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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…