Reviews: Assassin's Creed

This week is a very downtempo week for me, with all my friends gone and school wrapped up, I'm working 9-5, M-F, and after work I'm just kind of bumming around. From several of my friends, I've heard Assassin's Creed 2 is a terrific game. I don't really buy video games, I use Gamefly, and since it just came out, it's certainly not available. That's okay, I can wait. So I decided this week to rent the first game, I figured it might be useful to play it before the second. My friends at work that had played the game said it was "pretty good" albeit repetitive, but worth a play-through.

They were wrong. I'm not a intense gamer (anymore) but I play through maybe one game a month, or every other month, because it's pretty fun. I can unequivocally say this is the worst game I have played, in a long time. Which is surprising a bit, because the online reviews were decent and my friends said it was an entertaining game. But I got about 50% through and was sick of it already, I can't stomach the idea of finishing it, even with the massive amount of free time I have this week, I'd much rather go to the gym.

Where to start? I'll hit the plot, in one word, trite. It's 2012, and you're some random guy mugged off the street to run through a memory machine and reclaim your "genetic memory" of an Arabic assassin in the Third Crusades. Or at least I think you're Muslim, it never really mentions. For whatever reason, your genes can remember specific lectures from your master from 1000 years ago, but not finding the freaking Holy Grail. It's not actually the Holy Grail, but it's some similar "deity" item. So you have to play through your ancestor's memory to get it, all the while you are being used by this modern corporation that wants this deity item. Indiana Jones and Lucasfilm, you probably have a lawsuit. I forget to mention most of the time you're not seeking this "deity" item, you're running on errands killing guys that your master think is corrupting the world. And voila, turns out they aren't that bad and your master is the bad guy. Boy, you never saw that coming.

Anyways, it's a video game, so I'm willing to stomach a lot of stupid stuff. That is pretty awful, but as long as the game play was entertaining, so be it. It's not. One of my friends, and several online reviews label it "repetitive." This is the understatement of the century. They did well to allow you to climb cities and run across rooftops, but there's 5 things you do:
1st- Travel to cities that are way too far away.
2nd- Interrogate people, consisting of listening to them talk, then following them until they get in an alleyway and beat the crap out of them.
3rd- Pickpocket people, which is the same as interrogating them, except you press a button to steal an item instead of beating them up.
4th- Save citizens- For some reason, the 3rd Crusades was a time where civil police were even more corrupt than NOPD during Katrina. They gather in groups, and push around citizens calling them thieves. You kill any guards nearby. Woohoo.
5th- "Synchronize" your maps, which to expand your barely intelligible map, you have to climb a tower, look around, and then jump off. Climbing a tower consists of holding "free run" and waiting till you get to the top.

Oh, and occasionally, you actually kill these bad guys your master tells you to. But you have to do each of these several times to gather evidence your guild is voluntarily withholding from you (because you're reckless) before killing them. Mindnumbing.

The game was praised for the "awareness" factor it gives to crowds, if you kill someone in plain view, citizens get scared and guards get angry. This is innovative? Fable 2, and probably a dozen other games had this. Regardless, when you flee an area, people remember what you look like and you won't necessarily immediately escape attack. For some reason, you cannot hide in an alleyway and restore your status to "unknown." There are four things- passing by monks, haystacks, roof "gardens", and benches. For some reason, if you sit down on a bench when guards are not looking at you, they forget about you. But not, for example, if you are on a rooftop 2 miles away. Unless that rooftop has a "roof garden" which is a little gazebo with curtains. All of this just reeks of very rigid "in-the-box" thinking. As does the integration part, where you learn how to play the game. A good game will make this entertaining and not obviously "we are teaching you how to do everything." The developers probably said "screw it" and spent time teaching guards to look everywhere but haystacks, roof gardens, monks, and benches. Oh, and speaking of repetitivity, the AI comments are unbelievable. Everyone says the same thing, people getting mugged by soldiers say one of two things, the soldiers mugging say maybe two or three, but it seems incredibly lazy of the developers to have so little variation when you spend the entire f***ing game doing these activities.

I've savaged the innovative AI (which is anything but) and the awful plot, let's talk about combat. It is terrible. Combat doesn't make a game, it's a confluence of a lot of factors, for example Fable and Fable 2 are not particularly challenging, but they are still top-notch games in my book because they have decent plots and entertaining quests. This has 5 quests (see above) repeating over and over, in environments that look the exact same. (It is the Middle East) Anyways, on to combat. In what may have been a redeeming factor of the game, it falls short. Danny de Vito short. It is painfully simple, the enemies are impossible to kill if you just hack and slash (bonus) yet you can defend against 10 enemies pretty easily, and kill them by countering. Which consists of defending, and then pressing X when they start to attack. It is stupid.

Character development is another important part of a game. I guess since I've been using Fable as a "world game" benchmark, I'll say Fable does pretty well in this. The GTA games excel here. Assassin's Creed does not. I read some reviews where they say the character is "fascinating" in his complexity, or some similar crap. I want to beat them over the head with my Xbox, because this is the most one-dimensional stupid character I may have ever played, and given I played Donkey Kong as a kid, that's saying something. The main character has a stupid voice, it's supposed to be ominous I suppose, but it rings even more fake than my British accent would to a Mancunian. He's a rebel, who doesn't follow the tenets of the Assassin's Creed, and thus, an outcast. Wow. A non-conformist. Will the innovations never stop? As for the original character mugged by this evil corporation (another brilliant new innovation) there is zero character development, at least in the 50% of the game or so I played. He's a bartender. He doesn't know why he's there. That's about it, no mention of how the evil corporation found out his DNA contains evidence from 1,000 years back of an Assassin, which the memory machine can amazingly skip to the important sections.

All in all, this is an awful game. I started it, wasn't that impressed, but figured the next day I'd continue to see if it got better. I did that Sunday, Monday, and now today, but I will not be making that mistake again. The graphics are totally unimpressive too, some areas have pretty nice vistas, but are simple objects are completely undetailed. It would look totally mediocre on a large HDTV. On my video game scale (Buy it, Gamefly it, Avoid it) it will not surprise you to know this is an Avoid it game. Seriously, the most boring unentertaining uninspired piece of crap since Donkey Kong 64. It makes me very, very hesitant to pick up the 2nd one...though I must say, the location of Renaissance Italy is more interesting to me. Maybe this was a key factor in me not liking it, but ancient history isn't very appealing to me, and Middle Eastern history even less so. I don't know why, it's like China, I have no interest in going there. Ditto to Syria, Israel, and northern Egypt, but I just wasted the last few days doing it on this worthless POS of a game.

ps- I will give them minor props for the historical accuracy of the game. Apparently almost all the characters (including the bad guys you kill) were real historical figures, though I doubt each of them were assassinated. It doesn't come close to making up for how awful of a game it was, though.

Review of the Motorola Droid

So I've had my Motorola Droid for a bit over two weeks now, and I thought I'd post my thoughts on it. Reviewing it immediately is a bad idea, as first of all, I was pretty giddy, second of all, I had never had a smartphone, and third of all, I hadn't gotten used to it to make a full judgement. I'll break it down simple.

The Pros:
Screen- The screen is gorgeous, and very responsive to touch. It's kind of neat that the screen turns off when you have your phone at your ear during a call, but sometimes it doesn't turn back on immediately when you go to end the call, takes a second or so. Graphics are very powerful...SNES emulator looks great on it. Contra 3, however, is still impossible.
Camera- The video is ridiculous. 720p on this thing.
Keyboard- Some people like to slam the physical keyboard, and it could be designed better, by offsetting the keys or creating small dimples, but after two weeks, I'm pretty used to it. The touch screen keyboard is great, but I like the real keyboard feel better. Haptic feedback on the main four buttons is great, and they are thought out very well- Return, Menu, Home, and Search.
Openness- Full integration and support with Google Voice. Tethering via USB/Bluetooth available through the Android Market for free. You can install apps by downloading them from the phone, or copying them to the SD card, you aren't limited to only the Android market. Tons of Apps on the Android market, not as much as for the iPhone, yet, but I haven't found anything I'm missing yet.
Battery Life- I'll be honest, I figured a phone like this with GPS, Bluetooth, Wifi, and ability to run multiple apps at a time would be a powerhog, and that it'd be difficult to get through the day without charging, though it's battery easily lasts a full day with fairly often use. I usually use it to listen to music walking around campus, (I lost my iPod at the Rochester airport, something poetic about that) browse websites occasionally, etc, and I don't have an issue with low battery. And that's with push Gmail and such running.
Verizon's 3G Network- It's fast. Impressively so. I've heard from plenty of my friends with iPhones that AT&T is iffy when you're outside of New Orleans, and even in the city their network gets overloaded sometimes, often at night, and slows to a crawl. No issue here. Back in Rochester, I got about 1mbps down in my house. I even got 3G coverage in my basement, which has poor cell reception. At the Atlanta airport, it was about 2.5mbps down. In my house here in New Orleans, I get about 1.5mbps down. For comparison, my cable internet is running at about 400kbps, which is dreadful. But what can you do, they have a monopoly? Anyways, Verizon's network is as good as they say.
Swappable Battery/SD- So the phone has 256mb memory built in, and that's where you can install apps. At first, critics questioned over whether that'd be enough. Most apps are only about 700k, the biggest one I have is 1.3mb, so you'd have to be a nutjob to fill it. It uses a MicroSD card, came with a 16gb one by default, which I say, hooray for standards. Speaking of standards, it uses MicroUSB to charge and move data to your MicroSD card. Critics also said that MicroUSB has a charge limit via computer, which is true, it charges pretty slowly, but it came with a USB-to-outlet adapter. The battery, which is swappable (and pretty inexpensive, $30 or so) charges via the wall in a bit over an hour, pretty fast.

Nice Things I Never Use
Car Mode/GPS navigation- The car mode is pretty neat, and I can see it being very useful. GPS navigation is excellent, as good as TomTom but with the benefit of Google layers, like the traffic one. I don't have a car, so I use neither, though I did get voice navigation to my friends house about 45minutes outside of Nola when another friend was driving me there.
Voice Search- It works quite well, I just don't really use it. It is odd though, that Google Voice Search and "Voice Dialer" are separate. Google Voice search goes through the internet, your contacts, your music, etc, which is nice. But as far as calling your contacts, or dialing a number by voice, you'll want to use Voice dialer. I don't really use either, though. There's been talk about Google Visual Search, where you take a picture of something and it tries to search for it. Like the voice search it's very neat, but I don't foresee myself using it much.


The Cons
There's only two I can think of.

Camera- The camera itself is amazing. 5 megapixels, as I said, it can take 720p video. But the software is crap...it takes 4-5 seconds to snap a picture, save, and then snap another one. It's just too slow, but this can be fixed by a firmware upgrade. It's received a fair amount of attention, so hopefully Google/Motorola are working on it.
Music/Movie player- The music player is adequate, though it could be better. Video player, it'd be nice to have installed by default. I use the music player a lot, since I lost my iPod, and it does the job, but there's no equalizer, and the music is organized mediocrely. Not bad, though.

All in all, I absolutely love this phone, and talking to friends, I think it's probably the best phone out there right now. It's got several features (some critical, like openness) that easily beat the iPhone, and as far as other Android phones, it's just the whole package squared together. Most of them, like the G1, G2, Droid Eris, etc, are good...but not great. I use Google Apps all the time- Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Voice, Google Reader, Google Maps, oh, and, y'know, that search engine, so for someone who is a Googler like me, it is exceptionally brilliant. It integrates great with Facebook and Gmail, merging your contacts info, which is awesome, yet occasionally creepy. For example, when I text someone, it shows their most recent Facebook status, which is neat, though odd. The price is very reasonable, $200 with a mail-in rebate, I ended up paying only $100 because my contract was up for renewal. The data plan is $30 a month, my cable internet is $52 a month, and it's slower, so it puts it into perspective for me.

Reviews: Mirror's Edge

A while back this summer, I saw my friend Jimbo playing a game at my friend's apartment, a game that was all about parkour and jumping across buildings and such. It looked pretty cool, I asked him the name, (Mirror's Edge) and when I got down to New Orleans, I gameflied it. (yes, it's a verb)

Much as from what I saw, it is a very entertaining game. A first-person shooter without the shooter, as it says. Running across rooftops, climbing up barriers and over fences, it's pretty much all the parkour stuff I wish I could do...but am far too lazy to do, and I'd rather not die. It's definitely an "out-of-the-box" game, with different ways to get to your location but with that carries a bit of frustration, there were a few points where I was pretty irritated about not being able to find a path to the next area. Most of the time though, I turned it off, and when I came back I found a route pretty quickly.

My only real complaints about Mirror's Edge are the plot and length of the game. The length is quite simply, short, a trend I've been noticing with several games recently, I thought Gears of War and its sequel were both pretty short, although quite entertaining particularly in multiplayer mode. This is a game I could have finished in a few days, having only played a few hours. And the plot? Well, I am a sucker for dystopian-style environments, but it was pretty predictable and fairly hackneyed.

It's not too hard to get used to the controls, they did a good job with it and after a few minutes you can play the game quite naturally. The graphics are gorgeous, particularly when playing on an HDTV, the city environment is really quite stunning. I'm not sure if the cleanliness and brightness of the city were meant as a contrast to the oppressive government (probably so), but I would have liked a mission or two in the dark, or rain. Or both, I know it's cheesy, but hey, the plot was pretty cheesy anyways.

All in all it's a good game to play, I recommend checking it out if you can. It's for Xbox, PS3, and PC. On my ratings scale (Buy, Gamefly, Avoid) I'd give it a Gamefly rating. Definitely worth a rent, and while the running trials help to extend the longevity of the game, the plotline is so short that if you buy it, you'll be wondering if you can return it after 2-3 weeks. I can see this being a game that would be quite enjoyable to re-play 6months after you finish or so.

Reviews: Twilight Princess

I heard great things about Twilight Princess, from the internet and from friends. And I have to say, it lived up to all of the expectations, I was extremely impressed. I would give it an easy 9/10, maybe a bit more, but it wasn't quite perfect. Some things to say about it- The writers, it seemed, wanted to give the Mario Bros franchise a run for their money in "Most-trippy-plot-ever." Despite being incredibly bizarre and weird, the plot worked well. The wolf/Link was an awesome addition, it changed the game completely. The graphics were, in true Wii form, not unbelievable, but decent to get by. The items you receive are awesome, definitely a step up from other games, it seemed they wanted to expand upon the traditional ones, and they did. My only complaint is you can't use them enough outside of the Temple you find them, for example, the Dominion Rod is cool and all (the Spinner was my favorite) but in both cases outside of the temple...not terribly useful.

The dungeons were awesome. I don't know if it was me, but it seemed like they were all a bit shorter than in the past, which was good. They were a good chunk of time, but with the exception of one temple, I never was getting bored of them. That exception was the devil known as the Sky Temple, where the weird fetuses (as we call them in our suite) live. God did the double-hookshot get old fast. All the temples in general seemed sufficiently puzzling, yet not frustratingly long (which some previous Zelda's were, cough cough Ocarina Water Temple). I also liked how they diversified them, ie- Yeti's mansion, Sky temple, Shadow world, etc. They really varied it up. Speaking of varying it up, fighting Zant was awesome, revisiting all the dungeons, and Ganondorf was awesome too, you really used all your different skills. Oh, another big thumbs-up was the sword-fighting skills. In most games, learning new moves is completely useless. In Twilight Princess, they are enormously helpful.

My only real criticism of the game was it seemed, more than most Zeldas, too focused on the plot. I almost never found myself browsing around the town doing random sidequests or in general, doing something unrelated to the plot. Some say "well you weren't looking for it" but in the previous two, they just kind of happened. The plot was great but you don't really associate with Hyrule or its people much....all the side missions were actual parts of the main storyline. One of the problems with this is it shortens the lifespan of the game. It was an awesome game, but now that I've beaten it, I really don't have any desire (or need) to go back and play around. A phenomenal game though.