The two sisters

Imagine you meet a very nice girl... Let's call her "Jade". She's very beautiful, and you just love being around her... but then you start to get bored. You love her conversation, but she always comes back to the same themes, and she repeats the same things. You are even tempted to ask her to shut up. Finally, you can't stand being with her anymore.

But then you meet her younger sister. She's not as beautiful, but her conversation is much more involving. She talks about the same things, but you realize that now you actually care. She's not dull, and you love every minute with her...

Well, that was my experience with the first and the second game of the Assassin's Creed series. The first game looks nice, but runs out of gas very soon, and you even want the game to end as soon as possible because it keeps forcing you to keep killing people for unclear reasons instead of running straight to the main bad guy.

Assassin's Creed II is basically the same game, but now filled with content. Oh, boy, what a surprise... It actually makes you realize how the first one was painfully unfinished and empty. The story is actually involving (a revenge plot), there even are cutscenes with close-ups (and not the floating "select your CCTV camera" long-drawn dialogues), and you even feel your missions are actually useful and not a laundry list of to-be-killed persons.

The developers wisely realized that the gameplay of the first game was good enough, so the basic gameplay hasn't been changed, but only improved on. Now, there are a few indoors platform sections that feel like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time outtakes (which is a good thing!), a couple of vehicle sections and some surprises. There's also a series of weird puzzles which are at times a "clever use of historical figures" and some other times just "ludicrous namedropping", but they are quite atmospheric and feel appropriate to the overall story.

Something that I don't like about this game is that there's too little Desmond in it. It looks like during development somebody said "hey, players hate Desmond", but Assassin's Creed is after all his story. I'm sure players of the first AC hated having Desmond doing nothing in two rooms, but I'm quite interested in the "long battle of assassins vs templars" plot and its repercussions in the present/future. For that reason I'm disappointed that Ubisoft isn't keeping their original "a new character for every game" approach and their next AC game is an "Assassin's Creed 2.5" instead of a true Assassin's Creed 3.

DLC:
My full 36-hour long playthrough (with a 100% synchronization) included all the DLC available for the game, including all the extra locations from the "deluxe" edition, and the family crypt that is made available after spending "Uplay" points. There are also two chapters that were seemingly excised from the game during development, "12: The Battle of Forli" and "13: Bonfire of the Vanities". Well, "The Battle of Forli" is decent enough, because it has flat-out-hilarious lines with Caterina Sforza swearing heavily and the possibility to get a missable achievement (kicking a guard while piloting the flying contraption made by Leonardo Da Vinci), but then this chapter ends with a stupid cliffhanger introducing a villain that is completely unrelated to the main plot.

On the other side, "Bonfire of the Vanities" is truly awful. Just avoid it like the plague, for two reasons: First, there's no story at all. You have to kill nine guys for no reason, and you feel again as if you were playing the first Assassin's Creed again (which is NOT a good thing). Second, this sequence breaks the mechanics of the rest of the game. Normally, you kill people and that's it, the mission ends and you can look for another thing to do. Here, after you kill every target, you have to escape and avoid detection. But if that's not annoying enough, now there are black guards who can outrun you. So during this chapter you "lose your powers", as it were, and you feel unnecessarily frustrated. It just feels like "padding" and it doesn't add anything to the game. The only good thing about this DLC is that they offer a (more expensive) version which includes a few more Prince-of-Persia-like locations taken from the "Black" edition, but if you don't really need them, just steer away from this awful piece of DLC.

Of course, I'm talking about the PS3 version. The DLC is already included in the PC version, which also has the dubious honour of using the worst DRM method to date.

Assassin's Creed II is one of the best games of 2009, no doubt about it. In a way, it's a shame that it's best for you to play the first game to understand fully what is going on, but even without that, the story is great, and the gameplay is solid and really enjoyable. This is a must-play title.

It didn't take long, did it?

Only 3 days after the European PC release date, the strange/stupid DRM imposed by Ubisoft has already screwed the users, who can't play the game. I guess they didn't expect so many people to buy the game or something (the Ubisoft rep said something about "excepcional demand"), as some people were saying on the forums that they really didn't mind about this form of DRM and that they would buy this great game (one of the best from 2009, that's for sure!) anyway. Well, I wouldn't be surprised if those same users are saying right now "This is the last Ubisoft game I buy!"

Let me tell you a little story. I always have some hot chocolate and toast for breakfast. And my toast used to have some "Philadelphia" cheese on it for a really long, long time. A few months ago, my supermarket stopped carrying the old boxy Philadelphia and started selling a new format. It looks like they also fiddled with the recipe, because only a few days after opening it, the cheese started getting mouldy. Was it a bad batch? Well, I bought a different type of Philadelphia (probably the diet version, or maybe one of the bizarre variations you can find in Germany), and I had the same problem.

You know what? I haven't eaten any Philadelphia cheese since then. I haven't put anything else over my toast for ten years, and now they lost me because they fiddled with the product for reasons that are not clear to me.

See what I am getting at? Ubisoft wanted to re-invent PC gaming to offer... nothing but a half-baked, big-brothery DRM scheme. Which nobody asked for. So yes, Ubisoft still offers some of the best games around, but we are not going to pay for something that is liable to stop working at any time while offering me nothing in return but some cloud-saving that I don't really need. I haven't played Far Cry 2 yet because of the 5 computers activation limit, and I won't play Splinter Cell: Conviction because of this mess.

Ubisoft, don't be stupid and don't fight Activision for the #1 Baddie spot.

IW is Oscar Mike

The "ApocalyPS3" is finally over.

Sony said "we are working on it" (probably with the same tone the former Spanish president used). But they were just waiting for the bug to die out on its own. And so it did, at 00:00 last night. Now that crisis is over. But will it come back to bother us some other March 1 in the future?

But not everything is fine. There are conflicts happening all over the video game world. We are getting weird news coming from Infinity Ward, no less. Like Modern Warfare, but in real life. Is this an April's Fools joke one month ahead of its time, or is this real? Has Activision fired the top management from their most successful division? Really?

Remember a few days ago when we said "Activision, stop!". Well, now it looks like they cut the head of their hen that laid golden eggs off. Doesn't that just sound insane?

UPDATE: It looks like it's definitely for real. They fired these people because of "breaches of contract and insubordination". Yes, these guys are rebels. A few years ago, they rejected to keep doing WWII games, and because of that, Activision made billions. Yes, it's not nice when you are proven wrong, even when they make you rich. And now, they don't trust them anymore. Isn't it funny (or just bizarre) when somebody is ungrateful to the people who pushed you to become filthy rich?

PS3 is down! I repeat, PS3 is down!

What the hell is going on? It looks like the PS3 has its own Y2K glitch!

Is there anything more annoying for a gamer than the Xbox 360 3 ROD thing? Well, it looks like if you have an old PS3 and you allow its internal date to advance from February 28th to March 1st, you are screwed too. The date is sent back to the year 2000, you can't play some games and you lose all the trophies you haven't synchronized with Sony's servers. More importantly, you can't access the PlayStation Network. If that's the case, how will I be able to download the fix for the problem when it's available?

This really sucks. Now, I can't use my PS3 until they fix this. I can't believe they didn't plan for something like this in advance. Also, some people think this problem is the consequence of anti-piracy measures out of control. And they may be right. Well, if you are affected by this, you can follow the story with frequent updates in Kotaku. Now I guess I'll have a rest from Assassin's Creed 2 and play some KOTOR on Steam.

But what will happen if Steam goes down too? Depending on a "global network" can be bad on these occasions.

I love what a guy called Mr. Winters said in a forum: "No, seriously... This is unbelievable, a kick in the nuts for Sony. The Xbox design flaw was (is) a more serious issue, that slow death, that invisible cancer... but this meltdown, simultaneous, global, explosive... was spectacular!"