The Death of Robert Jordan

Robert Jordan, it would be fair to say, saved my life. 

Not in a Human Growth Hormone Stallone “I won’t let you die” Cliffhanger kind of way, but rather by providing me with something that helped drag me through a pretty difficult time period.

Mr Jordan, you see, was an author of great repute.  His life’s work was the Wheel of Time series; 12 epic fantasy novels which made the Lord of the Rings look like Harry Potter, and Harry Potter look like a brochure on nerdy kids with broomsticks.

I picked up his first novel in the series (The Eye of the World) when I was ten or so, and immediately fell in love with the series.  I eagerly awaited each subsequent release, immersing myself in this foreign world so different, and yet so akin to our own.

In my mid-to-late teens I went through a very difficult period that I’m not going to go into here, but no matter how far I seemed to fall and screw up my life, I somehow managed to latch onto these books, reading them again and again and again.

Even as part of me wanted to give up on ever getting through school and all my personal crap that was going on, the seed of an idea had been planted; I would one day write my own Wheel of Time.  It would be MY life’s work, my opus, the thing that the creative part of me had always wanted to aspire to, and yet had always been afraid.  In short, Robert Jordan’s work gave me hope.

I would make my way into a field that allowed me to work on my writing skills (Journalism being what I decided on), until I could finally reach the lofty heights of being like the author that so many other authors aspire to be.

This website is a part of the goal; a place to publish my work as a portfolio, but also a place to serve as both the whip and the carrot to keep me working hard.  I feel that I am on my way to achieving my goals after spending a great deal of time not knowing where I was going with my life.

Thus it was especially heartbreaking to learn that, despite showing many positive signs in his recovery, Robert Jordan succumbed to Amyloidosis, a rare but highly deadly blood disease.  The tragedy for his wife and family is of course a primary concern, but what stunned me was the sheer outpouring of grief from the internet community.  Through his work Mr Jordan touched more lives than just mine, and his stories of humanity and character in the face of evil and insurmountable odds are ones that changed a great many people.  For me personally though, the greatest tragedy was discovering that Mr Jordan had died in the process of writing the closing book to the epic series.

Don’t get me wrong, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth by fans who wanted desperately to see all the final pieces tied together, and indeed this selfish desire in the face of a man’s death occurred in me as well.  But more than that, I also felt a bone-deep sadness knowing that this man had been taken with the completion of his greatest artistic endeavour within his grasp.

But while the Wheel of Time was Robert Jordan’s life work, it was not his LIFE.  And this is the most important lesson to be had from this I think.  Thousands (millions?) will remember Robert Jordan for his efforts as a novelist. What he was, however, was something far more; a war hero, a loving husband, a brother, a friend, and most of all a man who devoted his life to composing something to bring happiness to others.

I only hope that, in some small way, I can reach for the lofty heights that Mr Jordan reached and made his own.

Shelter in the palm of the Creator’s hand Robert Jordan.

The last embrace of the Mother welcome you home. 

-Tim Sweeney

Iron Maiden (2nd Sydney Concert) - The Review

 I don’t love Iron Maiden.

I just want to get that out of the way. They’re a pretty cool band, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve heard better. I respect their achievements in music, and I listen to them occasionally, but no more so than all the other metal bands on my playlists.

So it was with this mindset that I went to see Iron Maiden live for their second Sydney show.  Hell, I didn’t even pay for my ticket, so I reckon I was probably the single most unbiased critic there.

Things didn’t get off to a good start I have to admit.  The opener, Lauren Harris (daughter of the Maiden bassist) was terrible.  Generic girlpower rock with random, gratuitous swearing, random and frequent guitar solos, and multiple attempts to get the crowd clapping per song just pissed me right off.  It apparently did the same to everyone else, as she never got more than a minor courtesy cheer; at least, not until she got off stage.

Behind Crimson Eyes were better.  Not great, but better.  Technically they were fine; the band played well and the lead singer has quite a powerful voice with a good range.  The problem with them, however, was that they did not quite seem able to pick a genre and stick with it.  Their opening track consisted of your typical deep growling heavy metal singing, whereas the second song was a faithful rendition of Motorhead’s Ace of Spades, followed by quite a few tracks that sounded like they had been performed by Papa Roach or Linkin Park.  In fact, as bizarre as it’s going to sound, the set seemed to progressively lighten up from death metal to hard rock.  A strange mish-mash from a band with potential, but not a lot else at this stage.

But now for the main meal, the granddaddies of metal, Iron Maiden themselves.  As soon as I heard Winston Churchill start speaking as the lights went down, I had the feeling that something special was going to happen.  When the lights revealed the colossal stage, and the band began ripping out the beginning of Aces High, I knew that my preconceived notions on a concert were flying out the window.

I’ve been to some big name concerts. I’ve seen Metallica (who are the only metal band I’ve seen that I would compare to Iron Maiden), and to be honest they had nothing on the sheer spectacle of this.  Metallica gave a terrific concert; Iron Maiden gave one hell of a piece of theatre.

Imagine a giant, moving, Egyptian themed stage with a giant screen, pyro (as in giant fireballs firing out of the stage), fireworks, and the band themselves.  Now picture  giant, multicoloured spotlights, a lead singer running around above the heads of his bandmates waving the Union Jack, and a gigantic Eddie (the Iron Maiden Mascot) towering over everything in and aiming his gun at the audience (in true metal style).

I had honestly never seen the like.

 Of course, all of these theatrics would mean little without the music to back it up; but Maiden delivered here as well.  A set list dominated almost entirely by a selection of their tracks from the 80s (with a few favourites from other eras thrown in too), it was perfectly chosen and paced to take the listener on an aural and visual rollercoaster ride. Sure a few favourites were cut to make room for some of the more epic songs (the Rime of the Ancient Mariner being one of these), but of the people I spoke to after the concert, not a one complained about the set list (beyond my own grumbles that they did not play Flight of the Icarus).

All in all this concert far exceeded my expectations, and made me realise that there is a lot more to a band than how the songs sound in Winamp.

I love Iron Maiden.

Lauren Harris: 0/10 (Terrible)

Behind Crimson Eyes: 6/10 (Could be pretty big with a bit of focus)

Iron Maiden: 10/10 (Everything they could have been, and more)

Overall Concert Rating: 9/10 (Point subtracted for the supports and the lack of Flight of the Icarus…bastards.)

- Tim Sweeney 

Set list (to best of memory):

Aces High

2 Minutes To Midnight

Revelations

The Trooper

Wasted Years

Can I Play With Madness

Rime Of The Ancient Mariner

Powerslave

The Number Of The Beast

Heaven Can Wait

Run To The Hills

Fear Of The Dark

Iron Maiden

Moonchild

The Clairvoyant

Hallowed Be Thy Name

Team Fortress 2 - The Review (PC)

(This is a shorter review, gotta keep those different word counts coming!)

When a game allows you to disguise yourself as an enemy via a paper mask, walk around behind enemy lines, and then knife some poor bastard while taunting them in a French accent; well you know you’ve struck gold.That’s your review right there: Team Fortress 2 is a craptonne of solid gold.

Valve’s reimagining of the numerous Team Fortresses (specifically TF Classic) is at once both similar and distinct from its predecessors.  Gone are the slightly altered Quake/Half Life graphics; instead we get a cel-shaded masterpiece which looks like the Incredibles with a dose of manic humour thrown in.

Each class has a completely distinct look and sound. The Soldier is your rocket launcher toting, American GI, complete with shovel that you can smack against your helmet whilst screaming (hang on…).  The Pyro wears a complete body suit and sounds like Kenny from Southpark; the Spy has a rather dapper suit and the aforementioned paper masks; the Medic looks identical to my local GP and speaks with a Colonel Klink accent; and the list goes on.

Through crafting a unique graphic and audio feel for each player class, the experience becomes one quite unlike any other multiplayer shooter out there.  Besides making it much easier to identify who is who (The hulking Heavy looks nothing like the diminutive Scout), it also subtly gives the player an idea of what the class plays like, and what to expect in each encounter with the enemy.

The gameplay retains much of what made the original Team Fortress such a well-balanced masterpiece, but has been further simplified and refined to make each class completely unique from the others, and to further emphasise strong team work and co-ordination.   With seven maps now released, and an eighth on the way, there is enough variety to keep even the most hardcore fps player motivated to have “just one more round”.

Unfortunately the game is not perfect.  Close to, but just not quite there.  Some of the maps are very prone to being one-sided (ironically these are the most symmetrical ones, specifically Granary).  Also some of the game types are less popular than others, and the inevitable 2Fort only servers still exist after well over a decade of Team Fortress action! At least the original creators know they made a good map.

Despite these few flaws, Team Fortress 2 stands up as the best multiplayer release since BF2, and one that has a unique flavour, graphical style and sense of humour that sets it worlds apart from any other multiplayer game I can think of.  With a strong community, actively encouraged competitive play, and ongoing support from Valve, this could well and truly be the Counterstrike killer we’ve all been waiting for.

Graphics: 9/10 (The Incredibles on acid.  Shows that the Source engine still has some teeth in an Unreal Engine dominated world)

Sound: 9/10 (Classy presentation completely in character with the theme of the game.  The voice acting in particular is terrific)

Gameplay: 9/10 (A point subtracted for some balance issues, but hopefully patching will bring it up to a 10 in the future)

Longevity: 8/10 (Even with 7, going on 8 maps to tide the fans over, there will need to be a continuous release schedule to keep people playing long term)

Overall: 9.5/10 (The best multiplayer FPS to come out by a mile in a very long time.  The fact that it is a part of the Orange Box just makes the deal that much sweeter) 

 -Tim Sweeney

Smackdown VS Raw 2008 - The Review (360)

Two steps forward, one-and -a-half steps back.

Never before has a slightly paraphrased little saying been more applicable than when you’re talking about THQ’s ongoing wrestli….sorry, Sports Entertainment, franchise.  It seems that for every great addition that occurs in the yearly update, something that had no need to even be touched by the developers is messed with, or broken altogether.  Alas, for all the positive steps forward that this latest iteration takes, it is no real exception.

Visually the game is somewhat of a mixed bag.  The graphics are more impressive this year, with a little more realism and a little less of the shiny wax figurine look that has plagued these games in the past; although it’s annoying that every single male in the game has a figure like the offspring of Hercules and She-Hulk, even old codgers like Ric Flair who is closer to having bona fide man-breasts in real life than gigantic pectorals.  Oh and the women have gigantic, incredibly fake looking busts; but I suppose that’s fairly accurate to real life.  The animation has also improved, although there are still inexplicable bugs that occur with wrestlers floating on air, spinning 180 degrees instantly to reverse a move, etc.

One interesting change to the graphics has occurred with the introduction of the ECW roster to the game. What makes it interesting is that, unlike the Raw and Smackdown wrestlers who are spitting images of the real thing, the ECW wrestlers look like their real life selves if they were fed through a combine harvester.  Seriously, Elijah Burke’s face in the game looks like someone has been paddling the arse of a baboon, and CM Punk looks and walks like a mentally handicapped marionette.  Some of the old schoolers like Tommy Dreamer and Sandman look ok, but none are up to the quality of the rest of the roster.  Truly bizarre.

Aurally the game has seen its single biggest improvement yet; the ability to have your own theme music in the game, a feature that long time fans have been clamouring for.  Of course, this only applies on the 360 version; apparently PS3/2 owners get the ability to watch an entrance in the first person, a fair trade I’m sure (cough).  Of course the sheer awesometasticness (patent pending) of having your own theme music is counteracted by the terrible, horrible, awful voice acting that occurs in the main career mode.  At least the menu music isn’t too bad this time, even if it is a bit generic.  Oh and don’t even start me on the massively repetitive, completely illogical commentary; it’s actually worse than last years, a feat unto itself!

The career mode itself is probably my biggest gripe with this game, and one of those things that they apparently decided should be broken for gits and shiggles.  You get to choose from a small enough roster of superstars in the normal game, which is further gimped for career mode because only the wrestlers who provided voice acting that was of “sufficient quality” are playable.  What this comes down to is that no ECW wrestlers are available, almost none of the heels are playable, and half the babyfaces are missing as well. What you’re left with is Triple H, Jeff Hardy, and…did I already mention Triple H?

The actual career is laughable.  I mean it, it’s like they let the work experience kid design this during his lunch break, and even then he was too busy playing with his digimons and his myspaces and whatever else it is kids play with these days.  Imagine, if you will, generic storylines featuring maybe three different wrestlers over and over again (usually Carlito, Chris Masters and Edge on RAW).  Now imagine the same three wrestlers appearing in the same cutscenes with your character constantly.  Seriously, it doesn’t matter whether Carlito is your best friend in the world or whether he just groped your grandmother, you’ll see the same cutscene of your character walking down a hallway and shaking hands with him, trading fake punches with Masters, and watching Edge and random fourth superstar who hasn’t actually appeared in the game yet plot behind your back.

I don’t know what happened with the career mode, I really don’t, but it is just broken.  Emails you receive have the wrong names in them; one I received from John Cena actually had him repeating a line at the end of it, and then asking whoever was in charge of the recording “should I read it perfect?”  I kid you not.  Furthermore, career mode is the only way to earn experience points for your Create-a-Wrestlers, which is a sheer travesty.  Whilst some people may have exploited last years methods for online play by making uber characters, a lot of people like to make their own group of wrestlers with more normal stats for a challenge; this is almost impossible now.

Thankfully the rest of the game somewhat makes up for the career mode shortcomings.  GM mode is a lot more in depth these days, and a tonne of fun to play even with the small roster.  The new tournament modes are terrific, and something that has been lacking from wrestling games since Wrestlemania on the Nintendo 64.   New match types like the ECW Extreme Rules Match are fun, and superfluous crap like the pillow fights and what not are long gone.  Unfortunately, existing match types (such as the Cage matches) have been reduced in difficulty to the point that it is entirely possible to win a match on Legendary difficulty in under 30 seconds.

The analogue-stick based control method is still good, and has been further refined.  The biggest change to the way the game itself actually plays is the introduction of fighting styles.  Specifically, each wrestler has two styles (such as Brawler and Hardcore, or Technical and High Flyer).  What these do is limit the move-sets available to each wrestler, and also gives them a major special ability for their primary fighting style, and numerous secondary abilities for both their primary and secondary styles.

So, for example, a Dirty/Submission superstar would have the ability to argue with the ref, strip turnbuckle pads, gain health by placing an opponent in a rest hold, and other abilities.  As a primary ability, the Dirty superstar can deliver the mother of all crotch punches, which basically counts as a free, highly powerful finishing move. Each style offers it’s own useful abilities, and the differing combinations can make for some unique styles of play; each wrestler is a lot more varied to play now, even if some players might resent a little of the variety in individual move sets being taken away.

Multiplayer is still where the real fun lies, and remains essentially unchanged from last year’s offline.  Online is a different story, with more match types and an easier matchup system being in place.  The ability to play for custom belts, and said belts gaining in prestige after every match is a nice touch.  It’s also nice to see that the advantages that super heavyweights had over other wrestlers are pretty much gone now; light heavyweights are feasible to play against bigger, stronger opponents.

The various Create modes have undergone few changes, but this isn’t really a bad thing as they are light years ahead of pretty much every other sports game.  The CAW interface has been changed a little, and can be slightly unintuitive as a result when layers are being edited, but otherwise seems to have improved.  The Create-an-Entrance tool is powerful as ever, although it would be nice to see the ability to custom animate come in at some point.

Overall SvR2008 is a game that does quite a few things right, but somehow manages to undo some of the good work accomplished previously as well.  Having three shows worth of wrestlers to choose from is terrific, but why are there only two tag teams on the roster?  Why have perennial fan favourites London and Kendrick never appeared in a SvR game, but their entrance animations inexplicably are?  To be fair to the developers, apparently the WWE are very controlling about who appears, and what stats they have, but as a fan it is immensely frustrating to have to create 20 new people just to get the rosters looking remotely similar to the current lineup.

Still, why is the career mode completely borked?  Why are Terry Funk and Rick Rude the only two new legends? Why aren’t the old ones still in the game?  Hell, why aren’t wrestlers that were in last years game in this one?  It just makes no sense, and unfortunately that pretty much sums up a great deal of Smackdown vs Raw 2008; it’s technically a good game, but some of the design choices and lack of refinement just boggle the mind.

Graphics: 7/10 (Functional and as pretty as sweaty steroid junkies can be in parts, but let down by some crude animation and sloppy texturing.  I could have taken away three points for the mockery they made of Elijah Burke alone)

Sound: 5/10 (The 5 points that are there are for the custom themes and entrance music, otherwise there is little on offer here)

Gameplay: 7.5/10 (Technically fun, but hamstrung by a poor career mode and some broken matches)

Longevity: 9/10 (Multiplayer should never get old, and GM mode, Create modes and tournaments mean that even single play should be enjoyable for a long time)

Overall: 7/10 (Better than Smackdown vs Raw 2007 in so many ways, and yet worse than even the original Smackdown in so many others.  Worth a purchase if you’re a wrestling fan, but hopefully 2009 will be better) 

-Tim Sweeney

Assassin’s Creed - The Review (360)

Now that all that nasty Op Ed facetiousness is out of the way, let’s take a serious look at Assassin’s Creed; well as serious as I’m capable of being anyway. 

You’re an Assassin in the Holy Land during the Crusades.  You get assigned targets on both sides of the war to take out in the hope of bringing peace to the land and sending the invaders packing.  Hijinks ensue as things go awry and the plot twists are revealed (as an aside, I wonder if any game since Pong has not featured plot twists and betrayals in the story arc? Was there ever a game where everything happened as it was supposed to?).

Pretty stuff first then.  This game is about as sexy as it’s going to get for a while.  Sure there might be games that have more technical bells and whistles, but damn me if this doesn’t look so real that it completely immerses you in the experience.  Dust billows through the streets, hundreds of people go about their daily lives around you, and the protagonist - Altair by name - moves with a kind of lithe, almost feminine grace that we haven’t seen in a game before; whether gently pushing past a beggar or rather less gently putting a sword through someone’s neck, everything is so smooth that it’s almost like dancing.

The sound is equally as accomplished at being so realistic that you don’t realise it’s there.  The hubbub of everyday life in a medieval city compete with the screams, grunts and taunts of your Saracen and European enemies in combat; yes my friends, Altair is an equal opportunity murderer.  The music is appropriate, but occurs sparsely and is never overwhelming.  Overall the score succeeds in accomplishing the primary goal of any gaming soundscape; the immersion of the player.

Odds are that every single living creature on the planet knows about the big plot twist; but for the two of you living at the bottom of an oceanic trench that haven’t heard about it, I won’t spoil it.  Suffice to say that there are two intertwining plots in two separate time periods ongoing at the same time.   Whether you enjoy the plot and the non-assassination elements is up to you; I quite enjoyed the storyline, but some people apparently felt cheated by the fact that this game wasn’t just Microsoft Medieval Assassination Simulator v1.0.  In fact, the only real negative I found about the storyline was that it led to the inevitable “I strip thee of all your weapons, abilities and experience, despite the fact they are deeply engrained in your brain and/or musculature” gaming cliché.

Now onto the meat and potatoes.  Is Assassin’s Creed repetitive? Yes it is.  Does this break the game in any way?  Only if you feel the need to play the whole thing in one sitting and then bitch about it afterward.

Whether it was intentional game design or not by Ubisoft, Assassin’s Creed is the very definition of the reviewer’s bane: a game that should be enjoyed in small chunks.

The game itself plays beautifully.  Anyone familiar with the Prince of Persia games will have an immediate idea about Altair’s parkour-inspired abilities; he runs, jumps, climbs, swings, slices, dices and falls to his death when you misjudge the distance to that balcony over there.  Unlike the PoP games however, the movement is based in reality; no wall-running or time rewinding here, although the movement is still amazing to watch.

The game world itself is a triumph of next-gen design; huge cities with a living, breathing populace.   Women carry clay pots of water from the fountains, thugs haunt the back alleys looking for someone to push around, beggars aggravate the crap out of you, and guards maintain the peace, patrolling and investigating any trouble. This realism really has to be seen to be believed; knock a civilian over, and then sneak past the guards when they come to investigate; lose your pursuers around a corner and blend with a group of scholars; climb a building and be inexplicably shot by an arrow simply for considering walking on a roof; ok, so it isn’t perfect.  Nonetheless the system is the most realistic living world system we’ve seen in a game so far, and one that is sure to be emulated. 

In a massive achievement for progressive game design, any surface in the game world that should be climbable in real life can be climbed in Assassin’s Creed.  No longer is the player constrained by linear level design; go where you want, when you want.  The sensation of freedom is incredibly uplifting, and it is possible to waste hours choosing a line and just running over the rooftops from one side of the city to the other.

The control method is what makes this free-running (and the fighting as well) such a pleasure.  The face buttons work as though the player is a puppeteer with four strings attached to the character; Y controls the head, B and X the arms, and A the legs.  The buttons are context sensitive depending on the situation, and are further modified by holding the right trigger, which activates High Profile mode. So while A may cause you to walk slower and blend into a crowd normally, it will cause you to jump or dodge or speed up a wall when the right trigger is held.  This system makes everything from running to spying to fighting phenomenal as it is both intuitive and simply makes sense.

The tools at your disposal as a highly trained (and then inexplicably not highly trained, but we’ve already discussed that) assassin are well realised and fun to use.  The sword, dagger, throwing knives, fists and assassin’s blade (a deployable punching blade of sorts) open up numerous options as you set about completing your tasks; use your throwing knives to take out the rooftop archers around a target, leap from the roof and punch your assassin’s blade into their throat, and then use your sword to fight off the remaining guards.  Or don’t.  Almost every option for approaching a situation is viable if you are good enough.

Unfortunately this is where the whole experience starts to fall apart a little; it is entirely too easy to be good enough at everything to bother wanting to do the more complex things that you can achieve.  Whilst there is a great deal of satisfaction to be gained from dropping three enemies so quietly that their mates standing next to them speaking random Arabic don’t even notice, it soon becomes just as easy to engage them all with the sword and tap X until you’ve countered them all to death.  Besides, on the off chance you die the very forgiving autosave system will just put you back to about three seconds beforehand anyway.

This is one of the fundamental flaws of the game, and one that I think caused the ire of all those angry games journos.  When you’re reviewing a game, you should finish it multiple times, exploring different gameplay options and trying to find game-breaking problems. This thinking lends itself to rapidly getting through the game, and getting through a game rapidly means that the most time-effective option will be chosen for each encounter.  If you need to clock the game to earn your money, why would you bother going the stealth route when you can just slash everything to pieces with your sword?

So the problem with the game isn’t so much that it is repetitive, but that the lack of difficulty will often cause the person playing the game to choose the most time effective means through a situation, thus creating a repetitive situation, and so on ad infinitum.  The simple step of stopping the player from countering every enemy as they attack single file would probably have been enough alone to stop a fair bit of the whinging directed at the game.

Mind you this isn’t the only reason for the accusations of repetitiveness.  The game is broken up into missions that all go pretty much the same way; go to the home base, get the name of someone you have to make life-deficient, head to the relevant city and do some research.   Climb tall towers to identify objectives, eavesdrop, bash people, collect flags, kill people, pickpocket and all that other fun stuff until you know enough about Achmed bin Assassinated or Frenchy Le’Stereotype to go and plunge the knife in.  It’s all pretty cool, and makes you feel like you really are a hitman of the time, feeling out the lifeblood of the city until you know where and when to act.

Unfortunately that list of different things you do is pretty much it, and you do them over and over again for every single assassination in the game;  the context of the tasks may change (”kill those guards because they’re following me,” versus “kill those knights because I’m following them,”), but the tasks themselves are inevitably the same; in fact most do not even see a rise in difficulty for the entire game. 

This may sound strange, but I believe that the attitude you take into this game is what will determine how much fun you have. Myself, I soon realised the limitations of the game design.  Rather than take advantage of these, I chose to somewhat ‘roleplay’ (shudder) Altair, seeking to take each situation as an assassin would.  And you know what?  It actually worked.  Completing variations of the same task suddenly became less about the task itself, and more about finding ways to perfectly slip in behind that Templar, knife him and have left the scene before the guards can even exclaim over why all these healthy knights seem to be keeling over in the street.

Ubisoft have come out with one of the most memorable new IPs in a long time with Assassin’s Creed, and have managed to make a game that is great if you play it the right way.  If a single large criticism can be aimed at the game, it is that it’s up to the player to make the decision to play in this way.  At the end of the day there is a fine line to walk to balance between giving too much freedom or not enough in a game; unfortunately Ubi came down too far to one side of the line.  Lesson learned for next time (and there will be a next time; the game has sold well despite the lambasting it has received).

So to sum up, if you treat Assassin’s Creed as a series of individual assassination set-pieces, each to be approached in a unique way using all your abilities, then you will get a tremendous amount out of it and will experience the game the way I think the designers intended you to.  If you don’t, Assassin’s Creed is pretty much Doom with unlimited BFG ammo; you can’t lose, and as cool as the power trip is at first, you’ll soon be over it.

Graphics: 9/10 (Beautiful, realistic and immersive)

Sound: 8.5/10 (See above, although less noticeable)

Gameplay: 8/10 (Add two if you play it like an Assassin, minus two if you play it like Conan)

Longevity: 5/10 (Lots of collectables and whatnot, but it’s unlikely you play it through more than once)

Overall: 8/10 (A superb gaming experience that, while flawed, is still quite unlike any other.  All the ingredients are there for Assassin’s Creed 2: Electric Boogaloo to be a true masterpiece; they just need a bit more fine tuning in the kitchen) 

-Tim Sweeney 

Assassin’s Creed - The Editorial

An Opinion on Assassin’s Creed and the Gaming Media at large.

Apparently gamers hate repetitiveness, even when it occurs in different contexts.  Don’t let the sales of everything from the original Donkey Kong to the latest Mario (the very definition of doing the same thing repeatedly in a slightly different environment) fool you; we just absolutely hate it.  So it’s no wonder that Assassin’s Creed has received a universal “meh” from the gaming media, as well as many members of the hardcore gaming community at large.

After all, Assassin’s Creed consists of performing a series of repeated tasks, culminating in the assassination (who would have thought…?) of a target.  Rinse, repeat until you’ve finished the game eight-to-ten hours later.

The sheer gall of Ubisoft to make a game that involves collecting items, reaching specific points of the level, or having to kill a certain number of enemies in a time limit!  How could a revolutionary open level design, a reasonably non-linear approach to gameplay, a dual storyline and sublime graphics make up for elements of game design that have been in use in just about every game ever created since before Noah considered a dual degree in carpentry and animal husbandry.

Now THAT’s sarcasm.

I can only put the resoundingly negative view of what appears to me to be a damn good game down to a combination of every reviewer in the land having to play the game to death to meet deadlines, thereby magnifying and exacerbating the flaws in the game; and just a little disappointment after everyone in media land spent a couple of years touting the game as the second coming of Jesus, Buddha, John Wayne and J. R. R. (I need more initials) Tolkien all rolled into one.

What we got instead was a damn fine experience that is no more repetitive than grinding your way through many other (oft lauded) games.  Furthermore, it makes up for its flaws by doing most of what it aims to do absolutely brilliantly.  The sense of immersion in the environment and the storyline, the pleasure of the controls, and the sheer beauty of everything that occurs in what is really an ugly and highly brutal time; all of these things are executed to perfection in a way that would make most other designers envious of how effortless it all seems.

Could the game have aimed at a few loftier goals?  Probably.  Everyone would have loved  RPG elements, or a bazillion different side-quests or whatever.  Maybe, with an extra year of time to work on the game, it might have been the next Deus Ex or whatnot.  Instead we got a great game right the hell now that I, for one, am happy to have take pride of place on my proverbial games shelf (proverbial in that most of my games sit haphazardly on the floor).

And oh bugger I think I might have spoiled my review.

-Tim Sweeney