Assassin's Creed

though to me nothing in these games has matched the secret image/holy blood holy grail/foucault's pendulum puzzle stuff in AC2, i was so into that

this sounds fun, def thinking about picking up the sequel

my complaints were admittedly sound nitpickey but it's sort of incredible how big a game ruiner they all are. when the cut-scenes are as long as laborious as the ones here it seems almost impossible that they'd make them only worse by giving you the most bizarre camera angles and the ability to move within a 4x4 box - which you end up doing, b/c you're playing a videogame and gamers tend to not take to to non-interactivity lightly.

i remember playing MGS4 and thinking the whole time that kojima was just a wannabe, but fuck it if i'm not realizing how god damn good the guy made the formula with those games. it's funny how the MGS series actually makes you anticipate and want to see the next cutscene, whereas these are absolutely torturous

also, i've now progressed to jerusalem and it looks exactly like the city in which you make your first assassination. i'm not sure whether to blame history or the game devs.

horse-riding past guards i have still yet to figure out. i'm holding down x, just calmly strutting past their post when "KILL HIM!!!" and the entire guard is hellbent after me

Got sucked into a YT rabbit hole with a series of vids where they show the voice-actors for vidja game characters. I never realized how much the AC2 characters were modeled on their voices:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1wJv-4ytDw

Just played the original. Wow. By the end of the game I was feeling a bit overloaded with info, but damn they really set up a thick franchise from the get go

There were actually too many assassinations - even for a game with Assassin in the title - but I made it through because as a parkour simulator it was really fun. Seriously I just loved climbing the hell out of buildings

the whole stealth-attack-run-hide cycle got REALLY boring after the first 4 or so jobs, and I realized I wasn't even halfway through the game. It also took me a long time to get a hang of the stealth - i.e. realizing you can just bum rush archers and one-hit kill them or just toss knives at them from a certain distance. I did feel crazy good when I got the "Blade in the Crowd" achievement... on kill #8. Up until then I didn't even think it was possible!

Altair is a annoying character at first, though by the end at least he seems to realize he's a jerk so it's kinda forgivable

i really did enjoy the story/lore - though it was painfully obvious from the start you're gonna be dicked over by your boss, at least they made that journey a little interesting (at least until the targets become obviously really super evil, like the book burner or the guy who performs his own executions). I loved those little talks you had with your victims and the weird "inner angles" glitch cams they had

i do hope they worked a little on those bad far away cutscenes though, where everything is mid-focus and not zoomed in enough as you're waiting for stuff to happen (like every single time you went back to the master!)

pretty excited to check out the rest of this franchise, gradually

I get the feeling they really stepped up the game with having Ezio has the main character instead; a dude who could be charming and yet still learn over the course of his adventures

will be interesting to see how that time period compares to the Crusades. man i just loved staring at the architecture

btw "Nothing is true; everything is permitted" is a fantastic thematic statement one-liner, up there with "A man chooses, a slave obeys" for me

side note: as I also went through it earlier this year, it completely blows my mind that this and Mass Effect came out within a week of each other. it must've been felt like "the next generation IS HERE". going back to read the older posts in this topic.

horse stuff was cool for a second, but thankfully you don't really ever do it again after the first three assassinations and leaving Masayef. i did kind of appreciate it reminding me of Shadow of the Colossus, but yeah, the overworld Kingdom was just a baffling mess.

Throwing knives might just be the coolest thing ever, though. I really dug standing on the corner of a house and killing an enemy from above with a throwing knife, and then watching the ensuing crowd gather.

also totally agree about the beggars/drunks getting really annoying later on, and the assassinations not taking off really until after the first three - up until that point is like a super-long tutorial, similar to GTA games

another thing - you can punch people in the street without attracting guard attention

I still say this game is awesome, though; it is very much the Armageddon of vidya games in that parts of it deserve complete and total respect (the film's mise-en-scene, the game's city design) and other parts - specifically the story - need to be used as props in classes teaching people how to point and laugh at stuff.

i was more into the story, but yeah - the Minority Report/Gamer style sheen over everything from the in-game HUDs and menus to enemies blinking it and out of "data" was just incredibly cool to see, i'm not gonna lie

The wonkiness of the "real life" controls was really annoying (as was the guy doing Altair's voice)

voice acting: hey, Kristen Bell! but anyway, i thought it was totally weird right away that they did the Aladdin thing by having the main character not really have a native accent compared to everybody else

the more i think about it, yes this game did have a ton of weird problems, but the good outweighs the bad certainly imo - problem is that neither the stealth not the GTA-style overworld stuff is particularly well-developed, so if you're not into the core of PoP-esque platforming and exploring it won't hold, but the overall effort in is definitely appreciable

aaand i stopped reading there when ppl started talking about AC II

ac3 commercial is so awful

another day, another drama (in the back)

the AC vita game coming out alongside AC3 takes place in 18th century new orleans. which means i have to play it, which means for the sake of completeness i have to play AC3 which means i finally got around to beating brotherhood and started revelations and jesus fuck why am i like this

revelations ezio has a dope beard tho

is the AC VITA game an exclusive?

looks like it... but how much you wanna bet it gets released in an HD collection on the PS4 or something

vita exclusive, yeah, but i mean whatever everyone has a vita right?

revelations is kind of not very good. i was all psyched to not have to torch any more borgia towers and then the game's all like BYZANTINE TEMPLAR DEN TOWER and also here's a terrible tower defense game. tower tower tower.

new one is fun so far

Out? Really looking forward to this. Is the gameplay any different from before?

yeah, the american revolution setting seems cool... and there's La Fayette, apparently !

I just had a really uncomfortable conversation with Ben Franklin about the joys of screwing older ladies. Let's hope that doesn't happen again.

i guess you didnt hear about the hot coffee mod where you and ben tag team dolly madison then

then there's the hot tea mod where you and dolly madison tag team ben franklin

PEGGIN REVOLUTIONARY STYLE

IT'S NOT JUST THE TEETH THAT ARE WOODEN

okay I'll leave this thread now

hahaha

Ah, the joys of a DJP colonial pervathon.

So this got completely panned by AV Club

i am enjoying it! it is weird that two (2!) of my former places of work are locations in the game. I killed a bunch of redcoats in front of one of them, because why not?

also i do not like being forced to fight wolves, especially when the wolves are clearly based on doggies

story is incomprehensible, but game is fun (except for the g-d lockpicking)

i've been messing around with the vita game b/c of the new orleans setting, it's a really good implementation of the whole messy agglomeration of stuff that AC has become. people have been bitching about the length or whatever but games are too long anyway.

as someone who has never played the AC franchise (and generally don't play games of this nature) and liked the Grand Theft Ponies-ness of Red Dead will I enjoy this?

I just arrived in Boston. So far I'm liking it.

The big difference between Red Dead and AC is that AC is much more about hand-to-hand combat, more of a parry-attack sort of game. In Red Dead the combat is mostly gunplay.

Unlike Red Dead, there is a framing device set in the present day. You're tapping into the memories of your ancestors. I didn't like it at first, but it ties together the different stories and time periods well enough.

is the fighting engine similar to batman: arkham?

Yeah, kinda. Although Batman is a little more robust imo

Is it just me or is the AC3 ad campaign the most off putting, jingoistic bullshit ever? And it seems to be getting worse?

I'm enjoying this now but jesus fuck having to wade through eight hours of bullshit before I got to the actual game I expected to be playing when I bought it was tough going.

Especially annoyed by the three hours at the start I spent playing as someone other than the main character purely for the sake of a bullshit lol-gotcha twist. Assassin's Creed: Shyamalan's Curse.

the first few hours of this have been the most tedious shit going. 5 minute cutaway then some sluggish walking around then massive cutaway, credits, cutaway, bit of gameplay and so on. when does it get fun? remember feeling this about 2 and brotherhood and being glad i stuck with it but this one is really trying my patience. sure sure you made a game that looks pretty, stop crowbarring your b-movie director ambitions into it just LET ME PLAY A DAMN GAME

it gets better, but not for like 6 hours.

modern gameplay disease of forgetting to add 'fun', focusing more on making something *important*

There's a pretty cool twist, but no fucking reason for it to take so long to get to it.

I did not *get* the twist. I was confused (never played II or brotherhood) by the <strike>intricate</strike> convoluted plot. The game started getting really good around ~ Episode 5, and I think it's worth it to just slog through until then. But oh man, I love running through the woods and fighting wolves. And it was super fun to snare a beaver. Best parts of Red Dead Redemption combined with Thief II. I <3 this game.

Oh, also I love my mansion filled with indentured servants and magical black guy

Yeah, I think you needed to play a few of those you missed to get the twist. Which you should do, because II & Brotherhood are both quite good. Revelations was pish though.

man first couple hours of this are not impressing me.

so what's the twist, this haytham bro is a templar?

partial turnaround in opinion: best walking-thru-deep-snow movement i've ever seen!

i called that twist didn't i.

yeah i'm kind of into this, dammit! the woodsy stuff is beautiful and the climbing free-run shit is surprisingly well done over rough, organic shapes like rocks and trees (with some annoying exceptions). i do feel like there's slightly less effort put into the detail of boston (compared to the italian cities anyway). these churches all look suspiciously alike. but i have to say i'm interested to see how they work in all the high school history.

but the pacing, jesus christ. who put this together? slow and deliberate and STILL not informative about what you're supposed to do. herky jerky with too many cutscenes. not a good feeling when you're hours into what you know are supposed to be tutorial missions that aren't very tutorial. i swear there's a cutscene were Charming Indian Love Interest says "meet me at the top of the hill and i'll show you", and so you run LIKE 12 YARDS up that hill. into to another cutscene.

I'm about ready to throw this damn disc across the room. Far too often there are automatic fail states, pointless chases and all sorts of non-fun activities. Which is a shame, because just tooling around in this is magnificent.

Also, why do cutscenes fade into other cutscenes? And why have a cutscene go into an interactive segment where the only thing you do is walk approx. 5', listen to a conversation, then walk 5' back, triggering another cut scene? Just show the conversation!

It's frustrating and stupid but I played all the other ones and want to finish it. Grr.

oh. great.

Sorry goole. For every awesome bit, like trudging through snow, or jumping on bears from high in the trees, there's a dodge the gunfire on the battlefield or they saw you so you fail at life moment. I don't remember so many autofails in prior games.

annoying and not wrong:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/6516-Assassins-Creed-3

basic verdict: boring, not violent enough. so far i can't argue with that.

i never played the byzantine one. the two italian ones were probably the high water mark, weren't they :/

sadly true. Quite pretty though. Except for everyone's vaseline coated lips.