If you’re fortunate enough to own an iPhone or iPod Touch, you’re also unfortunate enough to have tried browsing the gadgets’ application store. With over 35,000 downloads currently available, finding the quality in all that quantity is growing increasingly difficult, frustrating and costly.
A conveniently skewed view of history. Corrupt religious leaders. Serious men in silly white dresses who leap flamboyantly about with knives strapped to their wrists. Jade Raymond. What do these things have in common? They're hallmarks of Assassin's Creed, which has quickly grown from a single, divisive game to one of the most popular franchises of the current console generation. And if you've been paying attention, you know that makes it a perfect target for our continuing Week of Hate coverage. Specifically the part of that coverage in which we take a moment each day to nitpick a beloved series to death...
Like petty school children bickering in a playground fight, gamers are obsessed with choosing sides. Never content to rate a game as simply “above average” or “slightly disappointing,” we allow internet hearsay, magazine previews, fanboy feuds and console preferences to push our views to ridiculous extremes. We can’t just like something… we have to deem it BEST EVER. We can’t just dislike something… we have to declare it EPIC FAIL.
It’s not easy being a horse, especially a diabetic horse who loves sugar cubes and games. As a proud member of the Equidae family, I don’t give a damn about the new protagonist in Assassin’s Creed II or the stupid non-animal flying device he’ll pilot. I just want to know if Ezio will be riding a freaking horse through the Tuscan countryside. Will he get to mount a Salerno, or perhaps a San Fratello?
Most game ads are usually a bit rubbish. But we can forgive them, because whether pushing Z listers ‘enjoying’ entertaining interactive products or offending our ears with a cheesy, booming voiceover, most of them are just charmingly clueless. The following ads are guilty of a much worse crime, though. They all utterly adore themselves. Self-indulgent, self-loving bullshit, below you’ll find cynical commercials that have
While playing a bit of Spirit Tracks I bumped into a tiny old man named Niko, who’s apparently been a part of Link and Zelda’s watery quests since the Wind Waker days. After that revelation shook its way through my bones, I realized, oh hey, his name’s Niko… as in Niko Bellic!
26 more cases of "Oh, that's interesting" inside!
Sometimes, a game’s plotline can surprise you. Awhile back, we posted a story called the top 7 games with mega plot twists you never saw coming that showcased seven brilliant “gotcha!” moments in gaming history. This is not that story. No, this story is a celebration of the unsubtle and clumsy, a compilation of those games whose plot twists were so thinly veiled, so heavy-handedly, elbow-in-the-ribs foreshadowed, that everyone and their grandmother figured it out ten minutes in. The only people fooled by these swerves were people who called it, but second guessed themselves, thinking, “Nah, it can’t be that stupid and obvious, can it?”
Yes it can, friends. Yes. It can...
On some level, roughly 95 percent of games have always been about assassination: go to point A and kill prominent entity B, fighting your way through goons C through Z to get there. Most games tend to come up with a morally justifiable pretext for all the violence, but more and more, we're seeing games that drop the act and let you be what you've secretly known yourself to be all along: a remorseless killing machine bent on destroying your targets.
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