Assassin's Creed

I bought this today, only to be greeted by a lovely ring of death when I got back home to the Xbox. Lovely. Will Microsoft be able to ship me a new one in time for Guitar Hero on Friday?

No - I hear they've gotten a bit quicker lately - possibly down to two weeks, but I wouldn't count on it. Mine took exactly three.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_8cmPZ7hfE

I played the hell out of this game yesterday and got about a third of the way through, when the difficulty ramps up incredibly all of a sudden and it really turns into a stealth game, rather than basically a sandbox brawler. I'm kind of disappointed that it seems like the exploring part of the game is over, and the fighting mechanic, which is after all basically single-button button-mashing, is not very satisfying when you get to the point where you're fighting thirteen guys at a time.

Also, fuck the cutscenes in this game. They're terribly written, you can't skip them, and the interactivity in them is the worst, most boring shit. "Oh boy, this is the part of this ACTION GAME where I have to walk slowly into my bedroom and lie down and go to sleep!"

However, there is a LOT of fun in this game. I cannot get enough of sneaking up behind archers and throwing them off rooftops. Or, to my shame, shoving beggars into merchant stands.

I was straight up stabbing the fucking beggars until I found out there was an achievement for shoving them.

Is there? What is it? God this game seems so wrongheaded in so many ways. Like I'm playing this game and it charms me and compels me so much because I'm transported to a world so unlike my own... And then I have to spend half my time being hassled, like aggressively, by beggars and lunatics. And you can't even pay them off! It starts off like one of these games where you're moving though a living indifferent city and you have to make moral choices about the things you do... But as far as I'm concerned the game is unplayable unless you spend a lot of time slaughtering beggars and desperate lunatics! Considering how much time they spent with the environment it's inexcusable how little dialogue there is for the ambient characters. "Please, sir! You don't understand! I have nothing!" and she follows you and follows you and you CAN'T EVEN GIVE HER MONEY TO SHUT HER UP. The idea of creating a moral imperative in a game with NPCs is a cool idea but having them be completely fucking unbearable, even if that may be realistic, kind of misses the point.
Are you supposed to find some moral

... rant rant

Shove 25 beggars for "Enemy of the Poor" achievement. Already got it, guess I'll go back to stabbing them.

I've only just done the second assassination and I'm already getting a bit bored. Great looking game though.

My housemate was working through the early stages and it seemed a little boring to me, but I'll give it more of a chance this weekend I think.

It gets WAY HARDER after the third assassination, if that would make it more interesting, Jeff.

I don't know if harder will help - if it's just more of the same stuff - it's already kind of frustrating when trying to sneak up on somebody to have a crazy guy shoving you for no reason. Much more of that and it may induce control smashing.

I was trying to think about what I feel I'm missing here & I've been thinking maybe it's tension. For the second assassination I went to Acre and did all the investigations, climbed all the view points and saved all the citizens - and never once did I feel really threatened or in danger. And all those missions were kind of like marking off items on a shopping list - more of a slightly dull chore than anything else. Even with the assassination (the doctor dude) - I had a hard time getting it to initialize correctly (kept getting shoved), which was frustrating, but not exactly challenging.

Anyhow, I'm not giving up yet - I'm definitely looking forward to making it to Jerusalem and at least walking around there for a while checking out the scene. Now that I have throwing knives too - I'm vaguely curious to see how those work out.

The ending at this point does seem so far away that I'm having a hard time seeing myself playing the game enough to make it there - which bums me out a bit.

Oh - the other thing I was thinking about here was that although they created this amazing looking open world - I haven't been able to find much to do that's fun in it. Unlike say, San Andreas, which may not have looked the best - seemed to give the player a lot more options and a lot more to discover. Sick of the missions, go on a race, rescue people with the fire truck, go gambling, exercise (ha-ha), just drive around listening to music and level-up your skills or whatever, hop on a bike, a sakteboard, go to the shooting range, etc...

Try throwing beggars into scaffoldings or crowded stands!

You're right that once the climbing gets old there's not much to do. And what you were saying is frustrating or irritating gets WAY WORSE in missions where you have to kill a bunch of people without being noticed. All you can really do is knife those guys. And really, for a game that continually scolds you about killing innocents from the very first scene, having a major part of the game be a setup where basically either you kill hundreds of innocents or the game is unplayably annoying... That's really fucking obnoxious.

OK, you've got a HUD? In ancient Damascus?

uh there's a reason for that, kinda

ihttp://images.contactmusic.com/images/reviews2/hud.jpg

oops

http://images.contactmusic.com/images/reviews2/hud.jpg

Just got this this weekend - first game for my new PS3. Amazing.

I'm done with the first three assassinations - and it got a lot harder. Guards are a lot more on guard, things are harder to get to without raising static, etc.

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.

I think you have to enjoy the discipline imposed by the creed - no killing innocents, don't compromise the brotherhood, etc. - to enjoy the game. Its all about doing it just right.

I heard that this is going to be the first in a trilogy - any truth to that?

I also finally bought this game and am incredibly ambivalent about it for ALL of the reasons mentioned above. Really beautiful, immersive, feels nice... but repetitive, obvious w/ its clues as to what to do, and some really irritating things (the beggars don't bug me, but when the lunatics PUNCH you, and that SOMEHOW alerts the guards to the fact that you're an assassin? BULLSHIT). However, I am starting ass'nation four and it is a lot more interesting, in the very least that it is HARD to get up the towers. which is my fave part. getting all of the view points.

I bought a copy of Vladimir Bartol's _Alamut_, which the french canadian design lead has pointed as the inspiration for this game. It's a really good book and I recommend it, written in 1938 as a commentary on Mussolini. The main character is a guy who starts the assassin guild and seems a hodge-podge of Osama bin Laden, Mussolini, and a Bond villain.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/8c/Alamut1.jpg/180px-Alamut1.jpg

Also has a nice primer on Islam for westerners, with bits about N.Iran.

Well written, and originally in Slovenia but got translated 3 years ago.

I still haven't gone back to this game after finishing the second assassination :(

you have to slog through one more to get to the magic on the other side of the third kill. it actually becomes, uhh, a video game, then.

currently $38 at Target... is it worth it? The very mixed reviews make it hard to decide.

not played it, but I do know that :

Mixed reviews = try before you buy

Yeah... in my opinion this game is definitely a "borrow from a friend who's bored of it or buy it from him" type game.

or, you know, her

After finishing the first two assassinations I just haven't felt like going back to it. The game is (mostly) great looking, but as a game - I'm just not finding it very compelling. Or not with so many other games I'd rather be playing right now. It's hardly garbage though

Great for making me see out "Alamut", the 1938 novel written by a guy from Slovenia mocking Mussolini

I was planning on waiting for the PC version of this, but even my newly-built shithot system is going to struggle with this. Take a look at the system requirements, they're absurd:

Supported OS: Windows XP / Vista (only)
Processor: Dual core processor 2.6 GHz Intel Pentium D or AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ or better recommended)
RAM: 2 GB (3 GB recommended)
Video Card: 256 MB DirectX 10.0–compliant video card or DirectX 9.0–compliant card with Shader Model 3.0 or higher (512 MB video card recommended) (see supported list)*
Sound Card: DirectX 9.0 or 10.0 compliant sound card (5.1 sound card recommended)
DirectX Version: DirectX 10.0 libraries (included on disc)
DVD-ROM: DVD-ROM dual-layer drive
Hard Drive Space: 12 GB

At least it's not Vista only, but when I just barely meet the "recommended" requirements for a new game with a system I literally built last week (and indeed don't meet, in terms of RAM), there's something wrong. My bet is that it's an abolute mess and they didn't take time to scale it properly across a broad range of hardware.

Ah well, at least by the time I finally buy a current-gen console it'll be in the bargain bins.

After finishing the first two assassinations I just haven't felt like going back to it. The game is (mostly) great looking, but as a game - I'm just not finding it very compelling. Or not with so many other games I'd rather be playing right now. It's hardly garbage though.

Ha - I was actually @ the same point, but I started playing it again last week and blew through the rest of the game. The assassinations get a little trickier & more interesting (tho I tended to take the bull-in-a-china-shop approach) AND they give you the option to skip all the obnoxious horse riding - you can just jump from one city to another once you reach the transition points, which was one of the reasons I too a prolonged break. And, yes, knife throwing is awesome.

The wonkiness of the "real life" controls was really annoying (as was the guy doing Altair's voice), and a lot of the stuff you guys mention re: shortcomings is spot on - I started shivving the beggars & drunks because they were annoying me (and a controller might have gotten spiked angrily at one point because the attack controls SUCK; I plead the 5th). But my biggest beef: just when the game gets interesting (and all the Templar / Assassin nonsense finally comes to light, in more ways than one), they end the stupid game! Looking forward to a sequel that I hope takes place in the modern-day / future environment, though.

while I agree that a modern-day version of this game would be hell of awesome, it occurred to me that the reason they introduced the recovered-memory gimmick in the first place was to give the game some boundaries - i.e. how else could they have divided the cities up into sections when you're able to climb or run on/over anything?

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.

also I finally beat this last weekend! (make sure to watch through the credits for an achievement, too.) now I can finally play Galaxy without feeling guilty!

how else could they have divided the cities up into sections when you're able to climb or run on/over anything?

it's kind of funny that all the futuristic pseudo-scientific DNA hoo-ha in this game is somehow more believable than the fact that you're, you know, playing a video game with certain reasonable limits!

it's easier to ask gamers in 2008 to take a bad gibson leap instead of tolerating another world where two foot picket fences block all progress?

ha. but do gamers really have nervous breakdowns when they reach the end of a map?

So, I just started playing this (thanks Gamefly!) and I totally should have bought this game sooner why because it look intersting

This is the first action game to come out in a long, long time that's actually engaged me; I think the last one was... probably PoP:SoT.

It's made by a lot of the same team, I think, right?

Give it a little more time - it seems good at first, but it didn't keep lots engaged past the first couple of missions. How far along are you?

Yep, the story of this thread is lots of wide-eyed swains coming to Assassin's Creed with high hopes and dizzy expectation and then all of them, one by one, getting pissed off at the beggars and lunatics and switching to Guitar Hero. Just so you know, Hi Dere. I'd hate to see you get hurt.

er... the first assassination

oh noes

so despite all the fanboying out there, i should skip this one then?

THIS GAME FUCKING SUCKS SO BAD

Fundamentally, anyone who enjoyed this does not enjoy computer games for the same reasons as i do.

Essentially they are looking for busy work for their hands.

no! the plot is mind-breakingly stupid and the game's structure gets repetitive in a hurry, but the actual gameplay (ie the parkour, the ultra-violent rhythm-based combat, the incredibly expansive gameworld) is just sublime. it's probably my favorite non-2D platformer ever. pretty sure super-cheap used copies are all over the place too. do it do it do it!

xpost "busy work for their hands" = EXACTLY what I look for in my video games actually. also, isn't AC like the LEAST busy-handed game ever?

it's just all repetitive, the parkour is button bashing, the fighting is mastered within five minutes, the repetition is repeated forever.

I dig the parkour aspect of it, but it does get really, really repetitive. It was the first game I got for PS3 about 1.5 years ago, and I've not played it much since March of 2008.

ok played this, was mixed in my views until the first "ride the horse to the next spot" thing. bah. do not want.

people really hate riding horses, huh

hahaha yeah after i posted that i looked at the shadow of the colossus thread and was all o_O.

the problem isnt so much the riding of the horse as the kind of unclear "slow down when passing soldiers" nonsense and climbing towers to get the eagle eye for some unknown reason and the dawning realization that despite having put some time into the game i wasnt actually having any fun.

they're always available for like 15 bucks not too long after release which is sometimes enough for the privilege of futzing around a big open world for a few hours before getting bored

Good to know!

Viking rap battles though!

I'm gonna play Mass Effect 2 & Dragon Age 2 first though

(I miss JLV.)
A crapload of Ass Creed games are on sale at Best Buy right now for BF/November; what are generally considered the good ones these days? I've only played the first. I assume the Ezio games are still held in high regard, but everything after that is a mush to me.

I liked Odyssey. Sun-drenched with a charismatic protagonist. Origins a slightly less good version of that

The London one is boring imo

I played them all up to Syndicate. Yeah, the Ezio games were great. 3 was ok, could have gotten most of the fun out of just Freedom Cry though. Black Flag was ok enough, Unity was disappointing (& I love the setting), didn't bother with Syndicate because I don't really care about London. I got Origins pretty cheap, I guess I want to try it, not sure about the Greek one, really these all sound exhausting these days.

Odyssey is great fun if you just like wandering around endless gorgeous landscapes solving tons of sidequests, a la Skyrim. The main character is cool like Biscuits said, and some of the historic Greek characters they've included are surprisingly fun. The main plot is a bit meh/predictable, but there are several intriguing subplots. I know some people dislike the Fate of Atlantis DLC because it sidesteps the relative realism of the main game and takes you to straight inside Greek mythology; there's a sci-fi explanation for all that, though it's rather flimsy... But I like that one too, it's visually quite inspired and fun to play.

origins, odyssey, valhalla are the new rpg-style Definitely Not Witcher 3 ones if that appeals

Sun-drenched with a charismatic protagonist.

Alexios or Kassandra?