Weekend Recap: Assassin Down the Avenue

"I am an American aquarium drinker /
I assassin down the avenue."
 - Wilco, "I Am Trying To Break Your Heart

According to Raptr, I've spent 15 hours with Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, and another 5 hours in Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit.  Both games are excellent and well worth your time.

Ah, but you want details!  You want experiences!   You want in-depth impressions!  (Do you?  I don't know who reads this thing anymore besides Russian search engines that keep bringing up my best guess at the Beatles set list in Rock Band.)  (That sentence right there, the one you just read, will have already generated 20 more hits before I even finish writing this post, so let's move on.)  (*Sigh*  Remember Rock Band?  I still really like RB3 but haven't touched it in weeks.)

Let's start with Need For Speed, then, since I got pulled out of AC:B and into a lot of NFS multiplayer this weekend with a lot of the same crew that used to play Burnout 3 every night for hours. 

Yes, it feels a lot like a Burnout game.  (Which is great.)  But you know what?  It also feels a lot like the old Sega classic Outrun, in that there's a shit-ton of drifting that you do, and all the cars seem to be superglued to the road, and they all have fat asses that always feel like you're about to spin out of control in a drift, but you never do.

The star of the show is clearly cops v. racers, and pretty much everyone that I've played with acknowledges that while both sides are fun as hell, it's playing as the cops that's really fun as hell.  That's as close as you get to the classic Burnout style of craziness, but now with spike strips, roadblocks and EMPs.  There's not a tremendous amount of depth to the gameplay, but that's OK - every race is different, and each track has a lot of side routes (as not all of the shortcuts are actually shortcuts) and, well, shit gets real crazy quick.   (Or, alternately, shit gets crazy real quick.  This game moves too fast for comma placement.)

The Autolog is also a pretty neat feature - it's essentially a real-time Facebook wall with all your friends' activity, so if someone beats your time in a race, you can very easily try to retake your position on the leaderboard.  It's very easy to get sucked down that particular rabbit hole.  At all times, you are aware of what your friends are doing (and have done) in relation to what you're doing, and before long another hour has gone by while you try to beat your friend's time.  I haven't played a game with this much "just one more go" in a while.

Although, now that I think about it, there's a lot of that "just one more x" in Assassin's Creed, which is partly why I racked up 15 hours without even really meaning to play that much.  And I'm not even a third of the way through the actual story. (!)  If the first Assassin's Creed was (fairly) criticized for not having enough to actually do, AC:B is possibly guilty of having too much.  My last 2 hours of gameplay yesterday was basically me trying to level up the 4 members of my brotherhood, which scratched my Farmville itch like crazy.  Is this a spoiler?  I don't think this is a spoiler - it's a feature, that's partly spelled out in the game's title.  A few memories into the game, you start recruiting fellow Assassins.  And you level them up by sending them out on all these little missions - you don't actually see them do this, and it doesn't affect you in any way, other than that your assassins will be unavailable for the 5-10 minutes it takes them to do their missions.  And so, while they've been doing that, I've been finding hidden flags and hidden feathers and doing all sorts of sidequests, and once they are sufficiently leveled up - or, more accurately, once I'm bored of flag finding - I'm probably going to start burning down all the remaining Borgia Towers that I currently have access to.  And then, maybe, I'll get back to the actual story.

The AC:B graphics engine isn't as bad as, say, the Gametrailers video review made it out to be.  I mean, my Best Games of 2010 - Best Horses award will still be going to Red Dead Redemption, but there's a lot about AC:B that's simply staggering.  The city of Rome is absolutely gigantic, and while it maybe lacks the variety that was a high point of AC2, it also feels a lot more cohesive.  (That being said, the engine is a bit old - and the more I think about it, the more I'm curious to see what an AC game would look like in the Red Dead engine.  Both games feature huge open worlds with wide open spaces - Red Dead doesn't have lots of buildings, of course, but its terrain is a lot more varied and textured.)

Anyway.  You get the idea.

My rental copies of Donkey Kong Country Returns and Gran Turismo 5 will most likely arrive while I'm away for Thanksgiving; I don't know that I have any time in my life for either of these games, let alone Disney Epic Mickey next week.  I'd very much like to be able to finish AC:B by the end of the year, and considering how massive the game is and how much there is to do, I wonder if that's possible, considering how busy I'm about to be...