Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag

A Fresh perspective

Part 1 Introduction:

This was an amazing game, from start to finish. This was my first introduction into Assassin’s Creed although I do have 2 and 3; I have never had time to play them. While an amazing Booty robbing, swash buckling, cut throat pirate game as this is, there is much more than that. Follow me in my Journey through Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag.

SPOILER ALERT: This is not exactly a walk-through since I do miss somethings but this review will go from the start of the game through the credits and some multiplayer as well. If you don’t want spoilers, you may not want to read further.

You begin your quest as Edward Kenway on a ship near Cape Bonavista in the pouring rain feverishly loading cannons during a battle at sea.  As Edward is loading the cannon the ship is struck and he falls back, when he comes to his senses he hears another shipmate screaming for someone to be the helmsman.  You are now in control and quickly take on the task. You quickly take on the task.  Your initial tasks are to destroy the enemy ships nearby, an easy task as the helmsman the task is to steer your ship to victory.

Attacking this pack of 5 schooners is relatively quick and easy.  As the last ship is destroyed the crew starts celebrating when things on the ship start to go awry.   The gun powder barrels start exploding and the crew quickly tries to douse the flames.  A dark cloaked figure jumps on board and assassinates a member of your crew.  As Edward jumps to action an explosion blows him out of the ship into the ocean.

The screen fades in a scene with Edward speaking to his wife Caroline in bed about getting ahead in life.  Edward wants to go away for a year or 2 to make some money and join a crew as a privateer, a flash back it seems.

After a few seconds of this argument he awakens under water. Edward awakens surrounded by sunken ships and dead bodies floating in the dead space of the ocean. You quickly swim to the surface before you permanently join the other bodies.

When Edward finally reaches land he lays on the beach for a bit to regain some strength when another person crawls up to shore a few feet away. The other person turns out to be an assassin and he asks Edward for a ride to Havana, he offers to pay you 100 Reals.  The conversation goes on few a few seconds and a chase ensues as tempers flare.

Edward states that he wants to work with this assassin but the assassin continues to run away, occasionally landing a few shots at Edward.  After the first shot hits, Edward no longer wants to work with the assassin and wants kill him.

After a bit of chasing Edward catches up to the assassin and a fight begins.  You win the fight, kill and loot the corpse and find a letter made out to Duncan, the assassin you just killed.

The letter is from Governor Torres, the Spanish Governor of Florida asking to meet you in Havana.  To make it believable Edward takes Duncan’s clothes and poses as Duncan but is still left without a vessel.

As you roam this new land in your new digs, you hear a gun shot.  Searching for that sound you quickly approach the cliff and can hear people talking.  It seems that the some men have taken a few hostages and possibly plan to take their ship.  This is where you learn how to hide in the bushes and stalk your prey.  You must lurk around a bit as the red coats walk around and you can take them down one by one,  into the bushes to kill them, but don’t get spotted.

Once these men have all been slain it is just you and the last survivor Stede Bonnet, the others in his crew have been killed.  Stede has his own ship and is also on his way to Havana but has no Captain.  Since you can Captain, it seems you have yourself a new friend and a ship.  Time to set sail for new adventures!

After about 1 or 2 minutes of sailing your new ship and watching the amazing sights the screen dims and you hear a woman’s voice saying “Fantastic work, very promising”.  I sat back thinking this was another flashback and was amazingly surprised to find a modern day woman in a laboratory of sorts with computers behind her.  I thought this was a game set in the past and I was a pirate…

Melanie greats you as you awaken from you slumber or intense VR session.  To make sure you are OK, she asks you to look up and down at the lights that are blinking.  Once she sees you are ready to go she welcomes you to Animus and Project 17,… just go with it for now.

When you are up, you are guided through the first door and around the facilities.  As you follow she tells you that everything you are going through is a memory extracted from DNA found.  Very interesting, let’s see how that plays out.

She motions to billboard of Liberation, Abstergo’s first title she says.

As you make your way to the elevator she hands you a tablet.  She mentions that the security is very light as everyone in the building has a tablet.  The tablets are the only way to navigate the locks in this building; the tablet has your identification on it.  With it, you can access locations based off of permissions IT grants you, like a badge.  Once you make your way into the elevator she lets you know that you can control the elevator through your tablet and to select the Sample 17 floor.

When you reach the receptionists desk the big boss comes up, Olivier Garneau is his name and Melanie introduces you to each other.

Like most CEO’s he is fairly disconnected from the workings of the company and the new hires, he asks which character you are and goes down the list.  After dropping a few names, Melanie interrupts and says “Edward”, Olivier seems to love the pirates and emulates your character, Edward mockingly.  At the end he mentions to her that they need to meet in private later and she breaks away showing you to your desk, looks like you are on your way through Google.

Melanie walks you to your desk where you meet John the IT guy who is calibrating your PC.  DO NOT SAY FIXING, he seems to get insulted by that.

Then finally you reach the other side of your desk where you will spend most of your time (like in real life).  Here is where you log back into the game from within the office.

Here you see your shelves with a single ornament, a figurine.

This figurine is you; Edward as an assassin and this shelves collection will grow quickly.  As you meet key people within the game the shelf will populate itself with these characters.  Let’s jump back into the game.

When you first log onto your machine you are greeted with a female computerized voice and brought to this screen.  You will land on this screen often, every time you die you enter this limbo state where you can run, jump and swing your swords but really go nowhere.  It does not say it but it seems to be where the game loads.

Till this point you have gone through a scripted playable intro although it didn’t feel too scripted but it was because now the game starts.

As a new comer into the series I liked the Pirate aspect, it was pretty fun and the story was pretty original.  So far the story had me hooked; I can appreciate where Edward is going trying to make more out of himself and his wife not understanding.  In such a short time there have been some nice twist and thinking the surprises were going to be minimal you are thrown into the modern age as a different character with a different story, but how different?  It actually gets a little more warped, check out the next chapter in this review coming soon.

Let me know what you think so far.

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There are many different types of video converters out there with many different features, this is one of them.

The 2 DVD’s I am testing for this software are “Lego Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Out” and “Disney’s Tangled”. I have 2 kids, my son loves Lego’s and Star Wars and my daughter loves romantic cute things, so these movies we bought are perfect for them. When we go on road trips, we have a portable TV that they can watch but there is only one TV so many times it’s hard for them to agree on a movie and then I have to suffer. My daughter has a Nabi JR (a tablet) though and she doesn’t like any of the games… but it can play videos and that’s where this software comes into play amongst the many other reasons this software is nice.

Visiting Wondershares site at http://www.wondershare.com/ you can find this and many great pieces of software, some freeware, shareware, tools and more.

Once there you can select which version you want to download and click on the free trial button to download it or click “Buy Now”, I chose Windows and the Free Trial and there is also a version for Mac. The software downloaded quickly as it was 728KBe but it did take about 44 seconds to install. It downloads the additional files during the install, so make sure you are connected to the internet for the installation.

When complete, click Finish on the final screen. Since I am reviewing this product I chose to launch as soon as I clicked “Finish”. As soon as you click finish it tries to access IP 203.130.48.8 using the WSHelper.exe.

Once the program starts you are greeted with this nice clean window. One thing to note, every time you start the program it tries to access IP 8.37.238.4. Obviously I am not a fan of phoning home but let’s see how this turns out.

If you try to access a DVD protected with CSS encryption you will be prompted with a message stating that this cannot be converted or burned.

After you click OK, it connects you to this webpage below

If you chose to download this plugin, after downloading double click on the file and it will prompt you to install. Click Install to begin.

When complete it will prompt you letting you know it has installed. The text is red and some might mistake it for an error and click uninstall, I almost did. Be sure to click on the X instead to close this window, they should have included a close or exit button.

When you load a DVD afterwards it will now ask you if you want to only load the “Main Movie” or “All Movies”. So it seems this download helped with the major drawback, but why is that not a default add-on if it is free anyway?

Once you have downloaded and installed the plug in and try to convert your first movie or video it will inform you that you are using the trial version of the software. Trial version restricts you to output that will be marked with a watermark throughout the video and limit the length of your conversion.

To register it, assuming you have the key you click “Register” and the “Wondershare Video Converter Ultimate (unregistered)” window appears. Here you would enter the email address you registered the software under and the registration code Wondershare emailed after the purchased.

After you have registered you will be prompted with the following message informing you that you have registered successfully.

If you have not yet purchased this program you would click “Buy Now” and be taken to their website

For this review we are going to explore the features of the registered version.

For the initial movie I tested Disney’s Tangled. To copy this movie, I inserted the DVD into my DVD drive and then clicked on the “Load DVD” drop down menu and selected the drive with tangled in it.

Once the drive is selected it will analyze the DVD, which only took 6 seconds. Then you are given the option to record “All Movies” or “Main Movie”. For the initial test I selected “All Movies”

Clicking OK starts analyzing the DVD

After analysis is complete, select the format you want the movie in. For this test I selected the Output Format for an iPhone 4 since I would be testing on my phone. Clicked under the “Output Format” section’s drop down menu, circled in red below then selected “iPhone 4”

You can also choose to merge all of the videos into one file, instead of separate video files. To do this, just before converting, place check in the “Merge all videos in to one file” radio button.

After selecting the appropriate format, the picture changed from the default picture which in my example was an iPad2 to the iPhone4 shown below. Now that everything is selected, I clicked “Convert”.

While this was ripping I ran task manager to see how this was utilizing the CPU. As you can see below, it was using 100% of an Intel 3770K CPU at stock frequencies across all cores. Makes for a decent utility for stressing your overclocks, although it does little with memory.

Once complete, depending if you have your speakers/headset on your will hear a bell informing you that it has completed ripping the DVD

The entire process took 00:30:13. The DVD was 12.9Gigs worth of data, with the output selected for the iphone 4 was reduced to 2.90GB in 15 separate movie files, each file a different chapter or a preview. The format is MP4 with a Video Codec ofH264 and an Audio codec of AAC default.

Repeating the process I listed above, this time selecting “Main Movie” to record the movie, the analysis took only 3 seconds and the ripping took 00:11:59. The single main video recorded was 5.5Gigs with the same output selected previously resulted in a 1.15GB MP4. This test only generated 1 file, the main movie.

This one slightly less intensive, mainly hovering around 93% CPU utilization.

I tested again this time with “Lego Star Wars: The empire Strikes Out” selecting “All Movies”

For this 23 minute DVD it took 3 seconds to analyze, not too bad.

I then clicked “Convert”

The process took 00:02:46 to rip to an MP4 format (Video Codec of H264, Audio Codec of AACC) output suitable for the iPhone 4. This generated 3 files.

When the initial test completed, I deleted the reference of the DVD and reanalyzed the DVD selecting “Main Movie”, this time taking only 2 seconds.

To rip the movie took only 00:02:30 using the same DVD and the same format MP4 format (Video Codec of H264, Audio Codec of AACC).

A few options to mention that can be done so far with both of the DVD’s I have shown above.

This option allows you to select the subtitle language

This option allows you to select audio language

Here you can provide more detail for each video file.

This option allows you to enable or disable GPU acceleration. This is an amazing feature than can potentially save tons of time decoding or encoding video. You will want to play with this selection depending on your video card.

The Edit button allows you to edit many features of the DVD.

Under this selection you can Trim, Adjust, Add Effects, Watermark and add subtitles.

Trim: Allows you to make the video shorter or capture certain sections.

Adjust: Allows you to rotate, flip horizontally and vertically as well as crop selections of the video.

Effect: Allows you to adjust the volume, brightness, contrast, saturation and de-interlacing of the video with many different options.

Watermark: Allows you to add a watermark

Subtitle: Allows you to import subtitles if downloaded and applied

The video below is an example of many of these features applied to this Lego Star Wars movie. I flipped the video horizontally and vertically as well as added a de-interlace effect and added the Dragon Blogger watermark.

Additionally you are not subjected solely to MP4 if you don’t like that format, there are many to choose from

And many devices to play them on

You can also Burn the files you just recorded, please make sure this is only for backup purposes. To burn, click on the Burn tab on the top of the program, circled in Red below

Under the “Burn” section you have a few options you can select

DVD Label: What you would like to title your DVD

Burn to: Here you can select what drive you want to burn these files too, what folder you want to store them in and what ISO file you would like to save them to.

Quality: Allows you to select the quality you would like to record the disc. It will of course affect how much can fit on the disc, choose wisely.

Aspect Ratio: This allows you to select what aspect ratio you would like to burn the video to.

More: Clicking the More tab on the bottom of this screen brings up a section that allows you to select the folder where the DVD files are located and also if you want to select the TV Standard in which you would like to record the movies into. Available options are NTSC or PAL.

At the very bottom, next to the BURN button you can select what type of DVD you will be burning to, Single layer disc or Dual layer disc. Single layer will only allow you to burn up to 4.5Gigs, most DVD’s in stores are single layer. Dual layer will allow you to burn 8.5Gigs, more expensive but sometimes needed for many movies unless you are only burning the “Main Movie” and don’t care about the other sections of the DVD.

If Converting and Burning files are not enough, you can also download your favorite video off of Youtube and many other video sources. To do this first click on the “Download” button circled in red below.

Once here click on the “Add URL” button on the left hand side

With this open, click on your favorite browser and go to your favorite video service, I chose www.youtube.com

Then I searched for my favorite band and song

I then highlighted and copied the address/URL of the video while it was playing in the background,

I pasted the address just copied into the URL: section and selected the format I wanted to save the video to. To see the formats available please look in the previous sections of this review. You can also select the “Save to:” location but I left it as the default location.

When done making my selections I clicked “OK

After about a 1 or 2 seconds of analyzing the link and video it started downloading.

When it’s done, you can watch your favorite video anywhere from any device in any format.

Aside from YouTube for testing purposes I tried a specialty website that had various videos included and I was also able to download those videos as well. This video downloading is a very nice feature, use it wisely.

At the top right hand corner of the main screen you have a few more options

: Takes you to Wondershares Facebook page, I would assume one of their least used features.

: Takes you to the Troubleshooting and feedback section.

: Takes you to the options sections

: Minimize, Maximize and Close. I am sure I surprised you with those.

With all the good, there is unfortunately some bad.

I have already mentioned phoning home a few times, which does bug some.

After running these tests, I started Firefox, which is my default browser I was prompted with this message. I was never asked during my install if I would allow an add-on to be installed; this should be a customized option. It never asked me in Internet Explorer or Chrome so it seems to only attach itself to the Default browser.

This program installs 2 startup programs. Both seem to be helper files, but are they really needed?

If for any reason you are unhappy with this software, I can’t see why but you can uninstall it. The uninstaller is somewhat messy, leaving traces behind in:

“C:\Program Files (x86)\Wondershare” as an empty directory

“C:\ProgramData\Wondershare Video Converter Ultimate” with various files, only consuming 688KB of space

“C:\Users\Iggy\AppData\Local\Wondershare” with files consuming 1.54MB of space,

“C:\Users\Iggy\AppData\Roaming\Wondershare Video Converter Ultimate” with files consuming 916KB of space

As well as registry entries “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Wondershare” and “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wondershare”.

Even though I am taking time out to point out these issues, they by far are not show stoppers. Many pieces of software like this leave traces of their previous install lying around probably also far worse, access the internet and automatically start-up that you may not know about. Many we use daily.

I found this program to be very nice, with only a few flaws

Pros

• Converts too many different file types, audio or video.
• Allows you to convert parts of the DVD not just the entire DVD.
• Can burn CSS encrypted DVD’s, for backup purposes. User responsibly.
• Allows you to edit and add many features.
• Allows you to download videos not easily accessible for download without a separate program.
• Allows you to set defaults to rip for many times of devices.
• Allows you to burn your media directly from the program without an additional program.
• Can be used as a CPU benchmarking utility when ripping video
• Brings features together in one program without needing to use several different programs
• Reasonable price

Cons

• Phones home (this was confirmed as both a software update check and a license validation check from Wondershare)
• Installs features on your default browser
• Sloppy uninstaller
• Adds 2 startup programs that may not really be needed (you can always disable them with the Windows 7 MSConfig or Windows 8 Task Manager / Startup)

You can buy your copy of Wondershare Video Converter Ultimate or look into many other pieces of software they have available on their website.

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