The market place is teeming with vibrancy and life to a point where you actually feel you’re in 11th century Jerusalem. However being an assassin in such troubled times means only one thing, you’re in the city on business. Your target, a town preacher with a hidden agenda.

You wait, watching from the roof tops as he makes his way to a secluded spot after spewing his half-baked propaganda. As soon as he’s alone, you descend from the sky, his back facing you as you hurl a few punches at him, beating him into submission. No one said this would be non-violent, or so god damned involving.

While he puts up a feeble resistance to your super-human combat skills, the trees sway, creating shadows that dance across the stone buildings in the mid-day sun, you can almost feel the breeze. The city crier concedes and vital information changes hands. You draw your sword to reschedule his appointment with god.

All seems well, until, from absolutely nowhere, a burly man decked in 11th century couture decides to amble down this lonely spot and manages to miraculously walk in between your blade and the victim. And come out unscathed. David Copperfield’s ancestor perhaps?

It’s amazing how an anomaly can reduce an experience like this to the rank of a mere video game with flaws et al.

For every ounce of medieval gorgeousness Assassin’s Creed manages to pump out, it delivers bugs in spades. This could have been one of the most immersing, breath-taking games ever but it feels artificial and bottlenecked due to pathetic quality control measures. What makes it even a harder pill to swallow, is that these gremlins in the machinery continue to pop out even after Ubisoft released a patch. Which brings us to the crux of this post. Do companies really care about their gamers? Where’s my second patch? On the DS game?

On one hand we have Valve with Half-Life and it’s many iterations providing solid support and continually fine tuning their games to technical perfection. While on another, we have Ubisoft, purveyor of some mighty fine titles but failing to support a game that was the solitary single player title on 2007’s highest sellers chart. Probably too busy prepping their (bug free) Director’s Cut PC version , you know, the version every reviewer who gave it astounding reviews played. It’s not rare to see a PS3 release butchered, but to bungle this on both 360 and PS3 is a shame.

Sure we as gamers realize that there will be an odd bug or two, but the moment it hampers the experience , you know there are problems that could be resolved by 25 MB or so of code. The original Deus Ex took quite a few of those to be free of it’s first edition tomfoolery.

And if the afore-mentioned patch (or patches) that promises to rectify it doesn’t, then there’s more to worry about than just a buggy game. It becomes a question of integrity. Leading me to believe that I should have spent my cash on something else.

Like a game that works.

Powered by Gregarious (42)

TRANSLATE

Translate this post into your favorite language. Click on any of the flags below to view the translated version. NOTE: Translations use the AltaVista Babel Fish Translation Service and may not be 100% accurate.

By N2H

• Dev Kanchen Says:
  February 14th, 2008 at 12:44 am

  I’m guessing that 25 MB part was sarcasm. But really now..didn’t know the bugs were dealbreakers.

• Rishi Alwani Says:
  February 21st, 2008 at 2:00 am

  Well they are. If this is as “next-gen” as they’re touting it to be, ffs, be serious about it. It doesn’t matter as much in a game like Lost Odyssey or Mass Effect as they have a better than average story to back them up. Asscreed on the other hand has faulty design and bugs that hamper it. It hurts even more when you’ve been watching the game since the announcement of it’s development.

• Sam Says:
  February 27th, 2008 at 3:28 pm

  obviosuly u guys havent played PES 2008. if there’s ever a game severely in need of a patch update…

  peace