Leveling Down

Ezio now has some help from his fellow assassins in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

Assassin’s Creed II was one of the top games of last year, so it’s no surprise to see that Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, a direct sequel to Assassin’s Creed II, is also scoring highly in reviews and doing well in sales. I’ve recently completed all I wanted to out of this game, and while I think it’s a good game, I can’t help but feel like it’s not as great a game as the reviews make it out to be. Hit the jump for my take on it.

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Hi – my name is cmfl3x. And I’m an achievaholic.

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Is the Wii the only answer to getting non-gamers interested in games?

Any gamer who lives with a non-gamer (generally, the Mrs., but I don’t want to assume) knows the inherent tensions that can arise in the household. “Do the dishes!” (Five more minutes…) “It’s time for bed!” (Let me finish this level.) “We’re going to be late!” (I’m fighting a boss.) “I’m going into labor!” (Let me get to a save point!) These tensions exist in my marriage as much as they might in any other and are compounded by the fact that my wife dislikes glowing rectangles in general. Thus any game that Mrs. cmfl3x and I can find a common interest in is like pure gold.

In this two part feature, I’ll be looking for some of the general principles that a gamer can use to try to find a game that can be enjoyed with a non-gamer. Obviously, your mileage may vary, and each individual user knows their significant other the best, but since I have a particularly difficult to please spouse, I figure I’d share some of my experiences. In Part 1, I’ll be looking at some general guiding principles and some general types of games, while in Part 2 I’ll discuss some specific genres that might house these diamonds in the rough. With examples!

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My fond memories of Dragon Age: Origins have been dulled by the number of extra DLC that “expand” the game.

Last Friday I posted about how I felt that EA’s Project $10 initiative is working, and I’m a supporter of it. Hey, I’m all for supporting developers and publishers to make money off their own products and if it came down to it, I wouldn’t mind if the used market disappeared altogether. EA has been coming back into the spotlight in a positive way with gamers these days, while Activision has gone the other way. But there’s one thing that EA is now more guilty of than others at this point that I am annoyed with: DLC for single player games. Read on for my thoughts why.

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If you want to tackle all of the missions in Burnout Paradise, you will have to drive to them.

I’m still in the middle of BioShock 2, so I’m going to kick this week’s gaming entries off with a gaming topic that I’ve been wrestling with for a while now: “open-world” sandbox gameplay design. It seems like it’s getting more and more popular these days, and while I may be in the minority for this, I don’t think I am a fan. Grand Theft Auto III made sandbox gameplay popular, and ever since then, we’ve seen several games in the last few years implement this “feature’ from Burnout to Halo. The addition of basically being forced to travel everywhere to actually start a mission certainly makes a game longer, but does it make a game more enjoyable?

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We’ve finally reached the last day of our 2009 Xbox 360 Awards & Holiday Shopping Guide, culminating in our Game of the Year. For those following the awards throughout the week, you may have a good guess as to what game will be our game of the year. Is it the same as your pick?

In any case, please remember that while we’ve chosen only one winner from each category, all games nominated within each category are all worth considering, depending on how much you enjoy that category. This week’s feature has doubled as a shopping guide as well as an awards “ceremony”. With that, let’s draw back the curtains for the finale…

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In Part 4 of the Awards/Shopping Guide, Leveling Down will be tackling some of the more controversial categories: Best Story, Best Value, and Most Overrated. Admittedly, these categories are VERY subjective and are only our opinions, and on some counts even espion4ge and I don’t see *exactly* eye to eye. Nonetheless, controversy is a lot of fun, so might as well give it a shot!

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One of the Xbox 360′s strongest features compared to other consoles is its multiplayer gameplay, which can probably be attributed to the Live infrastructure. It is thus not surprisingly to see strong multiplayer games on this system. For today’s awards, I will be discussing the best multiplayer games released this year, and the one better than the rest.

I will also be discussing the best new IP and best sequel of the year. It’s good to see that in 2009, there were nearly an equal number of good new IPs and sequels. The moment we begin seeing only sequels releasing and new IPs no longer developed is the moment the game industry stops advancing. It’s easy to support sequels since you know what you’re getting yourself into, but this year was perhaps the year with the largest number of development studios shutting down. Continue to take a chance by supporting new IPs – the developers need this type of support to stay in business and come up with new and exciting games to push our industry forward!

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Rounding out our main categories, today we will be looking at Best Action/Adventure, Music, Real-Time Strategy and XBLA games. Looking at the list of titles from this year, there were a surprising number of good action/adventure games out this year, and even though neither of us owns a PS3, you can’t talk about action/adventure in 2009 without mentioning Uncharted 2. I’m glad I didn’t have to nominate that game though, since that would probably have made for some tough decisions. Music games, on the other hand, seemed to take a step backwards, or maybe we are just getting sick of them. Meanwhile, Live Arcade continues to put out good titles worth taking a look at.

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In Assassin’s Creed, 2 is definitely better than 1

As espion4ge stated a week or so ago, we save the title “review” for games that we have completed. When I opened Assassin’s Creed 2 last week, never in a million years did I think I would be writing a review for this 20+ hour game less than a week later. Yet here we are – I somehow managed to sneak around my family and Thanksgiving schedule to pour in the 25 or so hours I needed to beat the game. Guess I’ve learned a thing or two about sneaking around as an assassin from this remarkable piece of edutainment. Hit the jump to share in that knowledge.

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