Posts Tagged ‘assassins creed’
Assasin’s Creed: Bloodlines PSP bundle detailed
To celebrate Assassin’s Creed PSP debut, Sony has announced that they will be released a limited edition PSP bundle appropriately entitle the Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines PSP Entertainment Pack.
This bundle will go on sale in November for $199.99 and include:
- White PSP-3000
- Assasin’s Creed: Bloodlines
- Currently unannounced UMD movie
- 2GB Memory card
So, it looks like despite the impending release of the PSP Go, Sony is staying true to their previous hardware and UMD format.
Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines will be out for the PSP on November 10th, 2009.
Velvet Assassin Game Review–Please Shoot This In The Back Of The Head
So Velvet Assassin finally managed to show itself, despite a long string of delays and various excuses as to why nobody could manage to lay hands on it. And now that it’s finally out, is it any good? Is it worth your rental or purchase dollar?
My answer? Not a chance. If it were possible to put a game on trial for war crimes, I would happily sit on the prosecution on this one.
You’ll play as Violette Summer, a British secret agent in the field in the declining days of World War II. Violette is a lovely, charming lass with plenty of genteel English charm, and she’s also a trained instrument of death and mayhem. She got that way after her husband, an RAF pilot, died in combat. Feeling she needed to do something to atone for her loss–and get a note of vengeance in the bargain–she went in for MI6 training and thus came out a spy. She’ll be neck deep in Germany with no support from the English government whatever, and she’ll be doing as much damage as possible to help bring about the end of the Nazi regime.
But she’s not REALLY in Germany right now–she’s actually in hospital right now, dying from massive injuries sustained in her spying efforts. And you’re reliving her missions through a series of flashbacks.
This all sounds fairly innovative, of course, reliving your missions backward through an unusual perspective, but the problem is–the BIG problem, why I’d cheerfully put this game up in front of a firing squad, is that the gameplay is incredibly tiresome.
On the one hand, they’ve put some innovative concepts in here, such as a “morphine mode” which slows down your memories and allows you to engage in killing on a rampant scale, temporarily. And of course, as numerous other gamers have already suggested, playing an attractive female character in third person vantage has some advantages of its own. Admittedly, as advantages go, these are pretty minor at best, and frankly, of limited appeal.
The disadvantages are much, MUCH more tragic—mainly, this is a game that requires a lot of sneaking around, especially in the early stages, and I have never been one to enjoy the sneaking around. I’m going toe to toe with NAZIS. I expect to be able to bust some serious caps up in some fascists. One particularly annoying segment in the beginning required me to jam a knife in a Nazi while his partner wandered off. If after doing the killing on the first one, you don’t get the body sufficiently hidden in sufficiently rapid fashion, you’ll be attacked by the second. You’ve only got the assassin’s knife you’ve been using all along, and that’s not going to do a whole lot of good against the German with the grease gun.
And that in a nutshell is the biggest problem with Velvet Assassin—entirely too much sneaking around. If you recognize games like Assassin’s Creed (that one even HAS the word assassin in it), or Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell or No One Lives Forever, well, that’s not a surprise. I kind of caught that one myself. Oh, sure, some people can’t get enough of stealth action games like this, and for some, the adventure and romance of being a spy in World War II is just entirely too much to resist. Depending on your very specific tastes, you’ll either love this game or wish it’d never been made.
Assassin’s Creed soundtrack available
Ubisoft has released the soundtrack of the popular stealth-action game Assassin’s Creed.
It features 11 tracks from the game, all from the world-renowned Danish game composer Jesper Kyd (known for the Hitman series and many other games), and is now available on Amazon for $7.99 and iTunes for $9.99.
Assassin’s Creed makes its way to the iPhone
Originally said to be hitting the App Store by May, word has recently gotten out that the iPhone (and iPod touch) version of Assassin’s Creed is now available for download.
Entitled Assassin’s Creed: Altair’s Chronicles the game is priced at $9.99 and looks to give you an experience similar to that of its console counterparts. In fact, if you’ve ever played the game for the Nintendo DS all this is, is a port with improved graphics.
Read (Joystiq)
Assassin’s Creed hitting App Store by May
Gameloft, mobile-game-publishing-behemoth, has recently stated that the iPhone (and iPod touch) version of Assassin’s Creed is set to join the likes of games like The Oregon Trail by this May.
This release window comes after the discovery that Assassin’s Creed would in fact be hitting the App Store along with Terminator Salvation which would come at a later date.
If Assassin’s Creed is proven to be successful on this new mobile platform, who’s to say we won’t be seeing iPhone versions of games like Gears of War and Halo? Oh yeah, Microsoft, bummer.
Read (Joystiq)
Assassin’s Creed on Steam for $10
Ubisoft and Valve are running a Steam promotion on some Ubi games, and the first one of those is the “Director’s Cut” edition of Assassin’s Creed, which will retail for only $9.99 for the next 24 hours.
The new Ubisoft promotion deal will see one of the publisher’s titles getting a 50% discount for a 24 hour period each day of this week.
Assassin’s Creed was originally released back in 2007 on the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. A sequel is rumored to be in development as well, with further details to be released at the upcoming E3.
Assassin’s Creed coming to iPhone
News comes from PocketGamer that Ubisoft’s sneaky Assassin’s Creed is coming to the iPhone in the near future. There are little to no details about the game, but we can expect some sort of open-world gameplay that made the original Assassin’s Creed so special.
Assassin’s Creed was originally released on the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in 2007, and will now find its way to Apple’s iPhone (and iPod touch) as well. Mobile game maker Gameloft is said to be developing the game, in addition to creating the upcoming Terminator Salvation for the iPhone as well.
Assassin’s Creed Video Game Review–Specialization Is For Insects
A lot of people had fun with Assassin’s Creed on the Xbox 360. I am not one of them.
In a mindbender of a plotline, you play as the distant descendant of a legendary assassin, Altair. You’re stuck in the middle of a lab in 2012, having memories extracted from you on the genetic level about all the stuff your legendary assassin great-great-great-many times over grandfather did. Your character will be remembering these events, but you’ll be the one playing them.
Altair did a whole lot of damage to the so-called Assassin’s Guild, breaking all three of its cardinal rules on one mission, and thus getting demoted all the way down to novice. This means, sadly, that all the sweet things you can do in the first level will be off limits to you until you can re-learn them. I can’t even express how ludicrous this is–demotion equalling loss of ability is too preposterous to even try and refute.
So you’ll be going about your business, trying to regain your former status (and ability, somehow) by carrying out a series of missions related to finding something that will end a war permanently. Worse yet, further complications will come around by introducing the now-popular Mayan end of the world date of December 21, 2012.
On a visual level, Assassin’s Creed is patently top-notch. And all the bells and whistles are present with great sound and level design and the like. Indeed, whoever compared Assassin’s Creed to a giant parkour run wasn’t just whistling in the dark. And the plot is massive, if confusing in more than a few points.
But the biggest problem in this game is its lack of substance. The missions are mostly information gathering runs, without a whole lot of fighting or action. This makes sense on some level–it’s not Warrior’s Creed or Soldier’s Creed, it’s ASSASSIN’S Creed. If you get in a big rolling fight then you’ve probably done your job wrong from the word go. This makes the problem a structural one—if you don’t want to play the stealthy assassin, then you don’t want to play Assassin’s Creed.
Specialization, folks, is for INSECTS. Robert Heinlein said it first and best. The best games may well require you to be the most versatile. Look at some of the greats—where you have to gather information, act on that information, and see it through to the end. You’ll have to plan your approaches, fight your way through a legion of foes and solve some puzzles to get where you’re going. You get to play on every conceivable level at once—strategic, tactical, and operational. Games where you do the same thing, over and over, seldom offer as much fun as those games that offer variety, no matter how pretty they look.
So if you love the parts of the various games out there where you have to sneak around, then you’ll no doubt love Assassin’s Creed. It’s a beautiful game with a storyline so dense that light cannot escape from its surface. But if you want something fast-paced with a more comprehensible storyline, you’ll likely turn this one down.
Assassin’s Creed, Rock Band, MotorStorm, LittleBigPlanet Coming to PSP
About time PSP got some love: Sony has announced that Rock Band, Assassin’s Creed, LittleBigPlanet and MotorStorm are coming to the handheld platform.
Not much is known about any of the titles at the moment since they are yet to be officially announced. However, Joystiq reports that Rock Band Unplugged will feature an in-game music store through the system’s wireless capabilities and that its gameplay will be similar to Frequency and Amplitude, Harmonix’s past rhythm game efforts.
Assassin’s Creed will be an “exclusive installment” which hopefully translates to a completely new story or an expanded one and not another port. LittleBigPlanet is being made in conjunction with creator Media Molecule and will pack new levels and areas specifically created for the PSP.
Meanwhile, MotorStorm Arctic Edge is being developed by Pursuit Force makers Bigbig and will be released on PS2 and PSP. As the name implies, it will be set in Alaska.
All games are due out later this year.
Ubi Announced Assassin’s Creed, Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon Sequels
Not able to surprise anyone anymore, Ubisoft has revealed that Assassin’s Creed 2, Splinter Cell Conviction and a new Ghost Recon game, among others, will be released across its next fiscal year, which starts April 1, 2009 and ends March 31, 2010.
The company also delayed the first-person survival game I Am Alive, noting that it “will require further development time and will now bolster the line-up for 2009-10.” It was originally scheduled for release this March.
Ubisoft pointed out that the upcoming time period will see the company deliver seven titles in existing franchises, launch 3 new brands, release four license-based tie-ins and provide additional entries in its line of casual titles.
Assassin’s Creed Sequel Confirmed, Talked About, Even Dated
Confirming the utterly obvious, Joystiq reports that a sequel to Assassin’s Creed is indeed in development and that it was talked about by Ubisoft during its first-half fiscal 2008-09 conference call. The confirmation indicates that the publisher is hoping to release the game during its fiscal 2010, which would place it during the holiday 2009 release period.
More information comes from GiantBomb, who, during the taping of an episode of Gametrailers’ Bonus Round, picked up word from industry analyst Michael Pachter that the middle ages setting of the game will move hundreds of years forward into the 18th century, most probably focusing on the French Revolution. However, this is yet to be confirmed, but would be an interesting approach to take for the developers.
Ubisoft Sues Company Over Assassin’s Creed Leak
Gamespot reports that Ubisoft is suing Optical Experts Manufacturing, who they allege had leaked a copy of Assassin’s Creed on the Internet. The publisher is saying that one of the employees of the Charlotte, North Carolina-based disc replication company got a copy of the game and proceeded to release it onto peer-to-peer networks.
The article also discloses that the PC version of the game sold only 40,000 copies in the US through june, but that over 700,000 pirated copies of the game were downloaded. It also relates an odd-sounding claim that Ubisoft intentionally crippled the game by putting a bug in the code that would crash the game as a security measure, and that negative reviews of the buggy leaked version harmed their reputation.
Ubisoft is asking for over $20 million in damages and legal fees.