling in these photos, that means they approved of the Holocaust!" I really don't think his interpretations are unassailable. Moreover, he uses a quotation from a German policeman to show that the "Jew hunts" were widely talked about and implicitly approved of; he makes absolutely no comment about the fact that in said quotation, the speaker voiced disapproval and actually silenced a joke about the "Jew hunts." In fact, he seems more mistrustful of testimony from the policemen than from other sources, which is just outright bias. Goldhagen also accepts his sources unquestioningly. He talks about numerous anti-Semitic pamphlets that were written in Germany, but he makes no mention as to whether such pamphlets were widely read or how much of an impact they had on popular opinion, or even whether such pamphlets represented a majority of publications in Germany.

It just seems as though Goldhagen throws out or ignores any evidence that is contrary to his thesis, and that's bad historical writing.

Classes end this week, finals end next week, and I just want to go home. The writing bug bit me, and I'm itching to work on the things I want to work on...but I can't, because I have finals and papers. Blegh.

I got rejected from being published by my school's academic essay collection for this semester, which I was pretty disappointed by, so when it finally came out, I snatched up a copy, looking for why my essay (which I actually liked, for once; it was on the Polish resistance under Nazi occupation, a pretty gripping story) got the boot.

First off, I read a creative piece. Did I mention that I really, really dislike most realistic fiction short stories? I swear, almost all of them are about adultery. The story in a nutshell: girl finds bat (the animal, not a baseball bat) in her room. Party in the house. Snot-nosed ex-siamese twins run around and break the girl's favorite Komodo dragon statue. Girl finds her mom (almost) making out with her boss. Twins beat the bat into a bloody pulp. Girl fantasizes about being taken away by aliens. The end. (I don't even...)

Secondly, I read an essay about a Nazi war criminal. Having taken an entire course on Nazi Germany last semester, I thought myself pretty knowledgeable about Hitler and Nazism, but it became clear to me when I read the essay that the author did not do a lot of research on Nazi Germany. Which was a problem when he started asserting that the Nazi party brainwashed the German population (it tried to, but whether said brainwashing succeeded is highly questionable), that Hitler harmed people during his ascent to power (yes, Hitler harmed a ton of people AFTER he rose to power--before that, not so much), and that the Nazis used underhanded tactics to secure popular support (no, not really, especially once you take into account the chaotic political climate during the Weimar Republic--every political party had a paramilitary group, and until Hitler became the chancellor, the Nazi party operated fully according to the letter of the law).

And another, more general thing: I feel that what I learned in high school and from Strunk & White and Orwell is all getting thrown out the window in college. I mean, the grades I get on my essays are fine, but when I look at other students' writing, sometimes it takes me a minute to wrap my head around the kinds of sentences they use. And what happened to the rule "don't use modifiers unless absolutely necessary"? For example, I know what an imperative is; what the heck does "categorical imperative" mean? Also, Orwell (I believe) was the one who said don't use a fancy word when a simpler one will do. College students, on the other hand, love to use fancy words like "aegis," "aberrant," "multiplicity," "triumvirate," etc.

*sigh*

Yes, I am still bitter about being rejected from the magazine. Once I stop being lazy, I will post my essay/ thoughts about the Polish resistance, a story that I think is quite compelling.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_American_internment

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_American_internment

While it's true that the numbers are nowhere near those of the Japanese internment, I think it's high time people realized that internment of German- and Italian-Americans during WWII (/WWI) DID exist.

I was prompted to look this up because I am (was?) part of a weekly informal discussion group that meets to talk about Asian-American experiences, but I'm having more and more reservations about staying--mostly because as time has gone on, the rest of the group is treating Asian-American issues in a more and more politicized way.

What particularly ticks me off is the way some members of the group propagandize history. As a history major, I've hypothesized that history becomes dangerous when it's isolated from context. I was starting to get tired of the way the other people focused on American outrages against Asian immigrants, so I tried to bring a more balanced view of the big picture by reminding them that pretty much every immigrant group not from Northern/Western Europe got discriminated against, including Catholics, Slavs/Eastern Europeans, Italians and other Southern Europeans, Jews...you name it.

And then people replied by saying, "Yeah, but ONLY Chinese Americans were excluded from immigrating completely and weren't even allowed to become citizens!! That's SO MUCH WORSE than how other immigrants were treated!!1!"

I really didn't feel like arguing anymore at that point, but later I thought I should have said something along the lines of, If we're going to be arguing about which ethnic group got treated worst, we shouldn't be focusing on Asian-Americans, but on African-Americans and Native Americans, people. I'm not saying that racism against Asian-Americans didn't exist. I'm saying that it's frankly rather ignorant to single Asian-Americans out as being "uniquely" "oppressed" by American society.

At first I thought that I was insulated in a bubble because I didn't care much about Asian-American issues, but now I think others are in a bubble because they ONLY see Asian-American issues and not the overarching tensions and conflicts in society.