The best way to interact with “Creed” is to just look at it.

Last night I wrote this furious post, which you will see below. But then, today, I thought I might want to give it a third chance. I was moving onto the second assassination mission, when the damn thing froze on me for what has been the 7th time in 3 days. This was the last straw. The entry is being posted as-is. UbiSoft has acknowledged that they’re working on a patch for the freezing difficulties, which effectively announces the copy you bought in stores, and I rented (a pristine copy, by the way, rented during the free trial), is a beta. And I say, if a company like UbiSoft is going to pimp their product as hard as they’ve done for Assassin’s Creed, it better be final and glistening like Thugnificent’s watch.

And now, for the review:

You watch the game play of Assassin’s Creed, your character effortlessly jumping from rooftop to rooftop, climbing any wall possible, and being able to see almost every detail of a grandiose city at the same time when perched on your favorite ledges, and you think holy shit I’ve found the game that I’ve been waiting for.

I’ve heard all the buzz surrounding Assassin’s Creed and other big name blockbuster titles, but rather than buy them all and have them disintegrate my bank account, I got an account with GameFly, the NetFlix of video games. It’s a trial account, and currently I’ve got two games that were hyped as much as a Lord of the Rings movie, and sadly, Assassin’s Creed, once you’ve gotten past the first big kill is about as exciting as the many many endings of the third Rings movie.

Chris Kohler over at Wired’s “Game | Life” blog has written a great disection of why AC is a failure once you get past it’s jaw-fuckingly perfect visuals.

Destructoid also has a good take on the game, seen here. Note their list of the structure of the game is one of the best dissections of why this game gets boring. Steps 4-6 are a little bit more than they make it out to be though. But they do get boring.

Then, “Gabe” over at Penny Arcade has defended the game, and also made VERY VERY CLEAR he wasn’t doing so because of the fact that they advertised the game on their site. Well you know what “Gabe,” you’re wrong. The idea that people who aren’t almost suffocating from their own frothy spit over this game, simply because they’re up against deadline and trying to beat the levels, is as stupid as the quotation marks you use to remind people that you’re not the characters you’ve made in your comic. If you try and take a deep breath and take your time in the game, you get no more satisfaction, as there’s nothing to do in the towns, except fight the same three fools who are trying to rough up civilians with the tact of Nancy Grace talking about her new children.

So, that out of the way, I’ll focus on a few major complaints about the game that I’ve had in the two days I’ve had since it came in the mail.

1. The endless conversation scenes that are “interactive.” Throughout the game, your character, an assassin shamed by his actions, will have these long conversations wherein you either learn about the mission you’re about to putz around in, or have the three tenants of the Assassin’s Creed smashed into your head like a baby trying to force a square peg into a triangular slot. To liven this ratshit up, they’ve decided to give you the ability to move your character about as he’s talked down to, and sometimes you can change the angle. But you’ve only been given a kiddie pool’s space to walk in these scenes, so if you decide to take them up on their offer, you look like a frigtard of a mime pacing in some invisible box. My solution: cut the dialogue down to at the very most a third of what it is now, and UbiSoft, stop being so lazy that you’re making the game player be the cinematographer, let them watch and wait,. The alternative is that you made the only real mini game in AC: cut scenes where you try and figure out why the fuck you can’t walk over to that vacant space. I guess this might involve the paths of other characters, but even that doesn’t add up.

2. Saving your progress in a video game has to be something you can do with the drop of a hat. If I have to do it myself, I will fly to wherever the fuck UbiSoft’s (the game’s designers) HQ is so I can beat the game designers over the head with my PS3 controller until they let me save my game whenever I want, and let me know exactly when it’s being saved. There are these little moments where you’re idling in this world of visual technobabble white-noise, wherein you can only assume a game-save operation is happening without you being told. The same goes whenever you fast forward to a “more recent memory.” The game is based upon your character, in some probably futuristic time, kidnapped (wherein they violate 7th grade writing lectures I thought we all got, and told instead of showed) and forced to be in some contraption called an animus that allows us to somehow use our ancestor’s memories, conveniently stored in our ancestor’s DNA like some generational permanent record (which sounds about as real as the permanent records we all had used as leverage against us by douche-bag vice principals). My solution: let me save the game when I pause it, anything else is about as respectful as skullskeeting Helen Keller the second she learned how to speak.

3. Legible text on screen. Please. Okay game developers, listen closely. Not all of us own 62″ 1080p HDTVs which make it possible for us to read the chicken-scratch on-screen text that you seem to have found the font for in a Magic The Gathering instruction manual. I know about that because back in the shit bird days of middle school M:TG was about as popular as lame-o GuitarHero is now. Personally, to explore a side thought, I think this is Guitar Hero is about as close to Magic cards as we’re going to get in terms of terrible, overhyped, oversimplistic nonsense that gets adopted by everybody because some scrotsack of a PR copy writer claimed that these wastes of time are somehow social. Fuck right off you lazy snot gargling Idiocracy rejects. And yes back to the gripe at hand, since the text on screen in Assassin’s Creed is not only overly-necessary, but it is eensy weensy in size and almost equally illegible in nature. My Solution: test your game on a shitty SD tv, because that’s all we can afford now that consoles (that frequently die, mind you) are 400 bucks each while gouging gamers again, by making the average game price somewhere closer to 60 dollars.

To end on a simple positive note, I suggest that, if you enjoy video games, dear reader, get Super Mario Galaxy, available for the Wii; I can’t find one thing wrong with it.