ugachaka :: Jacob was here

I can see why reviewers were harsh to Assassin’s Creed. The game has a few parts where it seems a little broken–hiccups here and there with graphics.

Your master assassin might throw his arms in the air when he dismounts from a horse at odd moments, but at the same time, it has a few amazing elements that make it a great game.

There. I said it. I thought Assassin’s Creed was a great game. Like Halo 3 or Call of Duty 4, there were distinct moments in the game that made the story electrified and interesting.

Yes, it’s repetitive in some sequences, but if you give the game a chance, it becomes pretty addictive. Assassin’s Creed brought out the achievement junkie, a slightly obsessive compulsive element of my personality, and made me want to collect every single flag and complete every optional mission. I enjoyed the fact that it was repetitive but systematic, and each assassination was different.

That is, I enjoyed every single mission until I got to the final memory–a climactic moment I reached at 2 a.m. one weekend.

Ready to jump into the final conclusion, I selected it and entered the loading screen. There was my familiar assassin, Altair, waiting patiently in a cloud of light. As the 5.1 sound came to a constant hum, and the game was about to load, my Xbox 360 popped a message out of the right side of the screen–Disc Read Error.

What a cruel joke.

Apparently, a circular sequence of slight scratches on the disc that I had ignored were crucial to the disc’s final level but nothing else. I had almost sent the disc back early on, but decided to tough it out since the scratches caused no problems. I was impatient to start my journey as Altair.

I tried cleaning the discs several times–no luck. I finally jumped on the Amazon.com return policy pages to see about returning the disc–no luck. My disc was more than 30 days old and opened since Christmas Day.

My last chance was Ubisoft, the publisher of Assassin’s Creed. Luckily, I found an entry in the knowledge base two weeks ago that showed a disc replacement program. As long as the disc was purchased within 90 days–true–and the disc problems were not caused by any foul play on my part–also true–I would get free disc replacement. Whew! Relief.

It seems like it is going to be a little harder than a swap and replace, but for the moment, my Assassin’s Creed hopes will be at the mercy of Ubisoft customer support. It’s tragic when a gamer is separated from his ending.

I hate achievement points–mostly because I obsess over getting them all before I can consider a game completed even though I have beaten all the levels.

For those of you out there who like being cheap about it, the new game Avatar is giving them away. Check out this video that shows you how to get 1000 easy points in just a couple of minutes.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv-kv4QJnV8&eurl=http://www.destructoid.com/how-to-get-1000-achievement-points-in-under-two-minutes-54717.phtml[/youtube]

Watch those Gamerscores jump up.

I neglected the AICN (great site if you don’t read it already) review of Halo 3 in the heat of trying to track them all through RSS feeds.

In Quint’s review, he takes a close look at the campaign in his preview of the game with Bungie. He went for getting the achievements right away and notes how much they add to the replayability of the game.

What you can do is replay any level and try to build up points. You get achievements if you reach a point minimum. You build points by killing bad guys (headshots count for more) and destroying vehicles. You get multipliers for beating it in a certain time, on a certain difficulty setting and having these skulls turned on. The more skulls you have turned on, the harder the difficulty level, the quicker you reach the level’s end, the higher the multipliers are.

The achievements and skulls really make the campaign great in Halo 3. Whereas you might have been satisfied zipping through Halo 2’s campaign once or twice, the edition of campaign level scoring adds an entire competitive element. The skulls also make the game harder and goofier (see Grunt Birthday Party skull for confetti).

The campaign has the same video and screenshot editing as multiplayer, so you can really take advantage of those epic moments in gameplay to share with your friends.

We tested this with our first level and it was mind-blowing. This level was almost 30 minutes long and it was only a 3.8 meg file. What’s sweet about it is you can switch views, watch yourself run through the map, pause and take a snapshot which you can save, move the camera around anywhere you want and even zip ahead into the map so you watch what the bad guys are doing for a few minutes before you show up and ruin their day. How sweet is that?

The review is great. Coming from a fanboy of the series, he takes a look at what makes Halo 3 a standout of the trilogy and the pinnacle of Bungie’s innovation in first-person shooters.

Anyone who has played the campaign on Halo 2 knows that the skulls were one of the harder to find easter eggs within the game. By wandering off in parts of the level that it appears the player was never supposed to see, players can stumble upon a skull like the one used in the “Oddball” multiplayer game type.

These skulls would unlock some hidden feature like making the computer-controlled characters say funnier comments during cinematics in the game or during actual gameplay. Another skull made your HUD invisible in the game. These skulls would stay in effect until you turned your console off. Thereby, Bungie was responsible for excess power usage all over the United States.

In checking out the Halo 3 achievements released on Xbox360Achievements.org, it seems that Bungie has now made it worth your time to find these skulls by making them actual points for your gamer score.

The site currently lists 49 achievements for a total of 1000 points on your gamer score. 1000 points that every teenage boy will probably have by December.