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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.
Yves Guillemot and Jade Raymond couldn’t be happier. Why wouldn’t they be, considering a certain robed and hooded Santa, complete with a spring-loaded dagger for his ring finger has been stuffing Ubisoft socks with millions of dollars over the last three weeks? The first part in a trilogy involving all sorts of medieval (and futuristic) hijinks, Assassin’s Creed has crossed the 2.5 mn. units sold milestone – recording worldwide sales of 1.51 mn. units for the Xbox 360 and 0.95 mn. units for the PlayStation 3 – making Ubi so damn happy that they have revised their initial financial forecasts and sent them packing straight into orbit.
Announcing that Assassin’s Creed had earned the distinction of becoming the fastest selling new videogame IP in the US ever, Ubisoft now claims that it will sell a minimum of 5 mn. units of the game in 2007-08 instead of the previously estimated $3 mn., with sales targets being raised to €840 mn., an increase of €15 mn. from their previous target. So much for all those “crystal ball gazers” who jumped the gun and screamed from the rooftops about what a phenomenal failure the game was. Hope you got enough quarters for the suicide booth, fellas!
In more good news, if you were worrying about sprunging the house for enough money to buy Tom Clancy’s EndWar, Brothers in Arms 3: Hell’s Highway and Far Cry 2, don’t worry, you won’t have to. The bad news is, the games have now been delayed to the 2008-09 fiscal year, which means you can probably expect to see them sometime around next Christmas, if you’re lucky. We know we’re not, considering we’re still got our keisters parked waiting for Altair to show up around here.
Hard to believe it’s been a week since we posted the Jade Raymond article. What was posted as a simple opinion on my part somehow ballooned out of control and became a huge “news story” on N4G and Digg, which it so wasn’t. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from all this “attention” is that people who are nice are still nice and the jerks are still… well, jerks! We know, considering we had to blacklist a dozen IPs and delete a truckload of comments simply because they were downright disgusting.
Going through the comments, there’s so much I want to address, but I fear if I start getting into it, all the other stuff I’m working on will just get put on the back burner. While it looks like we’ve got a dozen people linking to the site, all of them, wonderfully, coming together to try and address retarded sexist “gamers” everywhere, others still believe gaming still hasn’t come out of the Dark Ages when women were just supposed to be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen, cooking breakfast. Honestly, if I start playing a game, I don’t give a rat’s ass as to who made it – it just has to play right. And if I am playing online, I don’t care what sex you are – you just have to play right! Gender should never matter in an industry where you rarely ever see the people behind the scenes or on the other end of the internet connection.
Jade Raymond, producer of Assassin’s Creed, is one sad panda these days. And if Jade ain’t happy, UbiSoft is mad. After all, she and her team delivered one spectacular baby in the form of Assassin’s Creed. And if UbiHulk goes all green, it’s very bad news for Something Awful, which found itself staring down the barrel of a lawsuit after someone posted a particularly tasteless comic of Jade trying to convince nerdy gamers to buy Assassin’s Creed by giving them really messy head. While I love SA.com’s reply to the lawsuit and think that’s what you deserve for being a lawyer, I am aghast at some of the comments made by gamers worldwide in response to this.
Suddenly, people are calling Jade “a touchy bitch” and talk about how she was using her sex appeal to sell the game , to how UbiSoft was pimping her to sexually frustrated gamers to get them to buy the game. One comment at ActionTrip even reads:
Ubisoft are the ones who blatantly exploited Jade Raymond’s good looks and sexuality; every single interview on AC I’ve seen building up to the game’s release, every single presentation was carried out by Ms. Raymond.
Reviewers have it tough these days. With a dozen or more games coming out each week, they’re probably under horrible pressures to deliver their goods faster than ever before, with the result that we get crazy scores for games like Need For Speed: ProStreet and Assassin’s Creed. And the latter is pretty disturbing, considering the sheer scope of the game and how it promised to deliver truly next-generation gameplay.
But it looks like dear Gabe from Penny Arcade has stumbled on to the obvious fact as to why such a promising game is getting 7-something scores.
With so many games jumping on us like hungry zombies from 28 Days Later, we’re usually happy if a game gets delayed a bit, giving us some more breathing space to rob a bank and refill our wallets. But not so with Assassin’s Creed. After spending years just admiring the lovely Jade Raymond, we can’t even stand a single day’s delay as far as this medieval stabby extravaganza is concerned.
Obviously, then, we’re not happy with GameSpot Australia’s report that UbiSoft’s AAA Game of the Year contender (we hope) will get its release date pushed back one week beyond the American and European dates. In a statement issued to retailers, UbiSoft writes:
Due to manufacturing and freight difficulties during this time of year, Ubisoft Australia & New Zealand were unable to receive their full allocation of Assassins Creed stock required to fulfill all Day One orders.
Bad news, considering most of India’s gaming shipments come from the Australian PAL territory. We’re burning up the lines trying to find out more information about our local release, so stay tuned.
Boy, that Ubisoft sure can be stubborn! For those owning either the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, or both (in which case, I must come to your house and claim thy riches) – you may well be aware that some of Ubi-baby’s published goods haven’t set a single foot on these platforms in any retail store in India. Any specific reason? When I last spoke with Mohit Anand, he told me the problem was Ubisoft. Oh snaps, you just know there’s some mama-drama going on behind the scenes when you get a reply like that!
But just today, Tech2’s Avinash Bali reports that we shouldn’t get our a panties in a bunch over it. It looks like e-Xpress Interactive will be distributing Assassin’s Creed (you know, the game that can’t have a downloadable demo because it’s too sandy) on all platforms, including the PC version as well. No comment on the pricing for the console ones, but you can expect the PC version to retail for about Rs. 1299. Expect it to arrive sometime in December, and with any luck, maybe see a few more titles down the road that become officially released.
Speaking of which, the game has already gone gold and will be releasing on November 16th in all of Europa . Hit the jump for the full press release.
Update: It seems the PC version has been delayed to Early 2008, which means mostly likely e-Xpress Interactive will just have the console versions ready for us. We’ll keep you posted! Thanks to Thunderbird for the correction.
(Source:Tech2.com India)