While it may hurt my gaming cred – side note, I have no “gaming cred” to hurt – I am unabashedly a fan of open-world games where you have a giant map covered in icons and fog that can be rolled back to expose more icons, in the way that one would peel back tinfoil to expose tater tots.

Carrying this already-tortured analogy one step further, I have been binging the heck out of tater tots for like three weeks now.  After finishing Atelier Ryza, I dove into Ghostwire: Tokyo, followed by Halo Infinite, followed by finally going back to Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey so I could finish up the DLC in time to, if I’m honest, probably not play Valhalla before the next Asscreed game hits the shelves.  That’s in October, I think?  So I have three months to not play Valhalla in.  I can totally do that.

Despite all of these games being about running around a giant map and ignoring the main quest, you couldn’t pick a triptych of games with more different vibes.

Starting with Ghostwire, a game where the main character dies in a motorcycle accident in the opening cutscene, just in time for a disembodied spirit looking for a body to take over.

Except, you weren’t QUITE dead yet and now you’re stuck in a supernatural buddy cop movie where you have to run around Shibuya and bust the heck out of a whole mess of evil ghosts while also trying to foil a mad scientist’s plans.

I won’t go into the specifics of these plans, but trust me when I say that they are not good and rightfully deserve foiling.

Shibuya isn’t my favorite city in Japan, but I’ve spent a fair bit of time there in both real life and various virtual versions, and I really liked the version on offer here.  It isn’t a block-for-block recreation, but it’s close enough to make little difference and the art team worked overtime to make sure that it felt real and lived-in.

You know, if you take a second between rescuing lost spirits and sending vengeful spirits to the after-afterlife to stop and look around.

I followed that up with Halo Infinite, a game I wasn’t at all certain would survive the transition from a generally-linear FPS.

Short version: It survived and was a genuine blast to play, though I got a little annoyed when the last few missions dumped me back into an extremely linear sequence.  I think I COULD have fast traveled out and gone back to the over world to spend time checking icons off a map, but it didn’t feel right.

That aside, the whole thing felt like a massive playground, albeit in a slightly rough neighborhood.  Zeta Halo is covered with bases to capture and stuff to collect and very rarely gives you any grief about the methods you use to accomplish your goals.

Case in point: At one point, I happened upon an enemy tank in an enemy base, and used it to pound the stuffing out of a bunch of Totally Not Covenant Because We’re At Peace With the Covenant dudes in said base, and it was Good Times listening to all of the bad guys shouting at each other about how they would like to get me out of the tank and would someone do something about the tank.

Then I realized that I could lower a gate and get the tank OUT of the base, and drive it around the map – albeit, quite slowly – and that having a tank made many other activities entirely trivial.  Cheap?  Yes.  But nothing stopped me, and shelling enemy bases into goo while not actually being in any particular risk never failed to put the biggest smile on my face.

I think there are a lot of games developed with the philosophy that you can have a tank, yes, here, where we intend you to have the tank, but if you try to take the tank anywhere not intended we are going to have some extremely sturdy bollards preventing you from doing this.  Halo just shrugs and says, sure, until it blows up you can go wild with the tank.

Also the screams of Grunts when you hit them with your electrified grappling hook never got old.  I’m not sure I’m a good person but mmmmm so satisfying.

Howlongtobeat tells me that you can clock the Halo Infinite campaign in under 11 hours, and I spent over twice that running around doing hashtag-JustSpartanThings.

I don’t THINK hearing “Spartan, spartan, spartan” over and over again during the course of the Halo campaign had any bearing on my decision to go back to Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey after Halo was over, but now that I’m thinking about it I’m not able to entirely rule it out.

Anyway.  I bought the Complete Edition of Odyssey a bit over three years ago, binged the heck out of the main story, put it aside for three months or so, binged the heck out of the first DLC pack, put the game aside again for another five months and then came back to start the “Fate of Atlantis” storyline in, roughly, February of 2021.

I did not get very far into Fate of Atlantis before shelving the whole thing.  The game’s depiction of Elysium wasn’t nearly as exciting as sailing around Ancient Greece, and the storyline kept asking me to side with one of two thoroughly unlikeable NPCs.

Still, I am one of the weirdos that actually got sorta invested in the modern day AC story, and the DLC promised me some more of that, so it’s been on my get-back-to-someday list for a while.

Now that I’ve done that… eh.  Of the three DLC chapters, the best is decidedly the middle “Hades” chapter, which has you reuniting with a whole lot of characters who died in the main game for some final adventures.  And, even though the story beats in Elysium and Atlantis never really landed for me, both were at least really pretty environments to climb around and run through.  Ubisoft has some great environmental artists.

It’s also worth noting that the comes-with-everything edition of Odyssey regularly goes on sale for thirty bucks, which gets you Odyssey itself, six DLC episodes, a tremendous amount of post-launch free DLC and two remasters of earlier AC games.  If you have even the slightest interest in sneaking around and stabbing mans in historical settings, it is a shockingly good value.