toblix

Assassin's Creed II

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This game has sections in it called 'Assassin's Tombs' that are basically rooms that would have fit right in Sands of Time. They're the old-school "here's a room, figure out how to get to the exit" type platform/lite-puzzle rooms that made me love SoT so much.

I highly recommend checking this game out, if you haven't already. After a disastrously slow opening hour or two, the game really opens up and becomes kind of great.

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I've really been enjoying this game so far, but the one thing that bothers me is that you can't skip cutscenes. Some segments are especially annoying because there is sometimes a sort of trial-and-error process and having to watch a cutscene over and over again after dying is annoying.

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Yeah not being able to skip custscenes, randomly jumping in the wrong direction to your death, missions where you have to kill multiple targets undetected being really touchy, the slow burn of the beginning, these are all valid complaints but seriously, pointing out these flaws is like a finger pointing to the moon, don't concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.

:mock:

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Yeah not being able to skip custscenes, randomly jumping in the wrong direction to your death, missions where you have to kill multiple targets undetected being really touchy, the slow burn of the beginning, these are all valid complaints but seriously, pointing out these flaws is like a finger pointing to the moon, don't concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.

:mock:

Oh, I'm totally with you. They do so many things right that it's very easy to look over the few mistakes. For instance, stuff I've been noticing that's awesome:

- The way Ezio adjusts his cape after a scuffle. Cosmetic, but immersive.

- Minimap differentiating the elevation of map elements.

- Collectibles with actual rewards.

- No particular scarcity of money, so I don't feel so bad when I spend a little bit on a new weapon rather than a villa upgrade (though at this point, my Villa is fully upgraded architecturally)

- Throwing money is actually a really valid and useful way to dispatch crowds.

- Assassination moves that actually make sense and make you feel like the badass you supposedly are.

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Oh man the "Truth" puzzles get insane the closer to the end. It took me 30 minutes to finish one of those circle match up picture thingies. I can't imagine what the last puzzle will be.

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Holy Christ, I just walked behind two guards in an attempt to assassinate them. Normally, Ezio would just jump up into the air and stab them both into their backs, driving them to the ground. I must have walked up a little too close because instead, he walked between the two guards and stabbed them simultaneously through their throats as they turned to face him.

This game is insane.

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I can just hear Jake making a sweet box quote "Now with 2nd hidden blades!" and "Stab 2 dudes in the head at the same time"

That said I find stabbing two dudes at the same time to be repeatedly satisfying. Try stealing a pole-arm (spears or halberds) counter animations are quite brutal and fantastic. Hammer/blunt weapon animations are also painful looking but gets stale quicker, many of the guards have some kinda of mace on them so pole-arms are more of a treat.

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I would go as far as to say massive improvement. The platforming somehow feels even more fluid than the first game but also requires a little more finesse. The sidequests have a bit more variety and just seem to be better thought out. A lot of the elements of the plot are actually interesting this time (and the end isn't nearly as disappointing as AC1's, though perhaps nearly as cryptic).

Honestly, this is my game of the year. Best $60 I've spent in a while. I actually got all 1000 achievement points too and still enjoyed the game all the way through (collecting feathers is rewarding and the environments are actually interesting enough to make you want to explore, with significant contrast to the flags in AC1).

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I like to think I'm fashionably late in coming to the same conclusions, but damn this game is good. I'm surprised at how much I'm enjoying it actually, as I only rented it on a whim. I'm really liking the voice acting and cut scenes this time around as well, they've got a lot of mannerisms in the animations that liven it up.

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Oh man the "Truth" puzzles get insane the closer to the end. It took me 30 minutes to finish one of those circle match up picture thingies. I can't imagine what the last puzzle will be.

God man, I was stuck on one earlier for like 45 minutes and it was only the sixth or some shit. Reminds me of adventure games where just one horrendous puzzle can do you in for ages, but similarly satisfying when you do crack it.

And yes, this game is a tremendous accomplishment. While I didn't play the original to anywhere near the end, I did give it some considerable hours and it never really hooked me. I just didn't feel very invested in what was going on, and the gameplay didn't really do much for me. It felt like you had a good story, a great feat of technical engineering, and decent gameplay — but nothing holding it all together.

... which makes it remarkable how much I am enjoying this. It looks like they basically went through Grand Theft Auto and Fable 2 and worked out what makes those games so enjoyable. Particularly notable is the pillaging of the engaging way that GTA4 drives its story forward with rewardingly enjoyable cutscenes and intertwines loads of different characters, combined with how it reveals the world to you gradually.

Or to put it another way, everything the game has to offer is revealed to you slowly in a very rewarding manner rather than being all thrown at you early on. I remember reading about one of the AS1 developers saying how they really regretted revealing all your targets and shit so early on in the original, and rightfully so. Doing it Fable 2 style and starting off with a naive 17-year-old twat who learns the ropes along with you is a much better way to go.

Shit, it's great. Get it regardless of your AS1 opinion. :tup:

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Is it just me or did the last few decoder wheel puzzles not make any sense? I ended up lining it up to whatever picture was in the clue and then set the number of one I didn't know to a picture that it could be and cycled through the 3rd and pressed A after every spin. I would repeat that until I "solved" it.

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How are the console controls? I really want this game but I think I'd prefer the PC version.

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I can barely imagine it being playable with a keyboard/mouse to be honest. Third-person games generally control better with game pads in my experience, and Assassin's Creed 2 demands a lot from you when it comes to accurately navigating the environment.

Button-wise you'd probably be OK as it uses context-sensitive triggers extensively (you'll have to train yourself to get used to this rather than having separate buttons bound to everything), however not having the directional fidelity of the analogue stick will cause problems.

Not that you shouldn't get it on the PC, of course. However I'd be inclined to do what I did and get the Microsoft wireless receiver so you can connect a 360 pad to it.

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So I've played a little of the game and now can't separate the character Danny Wallace plays, and dear god the voice acting in the modern part, thus far, is dreadful.

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You think so? I didn't have any issues with the voice acting, although it keeps weirding me out how the main character in the modern world — which is thankfully only seen for like 1% of the game — has the same voice as Uncharted's Drake (both actor and performance).

Edited by Thrik

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You think so? I didn't have any issues with the voice acting, although it keeps weirding me out how the main character in the modern world — which is thankfully only seen for like 1% of the game — has the same voice as Uncharted's Drake (both actor and performance). ;(

His is the only half decent one, in the modern part, the other actors seem to be dry and unconvincing. The small amount in the past I have experienced is better, but nothing better than average.

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I think the characters themselves are just a bit shit, anyway. I didn't really clock the voice acting as being bad, but that might be because I was distracted by wanting to put the database guy's head through his monitor.

Fortunately the modern stuff is a minimal part of the game. It's getting to live in Renaissance Italy that makes the game really awesome for me, and thankfully I've not gone back to the modern world since plugging into the past (must be 12–15 hours in now). It almost seems like they shouldn't have bothered with the modern stuff because the game could easily stand up without it — but then I do like the awesome UI it justifies. :yep: And maybe it'll become more relevant later on. Or they could do an Assassin's Creed 1 and inch it forward to be continued in the next game.

Also, I think I'm just under halfway through and fuck me this game is big. At first I thought it was a bit of a GTA4-style deal where it's just one large city unlocked a section at a time. Instead it's... considerably bigger. And unlike the original there's actually lots of fun stuff to do in them, with missions making imaginative GTA-esque use of the world. :tup:

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Got it under the tree this morning. My mom's boyfriend/fiancee is actually a gamer, so he buys real (read: good) games rather than the standard "Oh, Billy likes vidjagames" shopper. Have played for an hour and a half and still don't have a weapon. Contrary to how that sounds, it is entirely rad. I absolutely loved AC1, unlike a lot of people, so this is astounding for me. So good. Yay!

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Having not played the original game, the beginning was confusing as fuck and that short rambling about Templars and apples of Eve didn't clear things out for me at all. Luckily I have no interest in those modern parts anyway.

The controls got some time getting used to as well and for once I would have hoped for a thorough tutorial explaining all the little nuances of climbing and combat (and not just how to control a newborn baby). For instance, while racing my brother on the rooftops, I kept performing awesome suicide wall jumps when I was actually just trying to climb the wall. The controls for these actions were explained immediately after the sequence.

Now that I'm familiar with the controls, the game feels brilliant though! I really enjoy exploring Florence and the missions so far have had enough variation to keep them interesting. I don't even have a weapon yet and I'm not minding it at all. The game's presentation of Italy is cheesy enough with merchants yelling "Formaggi!" and people in general being colorful and loud.

Ezio seems to be a huge douche too. For some reason I find that quite entertaining actually. On the other hand, he is not a very believable character, something that doesn't bother me too much as I expect him to turn all dark and quiet soon. Hearing his mother suggest him look for outlets other than

vaginas

felt a bit weird, though.

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Haha.

With time I've really warmed to the characters. Ezio naturally grows up as you progress, and even the secondary modern world characters don't lame me out as much as they did now I have returned to them and discovered more about them.

You might want to quickly read Wikipedia's summary of Assassins Creed 1's story like I did, though. Although the story is written in such a way that doesn't assume knowledge of it — the intro and Eden shit is explained in AS2 itself, and is meant to be cryptic as fuck — it does put things into more context.

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I got to go out of town on boxing day for a wedding, which means that just as I was getting to the end of Sequence 5, I'm away from my 360 for a week. After my time with AC2, I think my first impression is that I can see how it is a better game than it's predecessor, but I think I actually like AC1 more anyway, if only for the impact it had on me at the time. This game is excellent, but compared to Altair, Ezio seems clumsy. At least, I don't remember Altair being quite as suicidal as Ezio has proven to be. Story-wise, I'm very invested and absolutely loving everything. It's still a fantastic game by any means.

UbiSoft is freaking devious as well. All those diaries of Altair's that give you equipment upgrades really made me want to go and see more of his story. At that point, my mind made exactly the leap that they wanted it to and I thought "Hey, isn't the continuing story of Altair on PSP?" The fact that I would be out of town for a week when in full AC addiction made me decide to download AC:Bloodlines off of PSN and I've now played about a third of that as well. It's surprisingly well done. It got a fairly middling reception, which I don't think is deserved. I actually like it quite a bit. It retains pretty much everything about AC1 but is much more linear, given that the "open" world segments much be must smaller to fit the system's constraints. We're talking one objective always highlighted on your HUD, one viewpoint in each section of map, and maybe 2 completely optional side missions that take about 1:30 to finish. The downgrade in scope does mean that the game feels a lot more urgent though, and the story (which is what I'm here for in the first place) is remarkably substantial. It of course doesn't hold a candle to AC2, but if you have a PSP and are invested in the universe of the game, definitely have a look. So far Limassol and what I've explored of Kypria are pretty rad places to play.

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Interestingly, seconds before reading your post I noticed this in my RSS feeds:

It's a (very well) fan-made video depicting Altair's initiation. Pretty impressive! And reminded me that the whole atmosphere and story of the original was definitely really awesome. Genuinely such a shame the gameplay didn't back it up (IMO) and cement its position as a true classic, whereas this time it does.

I think it was a great move to take a more legendary approach to the Assassin heritage in the sequel though, as it means there's plenty for players of the original to appreciate but it doesn't get bogged down with being too dependant on knowing what happened.

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