So, I’m about seven or eight hours into Assassin’s Creed. So far so good! But then, I’m a sucker for open worlds where I’m at liberty to do pretty much whatever.
Except that I’m not really free to do whatever, it seems. I’m free to investigate a dude, kill him and also collect flags. And maybe shove beggars out of the way. From what I understand, I’ve seen about all the game has to offer at this point and the rest of the adventure is basically the same thing ad nauseum for another 25 or 30 hours. I will reserve judgment until I’ve seen for myself, though. Still, given what I know, I expect the arc of my experience will be…
- Hour zero: This game is clunky and awkward.
- Hour one: OK, I get it. Cool.
- Hour four: Oh, so that’s how combat works in full. Nice. Now to find the next View Point.
- Hour eight: This is rad!
- Hour sixteen: This is… less rad, now.
- Hour thirty-two: It’s time for something else. Anything else. Please.
Ah well. I suppose if it becomes too tiresome, I can always count on Travis Touchdown to rescue me from a gritty-but-cartoonish American vision of medieval Jerusalem in favor of a ridiculously cartoonish Japanese vision of modern America.
Also of note: This site now host a few other sites. Sharkey’s host went insane (well, more insane) and locked him out of his site, so it can be found here until solidsharkey.com is pointing in the right direction again. And a few site contributors now have their own blogs — Mightyblue has a home for his anime musings and I assume VsRobot will be using his own space to host his Add to Queue podcast. Maybe? And there are a couple of others, but currently their pages consist of (1) a blank index directory and (2) a photo of a bunny, respectively. I’m going to assume that these are merely placeholders and not avant-garde performance art pieces and refrain from providing links until they’re ready.
I have a couple of questions: Is there a new Gamespite Issue coming out soon? Wasn’t there an issue #3 already?
Thanks.
Yeah, Assassin’s Creed is fun, but can quickly get monotonous – I got it over Christmas, so I was mixing up playing it with other stuff as well. I think it was the guys from Penny Arcade who argued that Assassin’s Creed is not a game to try to complete in a hurry… I’d agree with that. It’s entertaining enough if played in chunks, but trying to play it for a while really shows up that they created this cool world with a awesome engine, enabling you to do wonderful acrobatics with the greatest of ease… and then didn’t really put anything in it to actually do. It’s a real shame, because you can tell how much effort they put into making it, and I felt like a scumbag for not appreciating it. Hopefully with a sequel they’d actually be able to focus on adding interesting things to do with the engine they’ve already created.
Yeah, I totally bought into the engine bad enough to cause burn-in on my roommate’s plasma, but that’s just because I tolerated how monotonous it was for long enough. I think, oddly enough, it was finding viewpoints that kept me going more than finishing any assassinations. Climbing up some of those unique buildings was a blast.
I’m excited to see this engine thrown at more classic Prince of Persia situations, or pretty much anything now. It’s fantastic work.
It’s not that long, dude. How many assassinations have you done?
As far as those web spaces are concerned, I dunno, Rei seemed pretty proud of that bunny picture last night when he was talking it up during Halo…
Oh, that index directory will be so cool! Just give it some time.
(I don’t know the first thing about FTPs, layouts and stuff, but I’m studying)
I quite enjoyed Assassin’s Creed, but I understand people’s complaints about it. I basically treated it as one long stretch of city exploration, punctuated by occasional bouts of guard killin’ or pick-pocketing, and even more occasional (but generally fun) villain-catching set pieces.
And my tolerance for generally exploring everything and climbing around like a monkey is *very* high. It’s the main reason I bought this game over a few other action/adventure possibilities, and I wasn’t disappointed. I just about squealed in glee when I discovered a full-scale Gothic cathedral to climb up.
Oh crap! No More Heros is out! I am going to blindly buy it without having read any reviews, instead of buying games that are most likely better (Burnout, Assasins Creed, Gears of War, Mario Strikers Charged, possibly Call of Duty 4, Mass Effect) simply because it looks cool. I have never felt closer to those dudes who buy monster truck games from WalMart.
PS. Wheres my Rival Schools 3?