“Art has never been made while thinking of art.”
– Niko Stumpo
“I shit on the chest of Fun.”
– Hunter S. Thompson
Leave it to Roger Ebert to make THIS film critic write about video games. I’m sure anyone who would click on an article that has “Ubisoft” in the title has read about Ebert and his decree that video games are not art. There has been ranting, raving, pissing, and moaning to the contrary from everyone under the age of thirty who hasn’t seen the sun since the PS2 came out.
Art, after all, is subjective. What do I think art is? I think art is whatever the hell you think it is. Seriously, after you get past the age of twenty-one, you have better things to do than mull over the sophomore-in-high-school bullshit like “What is art?” Like what you like and act your age. Personally, I like stuff that can wring your emotions and overheat your brain. Or at the very least take you on a ride. Would I call it art? If I like it, does it even fucking matter?
“Art” is the word you use so you can hold the illusion of good taste over someone you feel superior to. Because if you know what “art” is, than you know what “isn’t art.” It’s a tool for snobbery, not an abstract ideal.
But in my years as a film critic even though I have often been hesitant to use the word “art,” I have become well-acquainted with entertainment that are more than willing to hoist the title FOR me. Basically screaming that they are indeed “the thinking person’s film/television show/novel/album/video game/velvet Elvis painting.” And a whole bunch of them are completely insufferable. They don’t come off as life-changing or great. No, they just come off as really fucking smug. I may not know art, but I know a Goddamn poseur when I see one.
Which is why, as I’ve said, I think I’m qualified as a film critic to talk about video games. Or at least one in particular. Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to Assassin’s Creed.
The glacially paced interactive playground where Lost meets the Crusades, Assassin’s Creed has you play as Althair, who is a twelfth-century assassin in the Holy Land”¦ Kinda. Before you get to assassinate anyone, you’re introduced as some guy named Desmond in 2012, hooked up to a machine in a lab run by a creepily rendered, boner-killing video game version of Kristen Bell. To make a convoluted concept mercifully brief, you’re time-travelling through your own DNA to recover a precious bit of information that will change the world and greatly benefit the DHARMA Initiative, or the Knights Templar, or the Priory of Scion or some OTHER shadowy and ill-formed far-reaching organization like that. It’s not really all that clear. But it WILL be, if you plunk down another sixty bucks in a couple of years for the sequel.
Story aside, you have to navigate through cities in the Crusades era Middle East and climb onto big buildings. From there you can survey your surroundings and pick up via telepathy (or something) little tasks like interrogations or eavesdropping that need doing. You do a certain number of these, you find out who to assassinate and where. Then you do it, then you run back to headquarters, and then you get yanked out of the time-travel gizmo and the Creepy-Bell flirts with you.
Ah, but not so fast. In order to GET to these big cities, you have to ride your horse there. The catch is that in order not to attract the attention of the various soldiers scattered across the countryside, you have to use your “Blend” button, which makes you go really”¦ Really”¦ REEEEEAAAALLLLLY slowly. And those motherfuckers are everywhere. This being a stealth game, you have to keep the “Blend” button down for endless minutes traveling to each city.
And the “Blend” button works in the city as well, for if you press it, you can fold your hands and walk slowly like you’re a praying religious scholar. You know that you are seen by the guards because an annoying beep sounds off. So you have to walk around these huge cities at the pace of a snail trying to navigate slow molasses, or else the guards will spot and attack you. And MAY THE LORD HAVE MERCY ON YOUR SOUL if your thumb gets sweaty and slides off the button, ’cause then it’s “beep-beep-beep-beep” until you get it back on there again.
As for the combat, it’s rhythm-based. Yes, rhythm-based. You have to hold the guard trigger down and press an attack button RIGHT BEFORE the other guy attacks, so you can parry and counter-strike. You can’t hack-and-slash, for then you will die very quickly. Ninja Gaiden for the original Xbox is a lot like that, except that THAT one gives you at least the option of hacking and slashing if you want to. You have to be GOD if you want to get far in that game in that way, but you could if you were good enough. You can’t do that with Assassin’s Creed. It’s either their way or the dusty, boring, historically relevant highway. I guess it’s to imitate real sword-fighting, which would be great if real sword-fighting wasn’t BORING AS FUCK TO WATCH!
But a lot of the praise Assassin’s Creed received came from how Althair can leap from rooftop to rooftop while being pursued by enemies in a kind of parkour-type way. But the thing is you have to hold down a couple of buttons and use your analog stick to guide him to where you want him to go. You may not think that the elimination of the “Jump” button is all that big a deal. Hell, it might even strike you as innovative. But what it did for me was give me the impression that I was watching the game as opposed to actually playing it. Christ, I could be reading, for all this game’s concerned which, coincidentally, doesn’t involve a “Jump” button either.
So you have a very pretty game (and it is) that requires meaningless repetitions of the same tasks, while taking a whole lot of the button pressing out of the equation. Combine this with long cut-scenes full of thin characters (with no context, mind you, they’re just there to kill) that have diarrhea of the mouth. So much so to the extent that it makes the much maligned forty minute cut-scenes in Metal Gear Solid 2 play like terse, rapid-fire Mamet in comparison. You know, for something that has the word “game” in the description, Assassin’s Creed isn’t a whole lot of fun.
But of course it’s not supposed to be fun in the same way Babel isn’t supposed to be fun as a movie. It’s “art.” And by thunder if you can’t appreciate that the mercenary plot and the draggy pace as a sign of something TRULY FUCKING GREAT, then you really don’t deserve it. Anything this boring couldn’t have POSSIBLY been intended as entertainment.
Even looking back just a scant couple of months after the fact, 2007 was a watershed year for video games. Assassin’s Creed tried for historical relevance. Call of Duty 4 tried to be topical. Bioshock is a ten-hour criticism of Ayn Rand. Mass Effect acted, as good science fiction often does, as a present-day allegory about humans trying to make their way in a galaxy that doesn’t want them, in the all-too-familiar hopes of “winning hearts and minds.” 2007 is the year that, aside from the violence and sexual content of years past, video games really weren’t for kids anymore.
The difference though? Those other three games were fun. We all remember how we killed our first Big Daddy or the rush of the tanker level. What are we gonna take from Assassin’s Creed other than that Goddamn beeping?
This could be the first sign of growing pains that every medium has. They aren’t always pretty and can have repercussions that could take generations to correct themselves. Or it could be a sign.
It will be a sign that the wrong kind of people will start playing video games. Not because they love them or want to prove themselves behind a controller. But because it will be what all the cool kids are doing. They will become a status symbol, like copies of Finnegan’s Wake or The Birth of Cool taking up valuable shelf-space in spite of the fact that their owners didn’t bother reading or listening to them. Because just having it on your shelf imparts to anyone who sees it that that you’re just so Goddamn classy”¦ These people will most likely be wearing turtlenecks and wear Old Spice.
I don’t want snooty, turtlenecky fucks playing video games. I don’t want college students having to bullshit their way through term papers on Final Fantasy VII the same way most do on The Great Gatsby. People play them nowadays because they love them. And games like Assassin’s Creed that have all the hype and sales behind them will go a long way towards diluting that almost childlike purity. Video games, for better or worse, are the last bastion of the True Believer, where a fraud has no hopes for immortality.
And though I may not be the hardest of the hardcore gamer, I don’t want to do away with that just yet.
-The opinions expressed by Dr. Royce Clemens in his Doom Dispatch column do not necessarily reflect the views of Geeks of Doom.-
“Art has never been made while thinking of art.”
Haha! I had the same complaints while having to listen to the endless beeping while the fiance played this. He loved it. I didn’t see the entertainment value. Oh well. To each his own.
Comment by Jenny — March 5, 2008 @ 4:09 pm
Once again I am in awe of your writing abilities.
Comment by Jerry — March 5, 2008 @ 4:30 pm
I’ve stayed away from Assassin’s Creed after the same people who hyped about Halo 3 started to hype over that.
Comment by Tony DeFrancisco — March 5, 2008 @ 4:45 pm
Yeah, I totally agree with you. Video games are just supposed to be an escape from reality. They’re for fun. Why do people take them so damn seriously and shit on our fun? I’ve played ASSASSIN’S CREED and I thought it was pretty cool. Not something I’d play every day but it’s okay I guess. Personally, I’m addicted to GUITAR HERO and ROCK BAND. Yeah, I’m playing fake instruments but it’s FUN! And BIOSHOCK is pretty neat from what I’ve seen of it. Same goes to HALO 3. I’ve been a gamer since the original NES and I’m proud to be one. I still have a life outside the gaming world but whenever I need to release stress, I play GRAND THEFT AUTO and run down hookers. Art is subjective. Some people will like it. Some people won’t. All that should matter is whether YOU like it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna play SMASH BROS. BRAWL. No one is messing with Pit today!
Comment by Fred [The Wolf] — March 5, 2008 @ 5:10 pm
Well, there were good games out for systems other than consoles in 2007. I, for one, recommend The Witcher to anyone who likes a good RPG. It’s adult, gritty, and presents a more “real” fantasy world.
Comment by AC — March 5, 2008 @ 9:08 pm
You and I are in total agreement on the topic of “Art” by definition (though I still want to punch Roger Ebert… but then, I wanted to punch Roger Ebert long before he started badmouthing video games).
I hafta admit though, I’m still curious to check out this game, though, the idea that you can only *Watch* the cool parkour shit happening rather than actually make it happen is sort of discouraging. Here I was hoping for Prince of Persia and instead it sounds more like DDR…
Comment by NeverWanderer — March 5, 2008 @ 11:26 pm
I won’t comment on your main point in this article, because, honestly, I don’t understand what you’re getting at. But your critique of Assassin’s Creed is factually inaccurate on a few points. There most certainly is, for instance, a jump button. You *can* hold the run trigger plus the “parkour” button at the same time to somewhat automate your roof-running, but I found it much more effective to run and manually hit the jump button to give me more control over my movements.
I understand your complaints about how slow the “blend” mechanic is during your horseback rides, but you also don’t have to blend. Have you tried just galloping through those areas? You’ll alert soldiers, but you can so easily outrun them that there’s no point worrying about it.
You are completely wrong about the use of the blend button in the cities. For the vast majority of the game, the guards do not recognize you by sight, they will only chase you if they see you attacking someone or trying to enter a restricted area. Even when, in the last third of the game, many of the guards recognize you on sight, you can simply navigate the city from the rooftops instead of the streets. Rooftop traversing is really the main gameplay element of this game, so it’s a shame you apparently spent so much of your time walking around on the street.
Combat is also much deeper than you describe. You have the option to dodge attacks, break blocks and grabs, push enemies away, throw people off of roofs or cliffs, throw knives, and stealth-kill with your wrist blade. I found the flow of combat very satisfying and enjoyable. Although admittedly it isn’t as deep as the combat in a game like Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden, it’s not trying to be a mostly combat-oriented game like those.
Assassin’s Creed is one of those games that gives you shortcuts if you want them, but also offers depth if you choose to learn and utilize it. One interesting difference between non-interactive media, like film, and games is that you can’t really watch a film wrong (unless you have a penchant for hanging upside down, perhaps), but you *can* play a game wrong. I’m not saying that you should have liked Assassin’s Creed, but if you really played it in the simplistic way you describe in this article, you missed a lot of the gameplay depth that may have made your experience more enjoyable.
Comment by Slayve — March 6, 2008 @ 3:51 pm
I never said there wasn’t a “Jump” button. Just that the necessity has been eliminated. I think I mentioned a couple of times that I wasn’t the hardest of the hardcore gamers, and it’s kinda frustrating having to stop before you make a jump and judge your distance and swivel the camera around to get a clear view. Not to mention if you fall, you need to wander around for a ladder or another way up without anyone noticing you.
And yeah, you can outrun the guards in the kingdom section, but stopping every fifteen seconds to check your map is annoying enough to begin with. If you’re running for your ass and manage to take a wrong turn (which can happen if you have a smaller standard definition TV like I do while looking at the map) you have to turn around and go all the way back. This also sucks ass and by then, the guards have caught up with you.
And yes, it would be nice if I can go on the rooftops for most of it, but trying to find a ladder is a pain in the ass, and if you go up any other way, the soldiers spot you and the game starts beeping… AGAIN! Not to mention there are guards on damn near every rooftop in the vicinity of your objective, and being that you aren’t supposed to be on the roof in the first place, that doesn’t help either. And yeah it gets worse near game’s end, but isn’t that kind of an arbitrary and cheap way of making the game more difficult?
I didn’t include the stealth kills and knives in combat, because my operative meaning in the word “combat” is when the other guy fights back. When THAT hppens, you have to stick with the rhythm-based Errol Flynn moves which require a bunch of waiting. Now I’m not saying every combat mechanic has to be so easy a four-year-old could use it, but Christ, sometimes I just want to finish the level so I can save and go the fuck to bed.
And my main point is that with video games making mad grabs for mainstream intellectual respectability nowadays, the middle-class is vanishing and snobbery will come into play. The casual gamer, much like the casual moviegoer and the casual reader, is slowly becoming extinct. There’s no middle ground anymore. The only people who read with regularity nowadays are little kids, genre fiends and people who read only because they want EVERYONE ELSE TO KNOW THEY’RE READING. The day will come (and it shall come soon) where the only people who play video games are little kids and the bastard at EB Games who looks at you funny for owning a 360 and tries to browbeat you into buying a Wii lest you seem uncultured.
Comment by Dr. Royce Clemens — March 6, 2008 @ 7:13 pm
Not to be bitchy about it, but you did, in fact, say there was no jump button: “You may not think that the elimination of the “Jump†button is all that big a deal.” That’s not saying they eliminated the “idea” of a jump button, that’s saying there is no jump button. But this is not a major point, so let’s move on.
It seems to me that the main problem you had with this game is that you’re trying to play an HD game on an SD TV, and a small one at that. Now I can understand why you had so many problems with visual cues like the map and finding ladders to get to rooftops, neither of which were even remotely challenging for me, which I’m assuming is because I played on an HDTV.
This actually raises an interesting problem for the games industry: With both the PS3 and Xbox 360 outputting HD signals, how do you design a game that can be played on both SD and HDTVs? Clearly some of your issues with AC would not have been issues at all had you been playing on a TV that showed you what you needed to see. For instance, I NEVER had a problem getting up on the rooftops. If I fell off of a roof, I was back up there in seconds, either via a ladder or climbing up the side of a building. This seems to have been difficult for you, however.
Even taking into consideration your SD issues, however, you still clearly didn’t understand some of the mechanics of the game. For instance, even removing stealth kills, there is much more depth to the combat that you seem to have learned. This may be, once again, because of your SDTV, since most of the tutorials were text based, which you may have had difficulty reading on your screen. You seem to think there is only one move in combat, whereas there are at least five different moves you can make in combat, and I used them often, making combat an enjoyable part of the game for me.
And again, unless you were playing on the harder difficulty, I still don’t understand why you think you need to “blend” all of the time when in the cities. You can walk around normally, even run, the vast majority of the time without bringing any undue attention to yourself. And yes, you will often be stopped and even attacked by the archers on the rooftops if you run around up there, but that’s why you have throwing knives to easily dispatch the archers. They are also very vulnerable to stealth kills. This is not a problem. The game is designed to allow you to spend most of your time running on the roofs.
Finally, to your main point, I still don’t get it, and you back it up with some rather screwy ideas about the state of the industry. With the possibly exceptions of Bioshock’s references to Ayn Rand and Blacksite’s political commentary-lite, I haven’t seen much movement in the industry toward “mainstream intellectual respectability” as you put it. I don’t know where you’re getting that idea. As for the issue of casual gamers, you actually have it backwards. The real concern among veteran gamers is that the hardcore market is going to disappear because of the rise of the Wii and DS, the ultimate casual gaming devices. Two of the hardest of hardcore games this year, Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3, sold rather poorly, which has caused many to once again decry the end of both PC and hardcore gaming. That “bastard at EB Games” is not going to encourage you to buy a Wii, because he knows that people who buy the Wii buy very few games for it compared to PS3 and X360 owners, and he knows that most of EB’s profits comes from game and accessory sales, not console sales. Your breakdown of the demographics of gamers is also way off, since the vast majority of gamers are 25-35 years old, not little kids, and there is no indication that the gamer demographic is doing anything but getting older, not younger.
People played Assassin’s Creed because it’s beautiful, has an interesting enough story, and is overall pretty dang fun. Just because you didn’t like it doesn’t mean that the games industry is jumping the rails.
Comment by Slayve — March 11, 2008 @ 12:20 pm
I gotta say I agree with Slayve here and I really take exception with you trying to categorize anyone who likes a game you don’t. The review in and of itself seems a bit outdated being nearly 6 months after the game was released anyway.
I played this game for the PS3 and had no problems navigating or staying on the rooftops, and I’m hardly what you call a hardcore gamer. I have to say I never encountered the problems you did with having to blend so frequently and like Slayve I found moving to and around the cities quite easy without all the beeping you were apparently plagued with.
And your criticism of the combat system is way off. Hack-n-Slash is fine for some games, but including it in this game would not have made sense. It would not fit with the overall feel of the game, which was attempting a small sense of realism. You talk about repetitiveness like it’s a horrible thing…
quote:
“So you have a very pretty game (and it is) that requires meaningless repetitions of the same tasks, while taking a whole lot of the button pressing out of the equation.”
But…the hack-n-slash mechanics of games like Dynasty Warriors is just as repetitive. Does hitting the X button 8,000 times somehow make the game more fun for you? It doesn’t make a game better or worse, it just depends on what you are in the mood for, and you were obviously not in the mood for this game. I personally loved the “rhythm-based” combat and after a short learning curve found myself able to take out seven guards in less than a minute. I don’t where all this massive amount of “waiting” comes from during combat unless the half-second or so in between attacks is too much for you. For me, this was a refreshing departure from the games where 20 bad guys come at you, you swing your giant sword in any general direction, big slash graphics appear and the guys fall down and disappear.
Lastly, I think you are way off base generalizing about people who enjoy these games as “snooty, turtlenecky fucks.” I could just as easily generalize the other way and say that I don’t want people who like mindless hack-n-slash games filled with pretty colors and not much else playing videos games because it makes the rest of us look dumber by association, but I don’t feel that way and don’t see the point in using a game review to try and judge portions of society.
Who are you to judge who are the “wrong people” to be playing video games? Why even include a paragraph like that? It’s a bit absurd how many assumption you make about someone just because they enjoy something you didn’t? Could readers not do the same about you just because you quote Hunter S. Thompson? How many hack-writers and pseudo-intellectual wanna-be gonzo journalists do that? Does that make you one? No, of course not. But one could easily make that assumption based on the same superficial criteria you are judging others on. Don’t you see the hypocrisy in complaining that people use the word “art” to “hold the illusion of good taste over someone you feel superior to.” in a review where you declare that the “wrong people” are playing video games now? Rather than overgeneralize about the type of people who do enjoy this game (which seems to be a lot given the overall reviews and sales numbers) maybe you should try judging a game from the standpoint that not everything was made specifically for you.
Comment by WordSlinger — March 11, 2008 @ 8:14 pm
I agree with both Wordslinger and Slayve. While, yes, you do make a few good points about AC, the points you made felt simply like jabs at the game more than honest reviews of it.
I loved the combat system. My only complaint is that it was actually to easy to get a grasp of. I found myself at the end of the game running around angering the guards for a kick so I could fight groups of ten or twenty for fun because it cleared all the guards in an area and killed a few minutes of my time. The game is repetitive, sure, but that’s only if you let it be that way. You don’t have to mindlessly save every innocent woman being oppressed by the ‘evil’ guards. I ignored half of them. I only did a few required quests and then went on with the final assassination. But you didn’t have to do the repetitive parts. I did in a second play through for completeness which is the only reason you would be forced to.
It seems you were expecting this game to be something it wasn’t made to be. If you liked Ninja Gaiden more, play it instead of complaining that AC wasn’t like it. There was exactly the level of depth you are looking for in this game. IF you want quests and things to do, it has it. If you want action, you can find it. If you want stealth ((which is how I played and found the most enjoyment)) you can find it. The only thing it forces you to do is fight the last few assassination targets instead of sneaking up on them which I feel would have been better.
Your quote in the beginning, “Art has never been made while thinking of art” is true. But it also holds true that one looking for art never truly finds it.
You looked for the art in this game and I feel you overlooked it.
Comment by TheHunterFox — March 21, 2008 @ 8:39 pm