Assassin's Creed

Assassin's Creed is the first in a fairly long series. One that they'll probably keep making the next sequel to until everyone involved is dead. But I digress, the first Assassin's Creed game was produced by Ubisoft and released in 2007. In it, you play as Altair, master assassin from the Middle Ages. Oh wait, actually, you play as Desmond Miles, loser bartender who was kidnapped by some pharmaceutical company and forced to relive your ancestor's memories.

Confused? Yeah, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Essentially, you have been kidnapped so that this company "Abstergo" can find an object that they've basically misplaced. So they have to kidnap people who are distantly related to assassin's from the Middle Ages because they might know where to find them. The reason for this is that Abstergo has these machines called Animus's in that allows for the access of genetic memories which can be found in anyone's DNA in the world.

I'd argue that's not how genetic memory works, but that would destroy the plot of EVERY SINGLE GAME IN THE SERIES, so I'll just pretend that's how genetic memory works and move on with my life. And I am still having PTSD flashbacks from that time my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather fought in the Hundred Years War back in the thirteenth century.

I can forgive this game for being reliant on a plot that doesn't make sense, after all, it's a video-game, and it's not like most of them make sense anyway. One this I can't forgive this game for, however, is the massive amount of unskippable cutscenes, most of which are boring as all hell. Lasting a good fifteen minutes every time you want to start the next assassin mission, and it's just them talking and talking, if they had hired better voice actors, I might not care as much. But it's just really shitty when you just want to kill people and your being held up by the guy at the assassin's guild talking at you about how much you fucked up at the beginning of the game, when all you want in is that stupid feather so you can go kill some fat merchant and take his piece of Eden back to your boss so he can kill you with it. It's just rediculous, and unskippable cutscenes are the pits.

When this game first came out, it was pretty awesome. A small country to explore, with three major cities which are all really conveniently close to each other. Who knew that Jerusalem was just a short horse-ride away from Dalmascus?

Sneaking around in this game is pretty fun. The one complaint I have is the same complaint everyone had when they played GTA3 ten years before this game came out! That it's really stupid when the cops/guards don't care about anyone except you. I mean, why is it that when I run past a guard they're immediately like "there goes an assassin!" I mean, does no one else run ever? Or are guards just always on the lookout for a

man matching my description? You know, white cloak, can't see his face because of a hood, covered in sharp weaponry. I don't know, I just wish it was a little bit hard to get spotted.

Overall: B-, good but not great. Unless your such a fan of this series you have to get this one, or you've played any of the other ones and want to see how it all started, I'd probably avoid this one. I mean, it's fun and all, but when compared to later ones in the series, this one just isn't as good. Hardcore parquor is awesome though, which is present in every game of the series, but gets its start here.

Fallout 3: Operation Anchorage

I have this problem with beating games. Mostly I'm like always playing six things at a time and often things will get put to the sidelines never to be picked up again. Anyway, here's my review of Operation Anchorage:

Something I really like about games like Fallout 3 is that they are incredibly open ended. Unlike Japanese RPGs there's rarely a time in them when you get stuck looking for the exact one thing that you need to do in order to get to the next thing. Here, you can almost always just think of something else. Sneaking not work? How about trying a more action oriented approach. That not working? Try hacking the computer nearby and reprogram that annoying turret to kill its own guys. Not good at hacking? How about we say screw this mission and kill everyone involved and never look back.

What I don't like about Operation Anchorage is that it doesn't have this formula. Not even a little bit, you can't just back out of it. You go to help these group of ex-Brotherhood of Steal refugees calling themselves the Outcasts. All they want to do is open a safe filled with a cache of weapons, but in order to do that they have to go into a virtual reality training program and only someone with a PipBoy can do it.

The problem is, once you decide to do this mission and start it, there's no backing out. You get into the training program and you just have to keep plowing through it until you beat it.

It's completely linear, and just as completely combat oriented. I was only level 8 when I entered and I was playing someone who was more geared towards stealth than combat. It really annoyed me, after the first part which is stealthy, you get a silenced pistol (awesome), but after that your "commanding officer" takes away you stuff and lets you pick a small group of weapons. My explosives skill wasn't bad, the highest of my combat skills, so I took a rocket launcher and 10mm submachine gun. They didn't have any stealth weapons, and everything after that was basically running along a clear-cut path to the eventual end. Unlike the Pitt, which I'll probably review later on, which was another little world to explore and find interesting people, places and things, this felt more like a Call of Duty game where you're just running along a linear path, following orders from someone you have no emotional attachment to (though, since I'm playing through with an evil cannibal, I don't make any emotional attachments), to complete a mission you couldn't care less about.

Oh, I forgot about the snipers. Fuck those fucking snipers. They're invisible, incredibly hard to hit, always far away from you cause their fucking snipers. To the right here is a picture of them. I couldn't find any gameplay pictures, probably because their almost always invisible. Oh, and you don't take any of your items with you into the game, so if you get injured the only way to heal is by going to little health machines to heal you.

Overall: D, sorry. I feel bad for giving it this grade. Partly because I'm such a fan of the series. But that's also the very reason I gave it that grade. It feels like something out of an alternate dimension or something. Like it's very makeup doesn't belong in the Fallout Universe and kind of just leaked into it from some other game universe. Doom, maybe?