Quarantine Control #13: I’ll Take Greek History for $1000, Alex

We are still living in a pandemic, something citizens of certain countries have again realized in the last week — especially in the United States. Who could have imagined that pretending the worst was over and trying to live normally and have a good time wouldn’t work? States are now rolling back their stay-at-home orders, to the chagrin of those foolishly willing to risk it by keeping places like bars, gyms, and indoor restaurants open. It’s clear that COVID-19 is here to stay until a vaccine is ready, and the US and other countries like Brazil won’t be able to handle that until — and if — they get a grip.

This means we’ll be staying home often again, the perfect opportunity to read this feature and see what we’re doing with our time here.

 

Geoffrey Barnes

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (2018)
Source: PlayStation 4
It’s a Video Game

I’ve posted about my playthrough of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey for the last two weeks in this feature, and would you believe that I’m still playing through it? I’m pinning the blame on my OCD, the incessant desire to see every facet of this game’s lovingly crafted rendition of Ancient Greece, by playing through the main story and finishing most of the side quests and activities. It doesn’t help that Ubisoft added a bunch of free side quests in the time since the game released in October 2018, meaning my runtime is easily exceeding the average completion times on a site like How Long to Beat. I knew this game would be incredibly long after reading about it before jumping in, but damn.

I’ve nearly logged 100 hours into this game, and I somehow just reached Sparta. There are several more parts of Greece that I still haven’t visited yet, including small islands and large pieces of land. Like I said before, Odyssey is clearly doing something right if I’ve put so much time into it, far more than I did for the main game of Assassin’s Creed Origins. That said, it is getting a bit long in the tooth at this point, and I might focus on the main quest from here on. But I’m not giving any guarantees.

Key parts in the game’s latter half have stuck out to me recently, though I can’t delve into them without going into big spoilers, though not related to the main plotline. You’ve all been warned.

Odyssey’s version of Ancient Greece starts out through being as close to historically accurate as anyone could expect from an Assassin’s Creed game. The main character, formally known under the gender-neutral Eagle Bearer (I’m playing as Kassandra, as you might have been able to tell from the screenshot above), and their family clearly never existed, but the events they go through and key characters involved in them were actually present at the time. The latter half of the game dispenses with the attempt at accuracy and ventures into mythology. The larger versions of animals like lions, tigers, and bears (oh my do I not regret that reference) were already stretching it, but they really go places later on.

Not only does the city of Atlantis come into play, but the Eagle Bearer also has to fight monsters from Greek mythology to obtain the artifacts for it. There were quests prior to this where the existence of a Minotaur was played for comedic purposes, but even the Eagle Bearer is shocked when they have to fight a real one.

I won’t mislead anyone here by saying that I didn’t enjoy the hell out of this. It was a jarring change to be sure, but a welcome difference from the norm. The game justifies their existence, and the prevalence of other historically inaccurate occurrences, by saying this is all part of the computer simulation in which all the AC games take place. It doesn’t lean into this as far as, say, a God of War game, but it also doesn’t feel forced.

From taking a glance at one of the many guides for Odyssey around the internet, I still have quite a bit more to do in the main story, and several side quests left. It’s a lot, but at least I have the feeling that I’ll actually finish this game sometime over the next couple of weeks.

I promise that I’ll have something different to talk about for next week’s Quarantine Control. I didn’t want to talk about Odyssey again this week initially, but this is how I’ve been primarily spending my free time for the last several weeks, outside of the news and comedy shows. Good thing I’m not the only one contributing to this feature, eh?

 

Joseph Daniels

It is an indisputable fact of life that all of us, one day, are going to die.  Not all of us have the luxury of knowing how we’re going to die.  Some of us who do know are comforted by the fact that they know it’s coming and can prepare for it.

This doesn’t mean that any of us really want to die.  Well, I acknowledge that some of us do want to die.  It can be an overwhelming feeling at times, but I am not here this week to talk about that.  My point is, even if we know how we’re going to die, a lot of us do put up as much of a fight as we can and if we manage to do some good for the world, then the fight is worth it, even if we ultimately lose.

We’re currently at a point in our history where we’ve come up with ways to fix a lot of the problems that prevented life expectancy from reaching beyond… well, my age.  Two centuries ago, if I managed to survive to where I am now, I’d be above average.  People did live well beyond their thirties, but that was a luxury generally reserved for the most privileged.  Since then, we’ve improved in many ways.  We’re a cleaner species, although some people still haven’t gotten the memo, if a lack of hand washing is any indication.  We’re a smarter species, although certain education systems in the first world could use a bit of improvement.  We’re a more comfortable species, although we haven’t fully solved homelessness.  We do have a little ways to go, but for the most part, we’ve come a long way in two hundred years.

Our next hurdles are still physical in nature.  Once we started living longer, we discovered our bodies have nasty little self-destruct mechanisms.  Cancer is a horrible way to go, and the ways in which we fight it are exceedingly rough on the body.  Recovery is also not guaranteed and it’s generally agreed that we need a lot more research into figuring out cancer so that we can come up with more effective ways to fight it.  One day, we will live in a world that is cancer free.

This brings me to…

Jeopardy! (1984)
Source: Netflix
Episodes: 8000+ (Wikipedia), 8235 (J! Archive), 8170 (presumably the “official” count, since J! Archive lists the 8000th episode as the 8065th)
Episode focus: #7422-#7428, “The Cindy Stowell Collection”

One of the things I’ve always wished I could’ve done was watch Cindy Stowell’s run on Jeopardy.  I’d been without a source of the show for a number of years since no network in Canada seems to want to keep syndicating it after their contract expires.  Thankfully, I’d always managed to find a new source for it after my previous source had decided to stop showing it.  That luck ran out several years ago and it took my moving up north before I was able to watch it again.

This didn’t happen until 2017, and Cindy Stowell’s episodes had aired about a half a year prior to my move.

It always seemed like a tragic tale, a Jeopardy contestant that you can’t help but cheer for, who was quiet and unassuming in her appearances and who accumulated money slow but steadily.  In her seventh and final appearance, after winning six games and earning just above a hundred thousand dollars, she was finally defeated, but not before having achieved her goals.  She never made her appearances about cancer and it was never brought up in the contestant interviews, but during her time on the show, she was dying of cancer.  She was being treated for it and was fighting it as best she could, but after watching all seven of her appearances, it makes it a lot harder to think about how she passed away right before her episodes were going to air.  Her contestant interview video is also incredibly difficult to watch.  It was already difficult watching it when I wrote about her in 2017 for Naughty & Nice, but now it’s right up there with Mufasa’s death.

Thanks to Netflix, I was finally able to watch the seven episodes of Jeopardy I’d most wanted to see.  Prior to this, I was checking various on-line video sites like Dailymotion every so often to see if someone had uploaded them, and was even looking on The Pirate Bay because if I couldn’t watch these episodes legitimately, I was willing to pirate them.

All of Cindy’s money that she won, after taxes of course, went to cancer research.  She knew she was dying and this is something she wanted to do if she managed to get on Jeopardy.  Her struggles are even more poignant now that Alex Trebek himself is fighting an incredibly lethal form of cancer, one with such a low chance of survival that every day he lives, he’s beating the odds.  What began with Cindy is continuing with Alex and hopefully one day we will beat this thing.  Someday, cancer will no longer put us in jeopardy.

 

It’s one thing to acknowledge how the pandemic will be here to stay for a while, and that many of us will have a tough time continuing to adjust to it by staying at home or wearing a mask when going out. It doesn’t help when some countries, the US again chief among them, have leaders who’ve sworn by not wearing masks for months. It’s also a highlight of an extremely dumb country when there are conspiracies about the mere act of wearing masks, which should have been expected from the good ol’ US of A. It’s not possible for everyone to stay home thanks to essential workers and others who have to go to their jobs and make a living. But please, stay home as much as you can, and don’t do anything monumentally stupid like attending a COVID party. Really now.