heavydog

I’ve got an XBOX360, a thing which I am immensely pleased about. I’ve also got Assasins creed, a thing which I am not so immensely pleased about. It started well and I was thoroughly enjoying it before I got to the third section and thought “Hang on, haven’t I done all this before?”. You see, Assasins Creed is a bit … samey.

Don’t get me wrong, visually this game is an absolute stunner, pretty much setting a new benchmark for the way games should look on next gen consoles. The first time you round a corner and see the first city spreading out in the valley below you is a real jaw-dropping moment. The first time you swan dive from a viewpoint, or perform a retaliation kill will cause you to spontaneously whistle through your teeth in amazement.

But a game isn’t all about the way it looks.

It’s about the gameplay. Isn’t it? Assasins Creed starts with some phenominal gameplay and then, well that’s the point, it just does the same things over and over again. Without giving too much away, there are several set peices you need to do in order to learn enough about your mark to then be given the go-ahead to stab ‘im up good. These things never vary from level to level, they are always “Pick Pocket”, “Interrorgate”, “Evesdrop” and “Talk to Informer” the latter being either collect some flags an idiot has carelessly dropped or stab someone (or two, or three) who your informer doesn’t like. There are also side missions, well, side “mission” and that is to “Save the citizen”. Someone will be having a bad day at the hands of the city guards and it’s your job to rush in, kill the guards and talk to the Citizen. They will then tell there brother/husband/uncle/dog who will tell their mates and then you’ve got either a walking camoflage point, or some people who’ll get in guards’ way if they’re chasing you (more about guards in a moment). But that’s it. There is little more to the game, save the assasinations. Some assasinations will take you a fair amount of time, especially if you have to get into a castle, or somewhere similar.

But thats it. Seriously. The same 7 or 8 tasks over and over again, set in some of the most beautiful computer game environment ever made.

Somebody dropped the ball.

On top of that are the guards. The guards who roam about the city have some not bad AI. They will chase you up buildings and through tunnels, so no problem there. The guards on the roof tops? Idiots, all of them. When you climb up onto a roof, they will stand there and say things like “You’re not supposed to be up here.” and after a period, will start to fire their arrows at you. But they won’t give chase or do more than stand there firing arrows until you nip behind something and out of their line of sight.

‘Fair enough,’ says you, ‘can’t ask much more from a city guard.’

Well, you can, you see, after an assasination, you’re most sought after, meaning that any guard who sees you will raise the alarm and soon you have five or six chasing you, if you run up onto the roof tops they’ll run up too and chase you there as well, yelling “Stop him!” and “He’s an assasin” and “He’s just murdered so-and-so!”

Then you’ll hear “You’re not supposed to be up here.” as you run past a rooftop guard seemingly oblivious to whats going on behing you.

*Sigh* dropped the ball again.

It’s these little things that make the game so much less impressive than it could be. They could have mixed up the tasks a bit. For example, evesdropping: instead of just “Sit on bench, look at someone, press button to evesdrop on someone who is a hundred yards away in a crowded market square you couldn’t possibly hear even if you had 20th century technology.” you could have “Get within so many feet of this person and listen to them, if they spot you, you have to try again.” - that would have been more fun.

The thing that really amazes me most is that the biggest plot twist, the thing that, if saved for the end, would blow your mind, is used to open the game. What a waste.

Even after all that though, I still go back occasionally, not for the gameplay, but for the mindless sprinting across rooftops. Anyone who played Spiderman2 and just webbed round the city for hours on end will know exactly what I mean. It’s not Spidey, but it sure is purdy.

Some people will have you believe that the reason Assasins Creed is shit is because:

… you have to understand that the game has had to be limited in order to make it accessible to the lower-spec XBox 360.
The Golden Monkey’s Blog

While that is quite obviously the largest peice of bullshit ever written on a webpage, even if it WERE the case that the game was “limited” in order for the XbOX360, I doubt anyone, during the entire lifecycle of the games’ development, ever said:

“We need to make this accessible for the 360 - let’s remove most of the gameplay elements and keep the pretty, pretty.”

Because that, ladies and gentlemen, would be hamstringing the game JUST so you could have pretty visuals on the PS3. Plenty of great games on the 360, and no. Gears of War didn’t push the 360 to it’s limits; Assains Creed is a far more punishing game visually yet there’s still plenty of stuff left to do on the 360.

A wonderful thing happened to me today, I discovered that Bitmap Brothers are remaking Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe for the Xbox360. I played this game to death on my Amiga, it was awesome. While the actual games themselves were amazing fun, it was the managing of the team, the hiring of new players and upgrading and kitting out your Speedballers that really made it addictive. I wasn’t very good at it, in fact, I was quite shit but you know when some games have a visual, usually accompanied by a sound which is a reward for doing something good? Well, in Speedball2, it was the sound of the guy going “REPLAY!” after you’d scored and the noise of the ball hitting the stars — made the hairs on the palms of my hands stand up.

It was the closest I ever got to football managment sims. Which are boring as shit. For me, this will be a definate purchase, assuming it’s not £50. I don’t think there’s enough value in this game (assuming it’s all the same format as the original) to warrant it being that expensive. Still, I’m sure I’ll get it either way!

This is the new one:

This is the original:

Sex mode, ON!

Eurogamer > Naughty MMO on the way

UPDATE: There is now a website!

Apparently, there’s a disease in World of Warcraft, which, if you are under a level 50, will kill you. Or something. It has something to do with pets - pets with diseases are infecing WoW characters.

It’s obviously a pandemic you know.

This is lifted from a forum moderator on the WoW site:

“It appears that the hotfix remedy concocted to combat the recent Azethorian outbreak has not yielded the desired results

“At this time, our medical staff is continuing to develop an effective cure. We look forward to ensuring the health and vitality of the citizens of Azeroth in the near future.”

Now, this freaks me out for 2 reasons. The first is that this is a game and it has a virus which, although was initially introduced by the games creators, has spun out of control and is now killing all the characters who can’t defend themselves from it. It’s a virus thats not a virus. There was a “hotfix” released, which didn’t seem to do that much - rather like cures for the common cold then. Has the game become sentient for fucks sake? Will it spread into the real world and start killing humans like some nightmarishly bad 80s budget film?

The other thing is: is it important? Theres a whole other universe going on inside our own universe, people buying a selling stuff, living daily lives, fighting dragons and shagging wenches. But, if you die, of this “disease” or for any other reason, you can still come back.

But in the real world, there are people dying every day who don’t come back. This year, there has been tradgedy, both natural and not on an enormous scale and it is still going on today, right now as you read this (If anyone does). So, does WoW really matter?

One other thing that occurs to me: could you use games like WoW to test how virii would spread in the wild? Do people in games follow the same habits and paths that they would follow, roughly, in real life (if they actually had a real life).