I finished part 4 a couple of weeks ago.

The game turned out to be really great. So far I spent longer on it than on all the others, 45 hours in total. Though I also started playing it a long time ago, somewhere around January. So far it was the most colorful and engaging Assassin's Creed game. A colorful main hero, a slacker who decided to make a fortune through privateering and eventually became a pirate. I kept wondering how the story would tie a pirate to the assassins. It turned out to be simple and straightforward, and the plot was a bit not even about that.

The plot itself, I have to say, did not impress me. In the modern-day sections you play as some employee extracting ancestors' memories for a company that makes movies and all kinds of entertainment. Nothing special really happens there, but it does shed light on how the previous game ended and what happened to Desmond. The pirate adventures themselves, the story ones specifically, were about average. Though of course it is funny to watch the Black Sails series and play this game at the same time. In part, the same events as in the series, the same characters, and famous pirates like Blackbeard and Charles Vane. Just with different emphases. But everything that does not concern the main story is simply gorgeous. You sail a ship, disembark wherever you can. Everything is seamless, with no cutscenes or interruptions. You simply sail up to an island, let go of the wheel, jump off the ship, swim to it, get onto land, and poke around there doing side missions or simply stealing someone's goods.

The world itself is wonderful too. Islands, villages, cities, ships, very bright colors. Different locations, from jungles to proper cities like Havana.

The naval battles deserve a separate mention. What in Assassin's Creed III was just optional naval missions is now a full part of the game. You sail around, fire different weapons, choose tactics for battle, upgrade your ship so it can take more hits and bring down stronger enemies. For example, if you end up between two ships of the line, even maximum upgrades may not save you: they will simply blow you to splinters from both sides. And what is cool is that after smashing up an enemy ship, you sail up and board it. Again, everything is seamless: you leave the wheel, keep firing while the ship is being pulled in with boarding hooks, climb over to the deck, and then start cutting everyone down left and right together with your crew. It is done really well.

Besides that, you can capture forts. And that is done well too: first smash everything there with cannons, then sail up, land, and throw yourself into the thick of the fight in the fort, cutting everyone down left and right.

They were not shy about blood either. The main character finishes people off in a very bloodthirsty and brutal way. Besides being a pirate, he is also a bit of a fool. So there is a fair amount of humor in the game.

Actually, it seems to me the main story itself took very little time. But everything outside the story was genuinely interesting. Well, except for the dives. I just do not like swimming underwater and dodging sharks for the sake of some chests. But for the first time in several games I wanted to collect everything in the game. In the end I collected all the Maya keys, all the Templar keys, and unlocked both types of armor in the game. Even so, I still did not collect absolutely everything, I reached 90% synchronization, and when the story finally ended, after the credits I lost the desire to keep digging around in the game. Maybe I simply started to feel sorry for the time, since there were still several unplayed games ahead.

The graphics pleased me: everything is beautiful, with lots of detail. But once I caught a funny glitch: textures disappeared and the character's insides showed through in the screenshot above.

Overall, the game is really very good. Before this, the Ezio games were great, and this one probably left no weaker an impression. Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

This is already the second time in 2-3 years that I have run into GRUB breaking on one Hetzner server. As a result, after a reboot the server becomes unreachable. You have to go to the control panel, enable booting from the rescue image in the Rescue section, connect to it over SSH, and restore the bootloader. Looking up the info every time is annoying, so in short, after connecting to the rescue system over ssh, enter this in the console:

mount /dev/md3 /mnt
chroot-prepare /mnt
chroot /mnt
mount -a
apt-get install grub2
grub-install /dev/sda
update-grub
exit
reboot now

I had been carrying this idea around for a while and finally implemented it. Apple has a REST API for searching iTunes. I made a bot for Telegram that lets you subscribe to app updates. When a new version comes out, it writes to you in Telegram, whether in a private chat or a group chat. Now at work we will all be able to find out quickly when new versions of our apps go live in the App Store.

I wrote it in Node.js as best I could. The main thing is that it works. I wanted to make something for Android folks too, but it turns out Google Play has no API. None at all O_O.

Try the bot: https://telegram.me/ReleaseInformerBot (just type /help when you start)

If anyone wants to add something, the source code is on Github: https://github.com/makoni/ReleaseInformerBot

True, besides Node.js it uses my favorite CouchDB as the database. But to run it on a Mac, you just download the binary and you are done (well, and create the DB + views).

I'm continuing to play through the Assassin's Creed series and write down my impressions.

The third game, which is actually the fifth if you count properly, radically changed the setting. From densely built-up Europe it moved to North America in the era of the colonists, in the period when the colonies' war of independence from England was beginning. The scenery became less dense: low houses, not pressed so tightly together, lots of trees and forests.

It feels like the engine was either heavily reworked or replaced entirely. The controls were simplified a lot, with far fewer different combinations. I think the game even has fewer buttons now. Visually, everything changed in terms of graphics too.

The modern-day storyline continues: Desmond, together with his team and his father, reaches the First Civilization temple and searches through his ancestors' memories for the key to open and activate it. Desmond has matured and looks harsher now. He seems angrier too.

You start by playing some grown man who sails from England to America in search of the temple. Along the way he gets into various scrapes, gets a local tribal girl pregnant and, suddenly, turns out to be a Templar. After the prologue you start playing as his son Connor, who grows up among Native Americans, and circumstances push him to seek out an old assassin and learn the craft.

The game has a lot of forests and trees. Since you play as a Native American, you can climb trees and jump from branch to branch. At first it feels very unusual and unclear, but then you get used to it. Though I still liked running through the woods on foot or riding a horse more than jumping through trees. Besides, you cannot travel far along just any route through them.

The game has more kinds of weapons, though compared to the previous part there are no radically new weapon types. Firearms appeared. After firing, they need to be reloaded. You can take down a soldier with a musket, pick up his musket, shoot the next enemy, throw the musket away, pick up the next one, drop the next enemy, and so on. Though if they are all close together, it will not work.

The combat system itself was simplified a lot and became boring. There are very few opportunities to attack proactively. Usually the whole fight comes down to holding block and counterattacking. That is very boring. The finishing moves themselves do look nice and bloody, though. Chains of finishers remained, but you cannot always use them. While you are finishing off one enemy, the next one may already start attacking, and you simply will not have time to do anything except block and counterattack again. Even though the game does give you things to shoot with, constant reloading means you can only do that rarely, so most battles are still hand-to-hand.

Characters look great after battles, covered in blood. In the screenshot there is one of the recruit assassins you can recruit in the game. There can be up to 6 of them. Each has some kind of ability. For example, a sniper can quietly take someone out from afar. But the recruit system itself was simplified a lot for some reason. You can still send them on missions to different states so they gain experience and level up, but it is all clumsy and lacks the interactivity of the previous game. You cannot customize them, and they are not very useful, mostly just for calling for help in cities. And even then they get taken out quickly if they are not leveled up. I only learned in the second half of the game that you can apparently level them and send them on missions at all, that is how unclearly it was made. To recruit them, you first need to find them while exploring the location, and then complete some mission connected to them. Overall, their missions are interesting. But they also feel as if they were torn out of context.

The story felt rather dull to me. There seem to be lots of events, some movement, uprisings, conspiracies, war, but everything moves at a sleepy pace and there is not much action as such. Not very interesting and not dynamic at all. There are a lot of plot holes and no smooth transitions in the narrative. So far it is probably the least interesting part in terms of story. The conflict between father and son, the disagreements, how awkwardly it is all revealed and how awkwardly it ends too. Apparently they aimed more at Americans, like a funny excursion into the War of Independence. Famous events you can participate in, such as the Boston Tea Party.

Though some turns in the story are interesting, of course. For example, at one point you end up in prison, stripped of everything, and need to escape from it.

In the modern-day sections, Desmond also gets to run around and climb various cool places. For example, a construction crane on a skyscraper so he can parachute-jump from it.

I just took a nice screenshot.

At one point you end up in Brazil, where Desmond's face is hanging in the subway because he is wanted.

A separate topic is the naval missions. There are not many of them and they are almost all optional, but steering a ship and sinking enemy ships is cool. Firing cannons, boarding enemy ships, very cool!

Overall I did not like the game all that much. The graphics became better and prettier. But the story is boring, the narrative is dull and lacks dynamism. The side missions turned out to be more interesting than the main plot. A lot of things were simplified for no good reason. Plus I saw quite a few glitches in the game. A middling effort. Let's see what the next parts are like.

Modest Instagram-style year-in-review.

We started the year with a PTVP concert on January 1. Again. Because of an unexpected inspection at MOD, the concert was heavily delayed, and some people even decided it had been canceled and left.

I quit my old job. I stopped being a web developer and swore never again to work in one place for 5 years straight.

I got a new job. Became an iOS developer. I was happy that I was no longer making websites and that a lot of new and interesting things appeared in my life. I was finally able to dive into it fully.

We took my dad to a hockey game. We liked it so much ourselves that we went several more times :)

We bought a proper bed. Now we sleep on a proper mattress and do not suffer with back pain. A bed is awesome :)

As usual, we made our traditional trip to the Gulf for shashlik.

We ended up visiting Kronstadt twice with guests.

I spent the whole summer at driving school near Park Pobedy. Finally got my driver's license. It would have been better to learn back at university, of course. This all takes too much time.

We went to Ladoga to «our spot».

We had a good vacation in Prague. I had wanted to go there since childhood and finally made it. A city of beer and meat.

While we were in Prague, I took Yulia to Paris for a day for her birthday. Well, and something else happened there too ;)

We got Senya married off and got Vitya married too :)

After 11 years, I went back to Kostanay again. I visited my grandparents, my aunt, and other relatives, and looked at the places from my childhood with adult eyes. A lot of pleasant memories came back.

On the way from Kostanay to St. Petersburg, I dropped into Astana for a day. An interesting city, of course, built from scratch. Colorful, with all kinds of buildings, as if they wanted to collect a little bit of everything from around the world.

The new year is ahead. May it be better than the last one.

Overall, it was a hard year, and work filled most of it. There were several interesting concerts, hanging out with the band Dolphin at the VKontakte festival in the summer, but it feels like there was too little of everything.

May the next one be better, easier, and fuller. Though the plans for it are such that it probably will not be any easier :)

Fresh impressions of the next Assassin's Creed game.

This part is practically an ode to old age and the changing of generations. It continues the adventures of Ezio Auditore, who was the main character of the previous two games in the series. Here he has already grown old, and the game takes place 30 years after the beginning of Assassin's Creed II. Ezio follows in Altair's footsteps from the first game and finds his secret library in Masyaf, beneath the assassins' fortress-hideout. Naturally, the Templars are hunting that library there too. Nobody knows what is inside, but everyone wants it anyway. To open it, 5 keys are needed. Altair once gave those keys to Niccolò Polo, the father of traveler Marco Polo, so he could hide them. The trail leads Ezio to Istanbul.

In Istanbul, Ezio is met by Yusuf, the head of the local assassins, a colorful character. Probably the most colorful one; everyone else fades next to him.

The main plotline is not as interesting as in the previous parts. More boring. But the parallel line with the memories is good. I especially liked the ending. I finished the game in 18 hours. Though this time I got distracted from the main story more often by various side activities.

Over the course of the game, Ezio searches for the keys. Each key contains one of Altair's memories. That way we go even farther back into the past and can see events from before the first part of Assassin's Creed, when Altair was saving the Brotherhood and Al Mualim.

On top of that, in these memories we learn what happened to Altair after the first part, all the way up to his old age when he became a gray-haired old man.

Each key involves some descent into old catacombs where you have to cross gaps and look for paths. They are not difficult at all, and in places are downright linear. Sometimes, though, there are stealth-style missions. The hardest location is probably the last one. There you have to run to the right place in time, and also figure out where you are even supposed to run.

At the end you always get into some little room with a statue holding the key, and from there Ezio somehow miraculously gets back to the surface on his own.

There is still room for humor in the game. For example, in one mission Ezio has to dress up as a street musician to get into a celebration, and there he sings songs. The songs are about events from the previous games. For example, he sings some pretty funny verses about Cesare Borgia :) And yes, Ezio has grown very old.

As in Brotherhood, here you can recruit Brotherhood members. Many of them just need to be protected from guards; with others you need to compete: catch a thief, win a race, or simply fight and beat them. Recruits can be leveled up too. Each now has their own weapon type. You can also send them on missions to different cities, where they gain experience and earn money. In addition, every city is now under Templar influence, and successful missions reduce that influence. After reducing it enough, you can take the city away from the Templars, but it gives no extra opportunities. You just need to keep the city by continuing to do missions there. Recruits can also be used to eliminate targets as you go, and in some missions they even go into battle alongside you. Beautiful, spectacular stuff.

Each recruit can be leveled to 15 so they become a master assassin. To do that, besides experience, you need to complete two missions together with the recruit as regular missions.

The whole city is again divided into spheres of influence, and as in Brotherhood you need to capture districts by taking down the lead soldier there. Some can be handled head-on, while others have to be handled stealthily. For each district you can recruit one or two more people. After capturing a district, you also have to defend it. And that is a whole sub-game in the Tower Defence style, interesting and very cool. Waves of soldiers come at you, and you need to place barricades and place assassins on rooftops so they can bring soldiers down or fight them hand-to-hand. Once you have a master assassin, you can assign him to a district and then he will successfully hold off the soldiers without your involvement. They upgraded the Brotherhood system really well in this part, and I liked it a lot.

The game has new weapon types, including bombs that you can assemble from different ingredients and that do different things. For example, smoke and noise bombs for distracting attention.

Ezio is cool, of course. He still runs and fights well. He is just no longer a young man, so he looks like a tired, experienced guy who should probably retire already. All the games with him are good after all.

The ending, when Ezio finds Altair's skeleton in the chair where he died of old age, is impressive, of course. And what follows after that is now remembered with pleasant nostalgia. A worthy ending to his adventures, even if the main plotline in Constantinople itself was not all that impressive. Next up: Assassin's Creed III.

Finished another game in the Assassin's Creed series. It's awesome.

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is a continuation of Ezio Auditore's adventures. The new part starts where the previous part ended, in Rome. Most of the game takes place there as well. Rodrigo Borgia, who became Pope at the end of the previous part, survived, escaped, and keeps scheming. But not for long: the real focus of the story is his evil son, who wants to conquer all of Italy and does not even obey the pope.

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is beautiful and full of bright colors; they refined a lot from the second part. Graphics, gameplay, story, all of it. The game is short: according to Steam, I spent 14 hours on it while playing at a relaxed pace. Compared to the previous parts, that is very little.

The biggest new thing in this part is helpers. In the story Ezio leads the Assassin order and recruits new apprentices. All of Rome is divided into districts, almost all of them taken over by the Templars. Each district can be taken back: you enter the required area, the mission starts, and you need to find the Templar captain and take him out. Some are hard to take down, some need to be handled stealthily or quickly, otherwise they run away and you have to wait until the next attempt. Every captured district gives you the option to recruit one more apprentice assassin. You can point your apprentices at a target and they will quickly eliminate it. If there are many targets, they will dispatch some of them quickly and fight the rest with swords. They can die too.

The apprentices also have progression: the more experience they gain, the stronger and more powerful they become. You can also send them on missions. The stronger the apprentice, the higher the chance of success on missions, which are divided by difficulty. They get experience, level up, and bring in money from those contracts. If you have many apprentices, you can call in an arrow storm, and all targets die quickly, but the apprentice usage bar is fully consumed and you need to wait. Overall it is very cool: you can call them for help or simply tell them to clear the way so you do not waste your own time or get spotted. In missions, if a guard sees you, that is it, alarm and failure. If he sees an apprentice who takes him out, somehow it is not a failure :) And for recruiting new assassins, the mini-missions from the first part returned: save a resident from guards (or simply sic your apprentices on them) and done, a new assassin. All under the pretext of the uprising, the liberation of Rome.

The second cool thing is the tunnel system. Now you do not have to run across the entire city to get to a mission; as you play, you can restore wells like these and use the tunnel system to get where you need quickly. Convenient: you spend more time actually playing and less time running long distances.

There are also lots of battles, and they are cool, fun, and bloody. They added chained finishers: after delivering a fatal blow to one opponent, you can quickly pick another nearby enemy and finish that one right away too. It looks beautiful, spectacular, and bloodthirsty. The finishing moves became more varied too.

There are battle scenes in the story too.

Rome itself is full of cool buildings, but beyond those buildings everything is rather uniform and a bit dull. Though you do come across big temples that you can climb all the way to the dome. It is strange that there is a hole in the dome that lets you climb into the temple. Either there was some repair work in the plan, or it never rains in medieval Rome.

The story is awesome. The game is short, but very dense, and you can binge the story without getting distracted by side tasks like buying shops for profit. Assassins versus Templars, a new turn in the conflict. They even mixed in the French. On top of that, it gives you the full spread of mission types: mass battles, stealth, and much more. There are repetitions too: in the second part there was Altair's armor. To get it, you had to gather all the keys, and each key was obtained by climbing around temples and catacombs, a kind of puzzle. Here it is the same, only now it is the Armor of Romulus. I decided not to spend time on that and just play the story. The story does not let go, and the graphics became much better, especially Ezio, who is drawn very well, so it is pleasant both to play and to watch. Now I understand why fans of the series praise the Ezio parts the most.

The modern-day story follows the same direction as in the second part: the assassins are on the run, looking for refuge, digging further into Desmond's ancestors' memories to find artifacts. One of the refuges is the ruined villa where Ezio himself once lived.

What is strange is that in the story the Templars wrecked the villa many centuries ago, and it has apparently stood untouched ever since. That is odd. And nobody ever discovered the underground passages in it either. But you have to crawl through those passages while playing as Desmond.

So that is one very cool game. It is basically just a continuation of the second part, but a very cool one and perhaps more interesting than the second. Fixing earlier mistakes and improving what had already been invented, combined with an interesting story.