Assbandit's Creed - how do you say "dogshit" in Arabic?

The BBQ Pit
1

In the name of Allah, his prophet Muhammad, and everything that is good and right in this world, Assassin’s Creed stands a very good chance at being the most convoluted piece of shit of a computer game I’ve ever played in my life.

I heard good things about it so I decided to check it out. I had NO IDEA that it was going to based around this played-out, bullshit, Matrix-like sci-fi alternate-reality computer-interface-with-light-blue-letters horseshit. What the FUCK? From the very beginning of the game, they’re shoving it in your face, this stupid high-tech, slick, trite nonsense.

You’re not actually an Arab assassin in early Medieval Jerusalem (which would be a badass premise for a game if it was just presented in a straightforward way.) You’re some shmuck named “Desmond” who is being experimented on by some scientist and his obligatory hot-chick-who-would-never-in-a-billion-years-actually-go-into-the-field-of-science-unless-it-was-the-science-of-giving-handjobs assistant, and the whole thing…

wait for it…

is ALL A COMPUTER SIMULATION! IT’S NOT REAL! It’s just like…the MATRIX!

And on top of that, it’s predicated on the idea of “genetic memory.” Yes, this twenty-first-century fuckstick, who is apparently descended from Arab assassins, is somehow able to “sync” his brain with his “genetic memory” and enter the mind of his ancestors, which allows him to turn into a badass killing machine. It doesn’t, however, allow him to speak in a correct Arab accent, unlike ALL his other Assassin buddies, so that he sounds like some frat brother from Middle America in the midst of a bunch of guys who all sound like Jafar from Aladdin. Very historically-accurate. It really makes me feel like I’m there, man.

I played it for about five minutes before I got sick of it, despite the nice graphics. Graphics can’t make a game. Get that through your thick heads, you stupid pricks who design games!

Go fuck off! “Assassin’s Creed.” Right. Go back to giving handjobs through the Glory Hole at the local truck-stop.

2

Assassin’s Creed was one of the major reasons I bought a 360. I love the system, but I don’t think I’ve ever been more disappointed in a game.

If you truly want torture, see the game through to the end. The ending is mind-shatteringly bad.

The whole thing was just a journey to see some images that Altair saw after he killed his boss. As soon as you do that, some assassin’s break in to the military compound to save you, but you don’t see any of that. Everyone just quietly exits the room and you go back to your bed. Above the bed you see Chinese writing (I think) and bam, game’s over. That’s it. Stay tuned for Assassin’s Creed 2, I guess.

3

Spoilers ahead:

I really liked the game. The missions get pretty repetitive, and it suffers from the lack of a good stealth system, but I got a lot of mileage out of sneaking up on guards with the wrist blade and gacking them from behind. And climbing all over medieval Jerusalem was fucking awesome. I don’t really understand the complaints about the ending, which I thought came to a satisfying conclusion, even if it was telegraphed pretty badly from about halfway through. I don’t really understand the complaints about the sudden ending. Over the course of the game, you go on more and more missions, along the way learning more about the secret society you’re fighting, and about the true goal of the secret society to which you belong. By the end (actually, by about halfway through the game, but like a lot of videogame protagonists, Altair’s a little slow) it’s clear that your master has his own nefarious plans for the world, and you confront and kill him before he can bring them to fruition. I didn’t find the end at all sudden. I was expecting the final showdown at least three missions before it actually happened, and was more than a little impatient to just get it over with by the time it finally happened.

They don’t end Desmond’s story, of course, but it was clear that Desmond’s meant to be the wrapper that brings together the three chapters to this trilogy. I never expected a conclusion to his story, because his story isn’t the point of this game. Similarly, the nature of “Eden,” and what a “piece” of Eden is is meant to be the driving mystery to the series. I no more expected an explanation for that than I would have expected Voldemort to show up in person at the end of the first Harry Potter movie.

Like I said, the game’s far from perfect, and it’s difficult to judge the over-arching plot because so much of it has yet to be explained. It could be very cool, or they could balls the whole thing up into something stupid. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that based on just this one part of what is clearly meant to be a larger whole. Ultimately, though, it’s not the story that makes this title, it’s the gameplay. And the gameplay, while flawed, is still a hell of a lot of fun. I’ll be buying the second one on launch for certain.

Incidentally, I don’t get a huge Matrix vibe from Assassin’s Creed. Rather, I think both titles are drawing inspiration from the same source, Philip K. Dick and the Black Iron Prison. Assassin’s Creed seems to be drawing purer water from that well than The Matrix did, which makes me more interested in seeing where they’re going with the series.

4

I’m just bothered by the fact that, if they wanted to make a badass assassin game set in early Medieval Jerusalem, why couldn’t they have just made that, without adding the stupid x-Treme hi-Tech ultra-kewl reality simulation bullshit?

It’s like, when they made Call of Duty 2, they didn’t make it some thing about how a guy was in some kind of virtual interface that allowed him to pretend he was fighting in a Ranger battalion in France during World War II. They just made it a game set during World War II, and that was the end of it. What’s so bad about a simple straightforward plot?

ETA - the story unfortunately intersects with the gameplay, by which I mean, the stupid flashing blue HUD interface bullshit that pops up when you target an enemy, or go into “eagle eye vision” or whatever (apparently every game, be it Crysis, FEAR, Prey, or Max Payne, has to have some stupid fucking supernatural feature like that.) Why can’t they just go for realism? That shit totally ruins the mood of the admittedly very pretty-looking Medieval surroundings.

5

I think it’s important to make the distinction that, in the game, what you’re seeing isn’t a simulation, it’s a recovered memory. It’s not really that different from the set-up they used in the first Prince of Persia game they made for the XBox, where the “game” is actually the Prince telling a story to the Princess. In both cases, it’s a true story, and in both cases, the reasons for having the story told at one remove are integral to the plot of the game. Assassin’s Creed doesn’t give you the pay off for that remove just yet, so it’s impossible to say if it’ll work as well as it did in Prince of Persia, but the setup’s interesting enough that I’m optimistic for the sequel.

Anyway, the point is that they didn’t want to make a badass assassin game set in medieval Jerusalem. They wanted to make something more than that. Was it worth it? Just in the first game, they could have jettisoned it and not changed the story too much, but it’s clearly meant to all hook together with the other games in the series, so it’s difficult to judge how well it works without seeing the rest of the series.

Nothing, really, except that it’s nice to see some games aspiring to more than that. Most of them don’t really succeed at it, but even the failures can be pretty interesting. I guess the way I see it, I want a game with solid mechanics behind it first. If they’ve got that, the story doesn’t really matter. They can do something safe and reliable with it, and not risk saying something interesting, and it’ll still be worth it for the gameplay. Or they can try and do something different with the story, and if they blow it… well, the game will still be worth it for the gameplay. And maybe they won’t blow it, and they’ll end up with something really great.

Meh. If I want realism in a video game, I’ll play Microsoft Flight Simulator. Which, you’ll notice, I am not playing. I like realism in terms of characterization and rendering, but theme-wise, I prefer escapism over realism.

Incidentally, the bullet time in Max Payne wasn’t supposed to be supernatural, it was supposed to be cinematic. Max didn’t have magic time slowing powers, he just had really good reflexes that were simulated in the game by allowing the player to slow down time.

6

Well, to each his own. I haven’t totally given up on the game - I’m sure I’ll give it another shot. It’s just that, man, that Crysis-style “ice blue” x-Treme hi-tech HUD interface just SO turns me off.

I’m not a big fan of multiple levels of reality in a game or in anything for that matter, really. I want to play a game where I get to be a bad ass Medieval assassin. I don’t want to play a game where I essentially play a GUY who’s playing a game where HE gets to pretend to be a bad ass Medieval assassin. What can I say, it just turns me off. It’s like, there’s already one simulation - the game I’m playing, in reality, in the here and now. I don’t need a simulation of another simulation.

YMMV.

7

Gameplay is more than just mechanics. The dynamic climbing system was well done, but after scaling towers for the 1000th time it got boring. The fighting system worked smoothly but was too simplistic. The missions - well, there were only a half dozen or so, presented over and over and over and over. The graphics were quite striking, but I’m not playing Final Fantasy VI yet again for the fancy graphics. (I’m talking about the game originally known in the US as FF III on the Super Nintendo, here.) And on top of all that, half the achievements were gigantic fetch quests. Compare this to the Half Life 2 achievements where you have badass stuff like pinning a Combine soldier to a billboard with a crossbow bolt, or getting through a zombie infested town without using any firearms. Who really gives a shit about collecting 200 Saracen flags? All in all, this was the most disappointing game I’ve played since Fable.

8

It’s World of World of Warcraft!

9

Very well summarised.

10

I haven’t played the game, but from the descriptions given here, I’d say it also owes quite a debt of imagination to this awesome little forgotten gem from the mid-80s, Alternate Reality.

I was obsessed with that game when I was 16. Good times, good times…

11

I’m surprised nobody’s linked to this review:

I suppose “Faffing-About Creed” wouldn’t have the same ring to it.

(warning: flash animation with sound)

12

The DS version is much worse.

It makes “Elf Bowling” seem fun.

13

Eh, I liked it. It wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be, but I can live with that.

OTOH, there should probably be a rule limiting the amount of uses of the word “badass” in in one post. :wink:

14

The only thing that bugged me about this game, as a PC gamer, was the obvious console baggage that made it over to the PC version.

PC gamers are used to saving when and where they god damn well please. I don’t know how console players put up with progress saves. Devs: do not presume to tell me how long I need to play your game for, I WILL TELL IT how long I want to play it for. Got it?!

Also the exiting scheme. My fucking god. Yet more console baggage. I want to exit a game in two clicks of my mouse, not 3 fucking loading screens and 10 clicks later! Devs: I WILL TELL THE GAME when I’m done playing with it. Do NOT pester me with annoying shit I have to do to exit it!

We PC gamers did at least get a bump up on the graphics and more mission types which broke up the monotony of gathering info a little bit.

I will probably pick up the next chapter. Of course, by that time it PC games will likely look better than console games by an even wider margin than now. Hopefully they’ll do some optimization for the PC port.

15

I liked it a lot at second. At first, there were a lot of controls to remember, but once I got the hang of those, I enjoyed it for quite some time. About 20 hours into it, it got extremely tedious and I got stuck trying to fight 30 folks at a really bad save point and I never could get past that. It got shelved.

There was one point in the game, climbing an extremely tall church spire that overlooked the sea and the game had sucked me in so tightly that I could feel the acrophobia of being up so high. That was awesome.

I’ll play the sequel as I hope it will overcome the shortfalls that were better explained by Yahtzee.

16

Eh? How the hell could you get stuck in any fight in this game. All you need to do is block/counterattack and you will win any fight, against any number of opponents, at any level. The only bloke that doesn’t work against is the very final fight, and then all you need is daggers!

But if someone could explain to me how a man can be a freeclimbing god but be unable to learn to swim, I’d be grateful. That was really annoying.

17

I don’t know how to say it in Arabic, but in Hindi, it would be:

Kuthe ki tati (lit “shit of dog”)

You’re welcome.

18

I don’t know that you can blame that on it being a console game, plenty of console games let you save where and whenever you like. It’s more a matter of gameplay philosophy.

I’ve been playing the game for only a little while, I think I’ve done one assassination. I really like all of it except the American accent, that just takes me right out of the game whenever I have to listen to it. I can also see how it can get repetitive.

19

That was excellent.

20

I don’t have any game system but a PC and I hardly play any new non-sim games, but I still go to his page every Thursday for the new review.