Revisiting Assassin’s Creed II - A Big Ol’ Slice of Heaven

A cut above the rest?

In his seminal masterpiece “The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy”, 19th Century historian Jacob Burckhardt says of that time period:

“An objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all the things of this world became possible.The subjective side...asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual and recognised himself as such.”

The reader can see much of this Renaissance Representation reflected in Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed II - here we have characters critiquing the state, putting forward their own plans, propositions. At the same time, the game exhibits the flamboyant showmanship of the Renaissance through festivals, carnivale, extravagant clothing, architecture and art. 

There is, however, one key difference between Burkhardt’s work and Ubisoft’s game - Assassin’s Creed II is actually quite a bit of fun, whereas Civilisation makes me want to stick a hidden blade in my brain via nostril. 

That said, the game deserves more than just to be labeled ‘a bit of fun’. Actually, bluntly put, ACII makes the original 'Creed look like a blueprint for this sequel. In fact, I’m going to lay my terribly orthodox opinions down on the table and proclaim Assassin’s Creed II as the best the franchise has offered to date. 

Everything you can do...

At a first glance, this may seem a bold claim. Although it’s true that ACII might briefly look much like the same action-conspiracy-laden-sandbox-parkour-stabfest-adventure as before, now just a bit dressed up to fit the 15thC, the lightest of scrapings reveals just how much the developers have responded to criticism of the original game. Actually, it’s pretty much impossible to discuss the game without frequently referring to the first game’s inadequacies  - every element of the original has been somehow tweaked, improved, re-thought or else redacted for the sequel. 

This list of improvements, while not actually endless, certainly comes out longer than the dialogue in your average Michael Bay flick. ACI’s singular, bland enemy type has been flattened under the variety of enemies endowed with a superfluity of weapons - daggers, hammers, axes, spears. Fists are now a viable option in combat. The unwavering sun that one shone on Damascus and Jerusalem has been switched for a timed day/night cycle. 

Ezio, the game’s new protagonist, is both nimble and acrobatic (and makes his predecessor Altair look positively arthritic). This, among other things, entails he doesn’t have to be on a level plane with his target to exact swift murdery goodness. Nope: The player can now dispatch his target from rooftops, ledges, even while napping in a stray bale of hay.

Further, in my surveyal of Altair’s adventures I made the point - somewhat vehemently - that there the player is expected to work with the tools  given or else taste pixellated backhand. Here, you’re given far more slack on how you want to interact with the world. Ezio is free and encouraged to customise and upgrade his weapons, outfits and so forth. 

This is a game that wants you to enjoy yourself right up to the end of the 20 hours or so of story, while AC1 was the equivalent of a blind date that keeps yawning and checking her watch, wondering when you’re going to pluck up the nerve to excuse yourself and leave.

Alright, I hear you: less social life, more escapism.

Where there’s an alteration, there’s an addition - too many to fully list, though one of the standout inclusions that can't be overlooked are the ‘Assassin’s Tomb’ missions: six entirely optional, linear levels that vary from sewer to palace, and require the player to exercise as much mental agility as dexterity. I say optional, you’d be a fool to overlook them.

Tomb With a View?

Never Cross the Streams (unless developing games)

These alterations and add-ons are all well and good, and make for a much more enjoyable romp. Assassin’s Creed II’s highpoint (pun!), though, isn’t in these micro-improvements; rather it's in the way all these individual elements (let’s for convenience’s sake categorise them into setting, narrative and gameplay) are woven together, not tacked alongside each other.

‘Nay!’ cries the objector. ‘Surely gameplay always has a place in the narrative of a games, and that story always has to be set within a place? What makes this game so special?’ True, uncommonly literate respondent - almost all games will connect story, place and gameplay together to some extent. Some, however do it better than others, and some are as accomplished at it as I am at football.

(My career at that particular sport slid from defender to goalkeeper to goalpost, in case you’re wondering).

Particular examples of games that flail at this element merging are Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (I can’t believe those pesky COMBO letters have escaped again!); Call of Duty (“Why is the player suddenly in this location?” “Why not? It looks pretty”), and, of course, the original Assassin’s Creed, where missions were unashamedly added on after the narrative was already finished. 

Conversely, in Assassin’s Creed II, narrative, setting and gameplay are coiled into a single whole to such a degree that it would be impossible to parse them apart. 

Bear with me - it's necessary to explain this bit properly. 

Take narrative and setting alone, first of all.  Interesting historical characters, from the dubious Pazzi to the downright nasty Borgia, as well as the surprisingly comic Da Vinci himself, have central parts to play within the plot. Staples of the Renaissance - religion, conspiracy, self-expression - also happen to be themes that bleed into the Assassin’s series as a whole. 

We see all these things, additionally, through the lens of our new protagonist, Ezio Auditore, in many ways an archetype of the Renaissance himself. As opposed to Altair’s bland stoicism, we meet Ezio as a loud, sharp, self-absorbed youngster, certainly not Master Assassin (PhD). The series’ new-found sense of humour  is complimented equally by the sharp writing and characterisation as much as the world Ezio himself lives in.

It would, then, be jarring to uproot the plot and plant it in a different place or time period - they're too bound together, which is just as well, because Renaissance Italy sprawls in both of the game’s halves: Florence, Tuscany and Forli, then in the larger labyrinthine Venice (or Venezia, if you want to sound pretentious and make people dislike you more). Real architectural landmarks are realised, when viewed up close with startling detail. I’m not going to say ‘living breathing world’, but It’s a close run thing. Costumes are extravagant, cities bustle with noise and music. 

Changes are justified from a narrative standpoint, deepening immersion

These elements of setting and plot then built into the gameplay, not alongside. Missions, to different extents, always have some kind of relevance to the narrative, very rarely existing as obvious time-padding. The ‘Hey Altair, please find my flags and I’ll tell you something about your target’ structure of AC1 is no more; rather, cutscenes and dialogue always frame the basis for what the player does. The gameplay changes noted above, additionally, are justified narratively by the fact that the ever bland Desmond is hooked up to the Animus 2.0. It's another unnecessary yet welcome touch that adds another piece of evidence to the overallpoint.

The developers also use gameplay to emphasise certain points of narrative. To make another bad pun, the merging cuts both ways. Ezio’s first intended assassination, for example. is both emotion-fuelled and sloppy, and forces him to flee his home town and take refuge in his uncle's mansion. The game recognises the player's rustiness and uses it, making the player feels as though his/her actions are in tune with the narrative, not distinct. Desmond’s shorter sequences similarly grow clumsy combat to honed carnage as comes to absorb the skills of his ancestors as the player's skill progresses alongside. 

Needles in a Haystack

It’s this coalescing that was the downfall of the original Assassin’s Creed, but what makes this sequel shine even when the graphics begin to look less than sparkling - which is just as well, because that’s happening as the next generation begins to roll in. The animations that only a few years ago were at worst adequate have become comical.

Don’t believe me? Fast forward to the ‘grueling’ scene of 5:50-6:00 of this walkthrough (disclaimer, which isn’t owned by me)  and see for yourself. Can you not taste the horror of the scene? Me neither

It’s not just in the close-up detail that the game fumbles a bit, either. The grand buildings, as noted, look sublime when being climbed but from a distance look more like cardboard cut-outs than imposing structures. The skyline overall also looks muddied and hazy compared with more recent gaming cityscapes. 

The narrative also suffers from a few blights, the main foible being that story often juts forward years at a time, leaving the player perplexed and often disgruntled. Characters are often disposed of in odd ways, too - Ezio effectively damns his sister to several decades of managing his finances. 

It’s important to realise, however, that most of these flaws arise only because ACII bites off considerably more than ACI ever attempted to chew. These shortcomings, in other words, exist because the game tries to do much more with itself and sets the standard far higher. The vast majority of the time, it succeeds.

Overall, ACII is still a fantastic, incredible, adjectival-topping jaunt into one of the best games that the current generation has to offer. Even when the game becomes as old as Burkhardt’s language, it’ll never be as archaic. 

But why bother waiting that long at all? Get climbing, get running, get stabbing. Go.

If you want to see my opinion of Assassin's Creed the first, go here.
To read about my adventures an an uneducated juvenile, go here.
If you want to read Jacob Burckhardt, go get some sun.

What Primary School Taught Me: To L and back again

“Good Morniiing Mister Bloggs..”

Whether you called it Primary school, Elementary, Kindergarden or us-kids-sitting-cross-legged-inside-a-shack-somewhere: all of us share a lot of the same memories of our earliest stages of education, mainly because these memories are drawn from largely the same pool.

Most of us, for example, had some variety of flavoured milk at break (I’m team strawberry, personally), we all knew to Never-Ever-Ever tell even your closest allies if there was something tooth-decaying in your lunchbox. Hordes of children kicked the bins and ran from even greater hordes of bees; scores of us attempted to grow little portable patches of cress and often staked bizarre levels of pride in our plant’s vertical progress. 

At the same time, it’s important to recognise each of us have our own pocket of experiences that our opening years of education have given us specifically. So, without any more textual dribbling, allow me to share three lessons Primary school have imparted to me and probably not you:

Lesson One: Hiding under your table is a valid alternative to doing homework

Back at the very start of my Primary school career, I hadn’t done my homework. You read right: try your best to abstain from clapping me in irons. For whatever reason, I hadn’t glued the macaroni to the sugar paper or whatever it was I was supposed to apply my mind to that previous evening. Additionally, I distinctly remember being worried because I hadn’t done well rehearsing the alphabet - or something like that - earlier that day.

If I had told the teacher (a nice lady who we’ll call Mrs X, well rehearsed in the follies of four-year-olds) I would have at worst been given a sentence-long rebuke. Maybe a charge to do it for the next day. As she went round the tables inspecting whatever it was everyone else had done, though, a sterling plan emerged in my muddled head: instead of telling the truth, I could hide. 

But where? 

The answer struck me like a gym-shoe to the face. I eyed Mrs X across the room, bent over and inspecting the handiwork of someone else; I eyed the peers in my group, too transfixed by their own mini-marvels to see anything in their peripheral vision, then decided to act. I edged out my little red chair from the desk slightly, kicked my schoolbag to the side and slithered off my seat and under the table. 

I told you it was sterling. Miraculously, nobody spotted this daring feat among the feet, or else perceived it to be too commonplace to be worth mentioning. 

Plan executed, I clasped the legs of my seat with my little hands, pulled the chair in and waited for Mrs X to nod appreciatively at my group’s pastapieces and move on, at which point I’d slither out, put this blip behind me and resume my travels through the education system.

A couple of minutes passed, and I was getting bored. I counted the shoes around me, fiddled with the straps on the schoolbags, tried to remember if lunch was soon. To a Primary one, lunch is always too far off (although, to a second-year university student, lunch is still always too far off).

I counted my fingers, recited rhymes, played with the velcro on my shiny school shoes. Not long now, I thought, not long now until she- 

“David?”

Slowly, I arched my little neck round, and saw Mrs. X was crouched, looking at me, wondering what on earth I was doing amid all the schoolbags. Her mouth formed a small circle of surprise.

O. That was the letter I kept forgetting...

These guys saved my education. Except Quarrelsome Queen. Nobody likes Quarrelsome Queen.

Lesson Two: You are never ‘Too Young’ to partake in strategic conquests

Some geography is necessary: the entire outside area of my school was essentially a large ‘L’ shape nestled around the building itself. The upper side of the ‘L’ was the area for older students (between Primary 3-7), a big slab of grey tarmac where kids could trade cards, bounce balls and so forth. 

The other line was for the younger ones- a smaller area made of similar stuff where the Primary 1’s and 2’s could gain temporary respite from the trials of learning to pronounce their own names properly.

Now, just beyond that horizontal side of the L was a stretch of grass which sloped up lazily at one end to become a fair-sized knoll.

This patch of elevated turf came to be known by the older students simply as ‘The Hill’. We were a platonic bunch, really. To the bored older ones, ‘The Hill’ - particularly during summer - looked more appealing than back-to-back episodes of Bernard’s Watch. The light breeze would waft the shards of grass about, lazily inviting us to come destroy it with our footballs. Lost lunch money beckoned the adventurers, while other sun-gleaned areas called for the more silver-tongued striplings to make the case why the white colour is a necessity for crayon packs.

In the greatest outrage in the history of Scottish education, for most of our lunchtimes The Hill was decidedly, uncompromisingly, out of bounds. Whether that’s because certain days were allocated for certain year-groups, or it was only certain days of the week all were allowed on at the same time, I don’t really remember. 

This didn’t bother most, who were comfortable enough flailing about or throwing rubber balls hard at walls (and then acting surprised when it came charging back at their faces).

To an elect few, however, The Hill still beckoned, and this same select few strove to meet it. To reach our desire on one of these ‘out of bounds’ days, an elder student would have to navigate through the younger playground - the wrong side of the L all the while avoiding the patrolling sentries that were the Teaching Assistants - in reality, adults trying to make sure no-one had decided they were human agents of the god of war, but to us, nefarious masterminds who wanted children to enjoy themselves as much as Alcatraz inmates.

To successfully travel to to The Hill, then, we had to get strategical. This we did one summer, where a band of us developed several strategies to bypass the staff, get to our grassy destination and play our fill of Ninjas versus Commandos.These ingenious plans included: 

The Pawn - works better for larger parties. Send a pair of unlucky martyrs to get deliberately caught while a larger party sweeps across the other side of the playground. Success chance: moderate.

The Disguise - works better for individuals or younger groups. Crouch and stroll nonchalantly across, pretending, without ever drawing attention to yourself, that you’re a younger child. Last minute dash necessary or Assistants will see you on the grass. Success chance: unlikely.

The Shuffle - this one is a stroke of genius - walk along the wall of the school building, facing the building and keeping your back to everyone behind you. You’ll blend right in and look totally subtle. Success chance: if you try this, you’re an idiot.

Sometimes our stratagems would work, other times we’d get easily caught and marched back to the grey slab. 

By the end of term, we spent so much time on our military-style excursions I wouldn’t have blamed the staff if they wondered whether cane wasn’t actually a pretty swell idea after all.

Still, it was a fun few weeks that educated me greatly in the merits of teamwork and pragmatism, though I probably owe a few apologies to several faculty members, and more than one box of chocolates. Sorry, guys.

Moving swiftly on.

Lesson Three: Each teacher is equipped with at least one eye of Sauron

Between the two semi-narratives above lingers a memory, far shorter yet too vivid not to be recalled. The situation was thus. 

In class one morning, the assembled mass of marginally-literate children were writing some form of story or poem or doctoral dissertation or something. As we all know, kids imagine they are the best at everything they do. Indeed, if a child clearly, unavoidably loses at something, that something immediately becomes relegated to the ‘not worth doing anyway’ pile. Anyway, We were all getting quite invested into our writing, and the classroom was so quiet you could hear every flick of a pencil, every moistened lip, every rustle of anyone potentially taking refuge under a nearby desk.

Arthur: everyone's closest childhood friend

If you remember, I earlier discussed that a lot of our memories are collective, not individual, as they come from the same source. The ‘I’ll say I like yours if you say you like mine’ tactic is probably in this fold.

For those few unaware, ‘I’ll say I like yours if you say you like mine’ idea is simple: Child A will provide Child B with approval for their creative work if B reciprocates the gesture. ‘I’ll like yours if you like mine’ may miss the point of compliments, but no more than teenagers calling themselves ugly on their Facebook photos. Like my friend Peter, some people never grow up.

On my quest for validation, I decided to implement the ‘‘I’ll say I like yours if you say you like mine’ tactic on the girl sitting next to me, grievously disregarding the silence that pervaded the room. Before a few syllables had left my high-pitched tongue, Mrs. Y issued me with what I can only describe as the Stare of Rage. Her eyebrows swooped like a bird hovering, hunting. The mouth tightened, the pupils widened, her whole body tautened tight as a Trebuchet.

My juvenile tongue instantly glotted in my throat, and my voice climbed up to a somehow higher octave before fading away to nothing. I feared for my life, my sanity, my...then, quick as that, Mrs. Y walked on. Justice had been served with a simple look. 

Evidently, she had other fish to visually fry.

Cliche images aside, it was terrifying. I never crossed the teacher for the rest of the year, and a good fifteen years on can still can see that Stare of Rage (TM). 

Now that the fear has passed, though, I want to find her and ask her to teach me her ways.  I could stop wars, elect presidents, get someone else to pass the salt - all from a simple stare.

So, school-bound friends,  next time you’re about to do something stupid - make sure there’s no teacher nearby. There isn’t a table in the world that can save you.

Do you have any unique primary-school memories?

To read how my education fares now, go here.

To see how I procrastinate my education, go here.

If you just like hyperlinks, go here.

Revisiting Assassin’s creed: I thought I’d have a stab

Platform - Xbox360
Cost New- £10

I steer Altair up to the entrance of Damascus’ poorest district. Here, there’s no shelter - the sun stares down on dirty walls of baked brick. Along the edges, sellers are pandering goods in splintered, ramshackle stalls.

None of this bothers me: I’m busy eyeing the sole entrance into the city itself. The gate is open but four guards are standing sentry, huddled into the narrow high space that separates my hero from my goal.

My fingers slacken on the controller as my mind flicks through the options.  Dispatching them the old-fashioned bloody way is the first alternative, and I find it rather attractive. I’d be saving this bunch of human-shaped pixels from the perpetual damnation of standing here for all of virtual eternity. Yes - the only humane thing to do, really, is to imminently carve up four sizable slices of man-turkey. 

I’ll take my Nobel Peace Prize to go, please.

Then, my honed perception (and by honed perception, I mean a huge icon) informs me there’s a group of scholars beginning to meander up to to the gates, totally unwatched. My perception (icon) points out that my white robes would blend in quite nicely with the surly academics and I could pass through violence-free. 

There we go, then. Plan.

As I start to move, though, the camera swivels up a little and I see a stall slightly closer to the gate than the rest, probably close enough to leap over the guard’s heads without their noticing. Out of the three alternatives, this strikes me - and by extension, Altair - as the most best option. Virtual gymnastics that defy the developer’s expectations. Delicious. 

I make Altair change tack and let him mount the rickety roof of the stall. A run and a jump later and he’s soaring across the dust, then over the heads of the guards still staring blandly in front, and then landing on the other side. Home free. There’s no way they saw that, I know; the city sprawls ahead. 

Of a sudden, my HUD flares red, and the apparently all-seeing guards turn quickly, uniformly, like some bizarre form of Crusade Macarena.  They brandish their swords and unapologetically charge. The same guards, in case I’m not stressing this enough, who didn’t see my novel method of entrance. Not even a little bit.

Welcome to Assassin’s Creed: a game that really doesn’t care about your stupid whiny feelings.

The Hangover Part 1191

The first thing people seem to have forgotten about the original Assassin’s Creed is that, when it was released back in 2007, no-one really had a clue what was going on plot-wise. Sure, there were a few with the time and notepads able to piece together fragmentary excerpts of dialogue into a somewhat cohesive whole, but for the most part the game starts off confusing and spirals out from there, deliberately murky. 

Here are the things that you’re allowed to have a firm grasp on - you play as Altair, Master Assassin (PhD), living in the middle of the third crusade, commissioned with the task of bumping off nine ‘templars’ from either side of the fighting. It’s worth noting most targets are genuinely interesting historical figures (see here for a list). You find yourself being more sympathetic towards some, pitying others, and wanting to plough others down with a medieval tractor. Still, it’s difficult to understand what their end goal is, and just when you think you’ve got things sorted out, the final fifteen minutes narrative-slaps you so hard you’re left utterly disorientated and more dazed than ever.

This confusion consumes almost every aspect of the plot, too - while in later installments the player is allowed to take refuge from the meta-narrative within the more intimate story of the protagonist, Altair has graduated first-class from the College of the One Dimensional Personality.

This assessment is perhaps too generous for the game’s other protagonist, Desmond Myles, a present-day Assassin captured and forced to relive his memories via the ‘Animus’, essentially a Matrix machine into the past. The Desmond parts of gameplay are less marginal than anyone would like, serving to break up the action in the same way the Pacific separates Hawaii from the mainland. Desmond (here and the sequels) acts clearly a device that allow the writers to flick between time periods, and isn’t really worth dwelling on further than these few remarks. His sections are decidedly, deliberately grey and uninspiring.

   Desmond: A strange mix of bland and eminently punchable                                                    

Back to Altair, then.

There’s no getting away from the disorientation the game steamrollers the player with - in fact, it’s actually integrated into some of the game elements too. Huge expanses of land are accessible but are pretty much void, and the game’s collectable ‘flags’ have no discernible purpose, without so much as a pat on the back as a reward. Unless you do it yourself, but we have to save our energy for those trips to the fridge.

Here’s the crux of my argument, though: this constant, consistent disorientation isn’t necessarily a bad thing. 

Why?

Because it helps build one of the most palpable atmospheres in gaming. The boring wastelands of dialogue are frustrating because there’s something deeper going on if you could just tease it out. The huge, expansive cities of Jerusalem, Damascus and Acre are (though bettered by the sequels) huge, distinctive sprawling masses yet, in the same way as the plot, you never feel as though you ‘control’ them in the way you do in later installments. There’s a detachment here - gloomy filters are woven so there often isn’t any kind of sunny escapism. Little sprinklings of music exist where others may have placed a bombastic score. There are no huge set-pieces that make things feel especially ‘gamey’. Altair is slower in his climbing and free-running, giving exploration a less intense, more careful pacing.

The narrative works precisely because it feeds into the brilliant mysterious atmosphere that the game is, as a whole, drenched with. It makes the player always feel like the smaller part of a bigger whole, that there’s a conspiracy two steps ahead of your puny mind. The game doesn’t care if you keep up with it because things aren’t ultimately about you, and you’re made to know it.

This realisation, though, belies the paradox at the heart of Assassin’s Creed - this mysterious atmosphere is entirely undercut by the most repetitive gaming structure since Tetris.

Each ‘level’, if you can call it that, amalgamates (what a fantastic word) to the same thing:

(1) Converse with Assassin master.

1. Travel to city
2. Converse with Assassin Headquarter’s master
3. Climb some highpoints to find minigame-style missions
4. Complete minigame-style missions
5. Converse with Assassin Headquarter’s master
6. Travel to target
7. Watch Target converse
8. Stab target
9. Converse with Target
10. Run back to Assassin Headquarter’s master
11. Converse with Assassin Headquarter’s master
12. Converse with Assassin master

And so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. The whole thing begins to feel more like a business transaction than a game, and that’s only after the second or third cycle. There are nine assassinations to do, totaling easily two dozen hours of gameplay (though as you can see gameplay/watching ratio is as annoyingly off balance as playing see-saw with the fat kid) it can easily become a chore.

Nice level. Let's use it again. And again. And again.

It’s so frustrating because each element of gameplay taken individually is at least adequate, and more often than not excellent. The combat, similar though vastly inferior to 2009’s Arkham Asylum, is entertaining, the free-running through cities is sublime, the various high-points scattered around the cities is fantastic. Shoehorning these things into annoying mini-games makes the entire experience feel as though a week before shipping Ubisoft suddenly realised they had to put an actual game in with the experience itself. The overall effect, as said, is a paradox and is utterly, hopelessly detrimental.

Even by 2013‘s standards, the game still looks decent, although character faces have weird mackerel eyes and bizarre melted wax faces, and sometimes the framerate can dip to slower speeds than your grandparent’s holiday slideshow.

So, overall, do I recommend you play Assassin’s Creed? Yes - as a piece of art and a lesson in game development, not as a game. It all depends on your patience supply.  think people who say ‘Stick with ACII’ are being a little harsh - certainly the prequel has a lot to recommend it. 

Give the game a try, though don’t throw the series out if it’s not your thing. 

And for goodness' sake don't climb onto that stall. You'll get yourself some serious splinters.

For another game-related blog, go here.

If you hate videogames, and prefer Renaissance drama, go here.