toblix

Sounds awesome. Also, there should be some "throw drunkards off the pier" missions. It's hilarious and has comical value to see the poor guys flailing about, knocking each other into the drink.

Fine, don't. Also, I just downloaded the soundtrack illegally (is there any other way?), and it is truly awesome. edit: I just found out: There was nothing illegal about it. They haven't release the entire soundtrack. They just put out some of the tracks, the fucking retards.

Holy maloney! All these missions seem a thousand times awesomer than the ones I've ever got. I'm so confused! I always made a point of uncovering all the missions before starting, and I'm sure I never spotted a mission that wasn't eavesdrop, pick pocket, interrogate or informant. Ah, so they're informant quests, then? So the problem was that I got unlucky and got two or three similar quests from them (kill these five guys in three minutes, etc.) in a row, and (naturally) assumed they all gave quests like that. Fucking fucks in a shit. Could you describe the mission types for me? The market stand breaking and guarding sounds awesome!

I thought so to until I realised it would become horribly boring and tedious as the number of unlocated flags decreased. What?! I've never even heard of these. They both sound awesome, though. Where do you get these?

Just finished it, and bullets! Awesome graphics, beautiful cities and shit. Awesome movement, climbing, jumping etc. Combat was fun, although it often felt random. I never believed all the talk I head about it being annoyingly repetitive, but people were right. All the assassinations were one of: Run up to the guy and kill him, then run away and hide. Run up to the guy, chase him around a little, kill him, then run away or hide. After each assassination, there was a cut-scene. They were all completely alike. There were no interesting elements or variations or anything. Not really a satisfying reward. There were almost no moments where everything in the game came together and did something fantastic. The closest thing is the chases, either chasing the target or being chased by guards: here, the detailed level design, with open plazas, bustling markets, dank alleyways and unexpected blind alleys, together with the climbing and jumping and the fantastic crowds dynamics really made some magic happen. () Other than that, though, there was nothing. Before assassinating the target, you had to do at least three missions. These were one of: Eavesdrop (the easiest): Sit on a bench and press Y. Always the same happens: some boring conversation between two guys. Interrogate (the less easier): Walk up to a guy and beat him until he speaks. If there are thugs around, wait a bit until there aren't. This is followed by some boring conversation. Pickpocket (the easy): Walk behind a guy and hold B. If you fail (rare occurence) sit on a bench for ten seconds and try again. Never any variation, never any special sequences or anything. Informant (the annoying crap which nobody does): Walk around and kill some guys and come back before the runs out. You always had to do three, and you could always choose freely, any three. Naturally, the player would just choose the easiest to get these boring things out of the way. To find the missions, you had to climb tall structures. This was pretty cool when the structure was interesting, like the cathedral and some churches. You actually had to find a suitable point of entry, and then do some sweet climbing on tiny ledges way above the streets. There were about four of these sweet structures and a million of the boring ones you could just press right trigger, A and up and wait until you reached the top. Awesome checkpoint frequency. I never had to repeat crap I'd already done. A fight won was never repeated, which rocked. Awesome skipping of tedious shit like riding between towns, which brings me to the next point: This game has to be the victim of the most fucked up game design decisions ever: The Kingdom. That vast area was totally unnecessary, uninteresting and even the game never used it! There was a fucking town and a huge encampment and shit and nothing happened there. What the fuck? All that crap must've taken years worth of man hours to create and I think I can safely say that one hundred per cent of the players skipped it whenever possible. Instead of making this useless thing, you could fix so many other issues this game has. Although this game seems to be about stealthily assassinating guys, it's really a swashbuckling game. There's so much sword fighting, especially towards the end it's ridiculous. Only the frequent checkpoints saved this from becoming too annoying. What a horrible ending. Suddenly something exciting was happening in the present and then it ends. Anyway, this game was a huge disappointment, but fun nevertheless. I hope the sequel takes place in another era and drops all the unnecessary shit and follows the rest of my constructive critique. Also, they could just drop the fucking horseback riding. These guys spent so much work on all the wrong things, I've never seen anything like it.

I know how you feel, Marek. Stupid policies that ruin something awesome suck.

That's too bad. I always fail at that sort of thing because I associate the various buttons with their position, not just the symbols or letters on them.

PLAYSTATION MENZ In the quick time mode, or action mode, or whatever the fuck. The playstation button symbols that appear -- does their on-screen position match the button position, or are they totally random?

Regardless, the fact that you execute what may be considered the "bosses" of the game in exactly the same way you'd execute a drunk or a crazy man, only less gracefully, is pretty lame. With the game being what it is, though, I guess I don't see any obvious ways of making killing more interesting. I think it would be cool to, for example, ally yourself with people and time various types of diversions like attacks or flash crowds say, along some known path the guy'd take, so you'd have to set these up and time them. I dunno, sounds like shit when I describe it here.

What, this? Right. So there should be alternate ways of killing the bad guys, not involving getting noticed at all. I mean, this game is all about not being noticed, silent but deadly, etc. So it makes no sense that you can't do the main killings that way. I found these killings to be the awesomest, as you get the assassin feeling of having killed someone in a crowd, and nobody notices before you're long gone. I find this happens so seldom it never annoys me. The cities have so many ledges, windows and beams it's incredible. Yeah. I just kill them right away, since there's no penalty other than a temporary loss of "sync".

Yeah, I'm getting the feeling I'm just going to get more and more people to assassinate, the only thing changing per "level" being I have to kill more guys, I have to do more quests before killing each one, aaand that's it. When I think about how fucking incredibly astonishingly awesome and huge and fucking impressively ridiculous the Assassin's Creed world is (three huge cities, a couple of smaller ones, and all the shit in between), how amazingly sweet and smooth and gorgeous and dusty and realistic and huge it looks, it makes me think. I've always been a sucker for these things. Everything is hand-crafted, there's no city generator in the game that lets me run indefinitely in one direction. The world is GTA San Andreas huge, but still it seems kind of uninteresting. I wonder how the game would've been if they used the same time and resources but chose to make smaller areas with more varied gameplay. I guess the game I'm sort of wanting this to be is Hitman, where you have a billion different ways to off the guy, and never even have to be close to them, and I get that that's not the game they were making. Given the game mechanics in Assassin's Creed, though, I almost don't see how they could make the assassinations themselves any more interesting. Think about it, Altair can't even pick shit up, which limits the amount of interesting things he can do immensely.

Yeah, visually it's Goddamn incredible. I think the informant missions are awesome too -- walking behind someone, at their speed only slightly faster. Then he freezes and falls to the ground, and the guy who was walking behind him is nowhere to be seen. That's way cooler than the assassinations themselves, at least as far as I've played.

I really think this will become an invaluable resource over time.

I love how -- again and again -- I'd look at a puzzle piece and conclude that there was no possible way to reach it, and then gradually go from that to seeing how obvious the solution is. I wonder if Braid's time mechanics are just great because they're well designed, or also because they touch on some really fundamental, primeval perception of linear time? Could Braid be to our basal ganglias and right parietal corteces what optical illusions are to our Medulla Oblongatas?

These new features sound absolutely awesome. My initial misreading of the awareness ring -- the awesomeness ring -- sounded even better, but still.

Look for El Brasso.

Holy crap, I remember it now! The radar with visibility cones! This explains everything! So, I guess this is still missing in MGS4?

I'd try it, but probably not.

Have you tried blowing into the DVD tray? A huge piece of crap may have landed on the lens or something.

I got a bit of a shock when playing Assassin's Creed today. Suddenly wham, the disc is damaged. I took it out, put it back in and I haven't had any problems since. Unnerving, though.

That's fucking hardcore. I'm impressed and/or amazed by people actually attempting this. I'm a bit suprised and disappointed the last achievement is tied to that rather than the stars, though.

Just to be sure, we're talking about a single run-through of the entire game in 45 minutes, right? You don't get to retry parts of it or anything?

I'd possibly attempt a speed-run that was rewindable, i.e. you shape a perfect run-through of the game much like I had to do on some parts of the the final level. Of course, even that wouldn't work with all the world-specific scenarios, but hey. I sort of dig the concept of always being able to rewind back and try again and end up with a complete string of absolutely perfect moves. For example, some of the jumping sequences where you'd rewind back and forth and adjust momentum and angle -- a complete replay of that would look fucking awesome.

Re: the tags, what the hell? That's at worst constructive criticism!

The whole game structure is based around restarting multiple times, each time getting further than the last. I sort of get it, but I'd much prefer a more traditional structure, or even better, a linear structure. I hear the Wii version will have a more toblix-friendly mission structure, but I also hear it can only display five zombies at a time or something.