Happy Easter!

It's Easter Sunday, and one thing we never understood here at the WDW desks is why a holiday of such significance and importance to Christians doesn't merit a day off from work. Sure, it's on a Sunday and Chick-Fil-A is closed, but why do we have to go to work on Monday?  We mean, we get a day off for veterans and laborers, and we get two days off to celebrate a brief armistice between native Americans and European colonists, but no time off to celebrate the defining event of Christianity?

Which almost leads us to a segue about Notre Dame.  As everyone knows, the cathedral in Paris was badly damaged by a fire last week, although the Sports Desk was excited at first because it had thought that the loathsome football program from South Bend, Indiana had burned down.  But no, it wasn't the personification of NCAA privilege that had burned, but the national symbol of France (which we had thought was the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe, but what do we know?, we're not French). Many people have charitably risen to the occasion and donated money to help meet President Macron's goal of restoring the cathedral in five years, including the French game developer Ubisoft, maker of the Far Cry and Assassin's Creed series.  Not only did Ubisoft pledge 500,000 euros to the restoration, but they're also offering the 2014 game Assassin's Creed: Unity for free for the next week.  The game is set in Paris during the French Revolution, and apparently Notre Dame cathedral is prominently featured in the game. 

Reportedly, the virtual rendition of Notre Dame in A.C.: Unity is so accurate that it may serve as an important piece of historical media for the rebuilding. Unity artist Caroline Miousse said in a 2014 interview that she spent two years recreating the cathedral from the inside out. "I made some other stuff in the game, but 80 percent of my time was spent on the Notre Dame," she said.

Ubisoft's admirable efforts aside, the outpouring of money to rebuild the cathedral brings up the  question of why these donors weren't helping before with France's well-documented problems with income inequality, underemployment, and poverty?

By the way, "Jemen" and "Frankrijk" are "Yemen" and "France" in Dutch. 

But anyway, that answers the question of what the Games Desk would be playing next.  How could we pass up a free download ($29.99 value)?  After Captain Spirit, we were expecting to be further reliving our childhood by playing Life Is Strange 2, but the cyberverse apparently had other plans, and while as consumers we normally wouldn't select yet another Assassin's Creed vehicle as our next game, well, it's free! 

We started playing last evening.   The mechanics and visuals of the 2014 game are a bit dated and certainly not at the same level as A.C. Origins and Odyssey (five years is a long time in game development), but it's certainly not as bad as our attempt at playing another recent free download, 2002's Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.  We tried playing that one, but it was almost painful; after about an hour, we turned it off, deciding that whatever richness it could provide to The Elder Scrolls backstory wasn't worth the tedium of the antiquated mechanics of the  game.  No, Unity is still quite playable, even if Ubisoft has improved the game considerably in its recent editions.

Actually, though, the game was a bit confusing at first, as we've grown accustomed to the controls for the character in later Assassin's Creed games, and found it hard to get used to making the character work properly in this earlier version.  Also, the game started with a scene about a Templar knight and then jumped five years forward to the burning of said Templar at the stake, and then jumped forward from there 300 more years to a young aristocrat in 18th Century Paris, and then leapt in time yet a third time to that aristocrat now as an adult, with at least one cutway to the present or near-future involving the Abstergo Corporation and the Animus device (if you've played any games in the A.C. series, you'll know what all that's about). After that, the game finally settles down a bit and your character, the aristocrat, starts what's obviously the path that will lead him to eventually becoming an Assassin. One of his tasks involved scaling one of the towers of Notre Dame, no easy feat (to get up, you have to actually scale the opposite tower and then leap from the scaffolding on one tower to the other).  So we already got some up-close-and-personal exposure to the cathedral - you know, the reason the game was released for free? 

Another adventure involves an escape from the Bastille, and it's only after some three hours into the game when you're forced to make a death-defying leap off the Bastille walls that the opening credits finally appear in cinematic fashion and the game proper finally begins.  Everything up to that point was mere introductory exposition and training.  Three hours!  It looks like this might be another long game. 

Anyway, as we noted above, it's Easter.  The Boston Celtics have a potentially series-clinching playoff game against the Indiana Pacers this afternoon and Episode 2 of the final season of Game of Thrones airs tonight.  Also, the long and heavy rains of the past week have finally stopped, and it's a perfect day for a Sunday stroll along the Beltline.  So, without further ado, enjoy your day and in keeping with our recent tradition, here's XTC's Easter Theater: