Sure, but 2002 was a bit too early for ARM chips in what was essentially a cheap children’s toy. They were still too complex and expensive for this kind of thing at the time - not to mention, there were few emulators that ran on this architecture available, so it would have to be specifically developed.
I would assume that most people are just just listening to their favorite game reviewers as if they were listening to a friend talking about games. It’s a parasocial relationship and it’s more important what a certain person seems to be thinking about a title than how well-founded this opinion is.
Unity is really good, contrary to its reputation (at least on PC). The parkour flies flows nicely and doesn’t suffer from the grappling hook bypass of Syndicate, it’s still the best-looking game in the series, there’s a lot of attention to detail and the story doesn’t overstay its welcome, even if it sometimes annoys with time jumps and the series habit of having to cram in historic events that you already mentioned. Yes, the map is overflowing with icons, but at that point in the series, that’s to be expected.
Compared to Black Flag, parkour, combat, stealth (especially stealth), presentation, architecture and NPCs are vastly superior, but it’s less whimsical and of course doesn’t have those fun (if repetitive and far too easy, unless you go for the big ships right in the beginning) arcadey ship battles and boarding attacks. Black Flag is definitely better at hiding and spreading its collectibles out, making discovering them a bit more of an occasion instead of an (admittedly still highly addictive) checklist chore due to its larger and more varied game world as well as the novelty of being able to leave your ship at any time, even in the middle of the ocean or near a tiny sand bank to go out and explore.
Chances are, AC2 might absolutely blow your socks off if you’re that much into the first game. It’s a massive step up in nearly every way - except that it went for a softer, more painterly look instead of the sharper, more realistic art style of the first game. The story picks up very nicely too and at least at that point, I was still fully invested in both the Desmond and Enzio part of the narration and how cleverly they were interwoven. There is a tiny bit of bloat, it’s not as focused as AC1, but from the perspective of someone who played the first game not too long after its release, this is highly subjective, since that title almost felt like a proof of concept at times that could have done so much more with its game world than it actually did - and AC2 showed that Ubisoft definitely listened to this kind of very frequently shared feedback back then.
I love the old warning on the Steam store page for AC1, by the way:
Requires a dual core processor or better. Please check system requirements before purchasing.
Those were the days. This was one of the first games I tried on my new gaming PC in 2008 (after the most powerful PC I had regular access to was a machine from 2001, with some 2003 parts) and it was definitely a title that showed off the power of this extremely cheap, yet capable system, just like Crysis and COD4. In a way, this series in particular was a dream come true, since I’ve always been hunting for games that allowed me to truly immerse myself in a 3D recreation of the past. Much earlier, I had gotten a glimpse of that with the basic 3D-rendered scenes of historic buildings in Encarta and the unfortunately very limited (even though I hyped this up to no end before playing it) Pompei: The Legend of Vesuvius (2000), but AC1 far surpassed every earlier attempt at digitally reconstructing historic places.
One can criticize the more modern AC games for a great many things, but one thing they are getting right is that they are putting more of an emphasis on the educational side of things: Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla all come with separate and increasingly fleshed-out educational modes (also available as standalone titles) that remove all normal game mechanics except for traversal and instead offer bite-sized excursions into the world, explaining a little bit of the history, while also explaining some of the decisions the developers had to make during production.
It’s not “sinophobia” to not be aware of games (or any kind of media) that only ever released in a certain language and only in a certain region, especially before the Internet. Nobody has ever been afraid of freakin’ Taiwan, other than mainland Chinese kids after a fresh indoctrination class at school.
This does not just extend to games from Asia. The article mentions the European home computer scene from the '80s, but there are predominately European niche gaming genres that nearly completely passed by Americans, even if there was an English-language release, like for example the resurgence of point and click adventure games in Europe in the early to mid 2000s (started off by the runaway hit that was coincidentally called “Runaway: A Road Adventure”, an equally excellent and obtuse title, sustained by regionally successful series, like for example the dark and moody - and kinda crappy - Black Mirror series or, more recently, by series like The Whispered World and Deponia that are just as good as the Lucas Arts classics that inspired them), mid-budget RPGs from that time like Gothic and the first Witcher that at best found niche audiences outside of their core central- and Eastern-European player bases and cheaply cobbled together, yet consistently best-selling German job simulators, the only true international breakout success of this genre being the Farming Simulator series. Honorary mention: The astonishing OMSI vintage bus simulator, which is at the same time very retro in terms of its tech, yet so detailed and realistic, it caused perhaps one of the strongest waves of childhood nostalgia I’ve ever experienced.
As for titles like Free Fire, not every F2P slop that finds hundreds of millions mostly bot users in Asia even deserves any attention to begin with other than as a cautionary tale of what the industry as a whole should not move towards. It wasn’t “prejudice” that “erased” the Korean predecessors of modern P2W nonsense out of its nonexistent public consciousness in the West, but rather that these games were objectively terrible, sent the industry in a worse direction and, also only released in their home markets for many years, were only playable from there due to language, authentication and payment barriers. Terrible games with terrible business models that are only interesting as historic artifacts. When a few eventually did make it over to the West in the mid 2000s, they were rightfully panned for their predatory monetization and poor quality; I tried a handful back then and found that the reviews were right. These games flopped hard, but Western developers took notice, unfortunately.
The one good aspect about this preachy article that seems to be born out of some global South inferiority complex (seriously, just do your stuff without constantly wishing to be appreciated by Westerners) is the mention of the vibrant South American modding scene. On the other hand, I’m surprised, given that this article tries to at least touch on so many overlooked historic niches of gaming, that there’s no mention of the Famiclone scene, which to many people in Asia and especially Eastern Europe was the first contact with videogaming after the fall of the Iron Curtain: Cheap, extremely low-quality NES clones initially produced by Taiwanese and Hongkong firms, sold through flea markets, with cartridges that contained increasingly bloated collections of pirated games, sketchy ROM hacks of popular titles and even some original games (virtually none of them any good, unfortunately). These are still being made to this day, but are now sold online to unsuspecting buyers looking for affordable retro systems.
Scope creep: The game. Trailers do look marvelous, but one has to question how realistic it is that all of these complex systems not only work well on their own, but also manage to form a coherent whole. This could become a trendsetting Indie darling - or more realistically end up as a highly flawed niche title that only manages to find a few dedicated fans that are willing to overlook its issues (if it ever releases).
The developers are entirely unknown - possibly unproven - and the publisher’s only successful games on Steam are an RPG (Tale of Immortal) with just over 50% positive reviews that doesn’t even work if you don’t have your system set to Chinese, an action tower defense game (Outpost: Infinity Siege) with a OpenCritic average of 58 and a 2.5D Cyberpunk RPG (ANNO: Mutationem) that is probably their highest-rated title with an OpenCritic average of 74 and 80% positive reviews.
Before I sound too negative, I hope this title succeeds. I would definitely play it a lot if it manages to deliver on even half of its promises. Art style, perspective and setting remind me of the last classic city builder Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, building mechanics are reminiscent of various Minecraft-adjacent titles and the multi-genre concept isn’t too dissimilar to The Guild series. All of this is very exciting, but this is exactly the kind of ambition, possibly overambition, that tends to kill studios.
Lots of surprises on that list and plenty of titles I haven’t thought about in years. The majority of delisted games are pretty obvious though: License (to cars, planes, music, IPs, etc.) expired -> game delisted.
I think this was an Atari 2600 on a chip though, not emulation, although I’m not 100% sure. Wikipedia states that the successor from 2005 used such a design, but surely this must have been the only way of creating this kind of low-cost device in 2002. I doubt there was anything cheap enough that could emulate even a system as basic as the 2600 in software back then.