Assassins Creed and Gears of War - Completed!

I got Assassins Creed in the Ubisoft Steam sale last month (or whenever it was) and finally finished it this week. Pretty disappointing game all in all. It looks stunning and it has a lot of great ideas, it's just unfortunate that all those ideas were executed in the worst ways possible. The problem is that it's boring, starts out fairly easy, and the upgrades to your weapons and abilities vastly outstrip the increase of difficulty, so the net effect is that the game gets easier as you go along. By the end you can (and are indeed forced to) reasonably easily take out groups of 8 or more soldiers without much danger of losing. The free running aspect was a good idea, unfortunately it amounts to holding down a couple of buttons and pointing Altair in the right direction, you don't need to time jumps or anything, it's all done automatically, you just run and point. Not my idea of fun really. The idea of investigating your target before you go off to assassinate him was good too, however every single one of the 9 investigations is near identical and far too easy. The ending also stank of sequel, which of course is in the works. Hopefully they'll iron out all the things that made the original stale and produce a nice well rounded piece. They've no excuse not to really, all the problems have been pointed out for them by the press, they shouldn't be making the same mistake twice (like insta-death for touching water, I mean seriously what the fuck? Highly trained assassin can't swim?) I completed Gears of War (Windows version) today too. Picked this up for £15 from HMV a month or so ago. I first played this on my mates 360, and although I sucked enormously at the time I found the gameplay mechanics interesting. It's basically a shooter that revolves around a duck'n'cover style of play. You spend most of your time hunkered down behind random bits of (oddly convenient) debris and walls and such, popping out to fire at exposed enemies and attempting to out flank them. It's insanely fun in my humble opinion. The game is co-op based, you always have at least one computer controlled friendly tagging along, although sometimes I wonder if the friendly A.I. was purposefully made a bit retarded, some enemies in the game require specific strategies to take out, yet the A.I. is pretty happy to go for an all-out frontal assault, and once they're down said enemies will then devote all their killing attention on you. I think this is a game best played with a human co-op partner. The game has on-line play via Windows Live (both co-op and various versus modes), I've yet to check that out, I might do soon though to gain some of the online achievements. Online play is often quite frustrating for me as my ping is usually quite high which results in lots of annoying lag. I slightly suspect this to be down to the enormous phone extension lead used to connect our router to the phone line. Unfortunately no one will listen to me when I say if you're going to use a big fuck off cable like that then you should use network cable that was designed to carry broadband signals over a distance rather than a shitty phone extension that was not (particularly when said extension is literally meters longer than it has to be) Gears on Windows received a lot of bad press for bugs like unloadable checkpoints, but I never had any problems like that, the only problems I had were two occasions of computer-controlled Dom not following me and one occasion on the train at the end where I managed to get Fenix stuck on a door and had accidentally grenaded myself to death attempting to blast free. The Windows version has something like 20% more content than the 360 version and the latest patch seems to remove all the issues it had before, so I'd defo be happy to recommend this to others, particularly if you like a bit of online play. Also, I found out that if you launch a non-Steam game (such as GoW) via the shortcut launcher of Steam it'll apply the Steam overlay, so you can access you Steam web browser and your Steam friends list from within any game. Pretty useful. One last thing, I fucking hated that Brumak. freedoms_stain, out.