From Arcades To Wine Cellars: The Transmigration of Makoto Asada [Xbox 360]

They start out as normal looking dudes. Dudes you’d want to drink beer with, have a pizza with. Several pizzas. Then, they change. Whoosh! There’s been Microsoft’s J Allard, Sony’s Kaz Hirai and SEGA’s Toshihiro Nagoshi . But the latest game exec to go through a metamorphosis is Cave producer Makoto Asada. Let’s take a trip down memory lane. Here’s Asada as he appeared during promotions for the first DeathSmiles shooting game. He’s rotund and probably gets winded going up a flight of stairs at his local arcade, but he looks like a nice fellow. A gentle giant, if you will. This is an in-between period. Talking up the Xbox 360 version of Mushihime Sama Futari Ver. 1.5, Asada has decided he wants to make a change, a big change. However, the dye job is extreme. It shouts, hey, crazy hair! Watch out!! Yet the style is exactly the same. Asada as he appeared over the weekend at a Microsoft sponsored shooting game event. Look at that suit, that brand new hair. This guy doesn’t eat pizza. He eats fancy food at fancy restaurant and can probably recommend a good beaujolais. Bravo to Asada and these other individuals for improving themselves. Way better than the opposite, no? *applause* ケイブの浅田誠さん、死ぬ気でゲームを作っていたらいつの間にかハンサムになる [はちま起稿]

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From Arcades To Wine Cellars: The Transmigration of Makoto Asada [Xbox 360]

From Arcades To Wine Cellars: The Transmigration of Makoto Asada [Xbox 360]

They start out as normal looking dudes. Dudes you’d want to drink beer with, have a pizza with. Several pizzas. Then, they change. Whoosh! There’s been Microsoft’s J Allard, Sony’s Kaz Hirai and SEGA’s Toshihiro Nagoshi . But the latest game exec to go through a metamorphosis is Cave producer Makoto Asada. Let’s take a trip down memory lane. Here’s Asada as he appeared during promotions for the first DeathSmiles shooting game. He’s rotund and probably gets winded going up a flight of stairs at his local arcade, but he looks like a nice fellow. A gentle giant, if you will. This is an in-between period. Talking up the Xbox 360 version of Mushihime Sama Futari Ver. 1.5, Asada has decided he wants to make a change, a big change. However, the dye job is extreme. It shouts, hey, crazy hair! Watch out!! Yet the style is exactly the same. Asada as he appeared over the weekend at a Microsoft sponsored shooting game event. Look at that suit, that brand new hair. This guy doesn’t eat pizza. He eats fancy food at fancy restaurant and can probably recommend a good beaujolais. Bravo to Asada and these other individuals for improving themselves. Way better than the opposite, no? *applause* ケイブの浅田誠さん、死ぬ気でゲームを作っていたらいつの間にかハンサムになる [はちま起稿]

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From Arcades To Wine Cellars: The Transmigration of Makoto Asada [Xbox 360]

From Arcades To Wine Cellars: The Transmigration of Makoto Asada [Xbox 360]

They start out as normal looking dudes. Dudes you’d want to drink beer with, have a pizza with. Several pizzas. Then, they change. Whoosh! There’s been Microsoft’s J Allard, Sony’s Kaz Hirai and SEGA’s Toshihiro Nagoshi . But the latest game exec to go through a metamorphosis is Cave producer Makoto Asada. Let’s take a trip down memory lane. Here’s Asada as he appeared during promotions for the first DeathSmiles shooting game. He’s rotund and probably gets winded going up a flight of stairs at his local arcade, but he looks like a nice fellow. A gentle giant, if you will. This is an in-between period. Talking up the Xbox 360 version of Mushihime Sama Futari Ver. 1.5, Asada has decided he wants to make a change, a big change. However, the dye job is extreme. It shouts, hey, crazy hair! Watch out!! Yet the style is exactly the same. Asada as he appeared over the weekend at a Microsoft sponsored shooting game event. Look at that suit, that brand new hair. This guy doesn’t eat pizza. He eats fancy food at fancy restaurant and can probably recommend a good beaujolais. Bravo to Asada and these other individuals for improving themselves. Way better than the opposite, no? *applause* ケイブの浅田誠さん、死ぬ気でゲームを作っていたらいつの間にかハンサムになる [はちま起稿]

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From Arcades To Wine Cellars: The Transmigration of Makoto Asada [Xbox 360]

Nintendo Details Upcoming WiiWare And DSIWare Titles [Nintendo]

As if Cave Story wasn’t enough, Nintendo has plenty more downloadable games coming out in the first half of 2010, from Art Style and WarioWare for WiiWare to a DSiWare fighter that puts you inside the game. If you’ve been keeping up with the flood of Nintendo news this morning, you’ll know that Cave Story hits WiiWare on March 22nd , but the WiiWare party starts on March 1st, when Capcom’s Mega Man 10 makes the scene. Then on the 8th, Max & the Magic Marker arrives, charging players to use their Wii remote as a drawing tool, helping Max reach his ultimate goal, whatever that might be. Maybe he really wants to play Cave Story. Rounding out March we have WarioWare: D.I.Y. Showcase, a standalone WarioWare title featuring interoperability with WarioWare D.I.Y. on the Nintendo DS. Two new WiiWare Art Style titles also make the lineup for early 2010. Rotozoa features a tiny creature that absorbs tiny colored organisms through its tentacles to grow larger, and Art Style: light trax features a techno-music backed race between colored light beams, which sounds a great deal like Bit Generation’s dotstream , which is fine by us. This spring will also see the release of Ghostfire Game’s Rage of the Gladiator and a port of gorgeous PC puzzle platformer And Yet It Moves from Broken rules. Then, come the summer, we’ll be treated to Super Meat Boy! , which needs no introduction. DSiWare explodes this year with the spring release of Nintendo’s Photo Dojo, a fighting game in which you take photos of yourself, record sounds, and then become a character in a side-scrolling beat-em up. Sounds like an interesting use for that DSi camera we’ve been poking at for months. Spring also brings Nintendo’s Metal Torrent to DSiWare, a multiplayer shooter involving converting your opponent’s bullets to cubes to increase your score, and X-Scape, also from Nintendo, which is an exploratory adventure involving exploring more than 20 planets, navigating 3D tunnels, and fighting giant robots. It looks like Nintendo has a fine lineup coming, at least for the first half of the year. Things are beginning to look up for the weekly Nintendo Download.

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Nintendo Details Upcoming WiiWare And DSIWare Titles [Nintendo]

Alan Wake Slated For May 18, Looks Good [It's A Date]

The long-in-development Alan Wake, one of the most enigmatic titles in development for the Xbox 360, will finally be released on May 18, Microsoft announced today. Earlier this week, the game’s developers gave Kotaku a live demonstration. It was impressive. Alan Wake has been in development by Max Payne makers Remedy Entertainment for more than half a decade, showing up at big gaming trade shows, then vanishing. It’s been back, making the rounds, since E3 of last year. The game stars the fictional thriller writer Alan Wake who goes on a getaway with his wife, Alice, to the Pacific northwest town of Bright Falls. He’s suffering writer’s block and his marriage is in a bit of trouble. But the game focuses on things getting worse, as Alan becomes a man on the run, trying to survive the enveloping darkness and weirdness, armed with just a flashlight and a gun or two while a shadowy presence possesses sends men wielding axes at his heels and logging trucks flying right at his face. The game is a thriller. It’s T-rated, Microsoft announced today, and doesn’t aspire to be the kind of scary game we’ve played before. Remedy writer Sam Lake described the game to me as a “smart, tightly-paced story” and as a “thriller.” I asked what he meant be smart. “This is more of a thriller than a horror game,” he said. “When you talk about horror in video games, it usually means blood and gore.” He said the Remedy team wanted something other than cheap chills. “We want to make sure there are no scares just for the sake of scares,” he said. Everything, all of the game’s creepiness, will cohere into a narrative. Three of Remedy’s top men showed me about 20 minutes of Alan Wake. We first looked at part of the game’s first chapter or, as the studio has been calling it in the model of favorite shows of theirs like Lost, “episode.” Alan and Alice were driving into Bright Falls, heading over to a diner where they would meet the man with the keys to the house they’d be staying at. The diner was filled with ambiance and optional diversions. The waitress recognized Alan and squealed to him about how she was his biggest fan and even had the cardboard cut-out commemorating one of his novels to prove it. Sure enough, at the doorway was a cardboard Alan Wake. As one of Remedy’s developers walked Alan to the back of the diner, our hero encountered two old-timers sitting in a booth, jawing about something or other. One of them asked Alan to play a song on the jukebox. Further to the back, Alan encountered a lady in black, her face covered in a veil. She wasn’t the person who was supposed to give Alan the house keys, but she had them. And, she creepily added, she’d come by later to meet his wife. She demanded it. We skipped ahead to the midst of an episode later in the game. By this time, we were in the action. The sun had set. The darkness had descended and the flashlight-and-gun core shooting gameplay was in effect. Enemies in Alan Wake are covered in a shadowy haze. To defeat them before they kill Alan, the player has to focus Alan’s flashlight on the enemy, burning off the haze. Once that’s done, Alan can — and should! — shoot. Alan Wake is a single-player game, but at this section of the game, as he tried to survive out on a wooded hillside, he was accompanied by Bright Falls’ sheriff and the game’s comic relief, Alan’s literary agent Barry Wheeler. Since light could ward off the enemies, Barry had wrapped himself in Christmas lights. He looked ridiculous. The trio worked their way to the top of a dam. Hounded by possessed people and flocks of birds, they did their best to survive. On the road atop the dam, the Remedy guys had Alan commandeer a big spotlight. He could use it as a turret, but any light source Alan uses has limits. His flashlight can run low on batteries, forcing the player to use one of his reserves. The spotlight can burn itself out. So after a little bit of spotlight blasting, Alan left the thing idle and was left to his flashlight and handgun. Lake told me that spotlights and other light sources can be used to corral an enemy. Leave a shaft of light beaming on the right and enemies will avoid that region. As enemies swarmed Alan, the best defense turned out to be a flare gun. Firing this at several onrushing enemies triggered a stylish slowdown effect. The enemies recoiled and Alan dodged. But the mysterious dark force had plenty of other things in store for Alan. Unfortunately, as it got hectic, the demo ended. Lake told me that gamers can think of Alan Wake as an “everyman,” not an “action hero.” Unlike Uncharted 2’s Nathan Drake, he’s more of a flawed character, struggling in his marriage, struggling with his craft. But, aside from that, the best compliment to pay Alan Wake the game right now is that it is exuding the style, polish and beauty of location of Naughty Dog’s hit PlayStation 3 series. The game’s dark Pacific northwest is lovely. Its sense of style, dark and mysterious, narrated in ominous past-tense, is winning. It took long enough, but it does feel like this game is coming together. We’ll have more on Alan Wake in the coming days, including hands-on impressions of my own time trying to survive as Alan Wake in the darkness of Bright Falls.

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Alan Wake Slated For May 18, Looks Good [It's A Date]

Music? Yes. Movies? Yes. Commercials? Noooo, thank you [Style Savvy]

Beyonce nails sitting on a couch with a DSi. But not so much her interview afterwards.

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Music? Yes. Movies? Yes. Commercials? Noooo, thank you [Style Savvy]

Capcom, Do Not Forsake 2D Fighting Games [Street Fighter Iv]

Street Fighter has traditionally been a 2D fighter. Capcom has traditionally been a 2D fighting game company. That is, until Street Fighter IV . In a break from the previous Capcom developed titles, Street Fighter IV introduced the venerable series to 2.5D. It’s somewhere in the middle — not exactly 2D and not exactly 3D. “The 3D models on a 2D plane is a very good match and all of the (game) systems are capable of supporting such a feature,” Capcom producer Ryota Niitsuma told Kotaku in a recent interview. Niitsuma is heading up Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars, a title that like Street Fighter IV uses 2.5D. SFIV received applause and criticism for it being in 2.5D and not pure 2D. With titles like BlazBlue and Melty Blood, there has been a renaissance in 2D fighters recently. Sadly, Street Fighter IV is not apart of that renaissance. But Capcom has moved on from 2D now that it has found 2.5D — unlike 2D, which is viewed by some players as looking “old”, 2.5D still looks modern. To appeal to new fighting game fans, 2.5D is ideal as 2D could be viewed as dated by someone who does not fully appreciate the dynamics it has to offer. Niitsuma stated that it is his goal to draw in new players. Continuing, Niitsuma added, “Going out into the future I can’t say it will remain like this forever, but for the forseeable future I can see us making our games in this style.” This could be read as saying Capcom is out of the 2D fighting game business, but this statement is too wishy-washy. It’s not clear. It’s vague. And like 2.5D, it’s somewhere between “We’re only making 2.5D fighters” and “We’re not only making 2.5D fighters”. It’s safe to assume, however, that now that Capcom has the internal software to run fighting games on 2.5D, that we’ll be seeing more fighting games in 2.5D. We probably will. And that’s fine. But it will be a damn shame if we do not see any 2D fighters will that. It’s not a matter of which is better or even personal preferences. As a game genre, 2D fighting is a valuable genre, and 2D and 2.5D are different. They are not the same, and should not be viewed as such. (2.7D is actually a more accurate description than 2.5D as its closer to 3D than 2D.) If Capcom, let’s say, begins making only 2.5D, err 2.7D, fighting games, that is one less weapon in its arsenal. “I think at Capcom one of our specialties is 2D fighting action and we have had a great history of making games like that,” Niitsuma said. Agreed. So do what you do best and make more 2D fighting games.

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Capcom, Do Not Forsake 2D Fighting Games [Street Fighter Iv]

My 10 Favorite Gaming Moments of 2009 [Editor's Choice]

I’m just about done looking back at 2009 and just about done playing 2009 games. So I’m ready to share my fifth-annual list of my favorite in-game moments from the past year. These are not the 10 best games of 2009, nor are they ranked in any special order. They are 10 sometimes spoiler-y great, playable moments that stood out among all the games I played last year. Fart-juggling didn’t make the list. …spoilers of 2009 will follow… Nunchuk As Cleaver (Dead Space Extraction) : Running out of air outside your spaceship, with an enemy monster chasing you, you’ve got problems. Plus, your hand is pinned. No problem. Time for the best use of the Wii Nunchuk of the year as you use it to hack your own hand off. The Quiet Eiffel Tower (The Saboteur) : EA/Pandemic’s The Saboteur, which lets you blow up blimps from the ground of Nazi-occupied France and pay a few dollars in the real world to see many of its female characters topless, is not a subtle game. Therefore one assumes that the Eiffel Tower, mostly seen in the background during this adventure, will be the setting for a bombastic finale. It is the setting for the finale, but it is finale of a slow, quiet journey to the tower’s top, a journey through several floors of already-dead Nazis set to the melancholy music of one man playing the piano. Drawing For The Game Boy (Art Style: Pictobits) : The DSi’s download-only Pictobits remixes Tetris-style gameplay and winds up with something of a puzzle-based painting game. Each block of color you clear becomes part of a pixelated image ripped from or inspired by classic 8-bit Nintendo games. Except one level has you drawing a gray-toned image from the Game Boy instead, which is surprisingly retro even in this retro-obsessed gaming era. Platforming At Several Thousand Feet (Ratchet & Clank: A Crack In Time) : Platforming games have been making gamers nervous for a couple of decades, challenging them to make leaps of faith above deep pits. But they cheat by making the pits bottomless, artificially creating a sense of leaps among the clouds without putting any ground far below. Ratchet’s designers fill that part in with the platforming sequences they set on several extraordinary optional stages located, each, on spherical planets. On the best one, Bernilius Delta, the platforms on which Ratchet needs to leap are set at increasingly distant heights above the planet’s surface. As the game camera hangs overhead and the player begins to make Ratchet run and jump around this round world and its rings of platforms, Ratchet gets ever higher. The higher Ratchet goes, the further Bernilius Delta’s surface appears in the distance below. You’re platforming your way out into space, ever aware of how far that drop will be. The course ends just when you’re about to get dizzy from the altitude. An Unsteady Shootout (Uncharted 2) : Early in Uncharted 2, Nathan Drake has to trade bullets with some bad guys while the building they are standing in begins to tilt. Footing is often unstable during Uncharted 2’s most exciting moments, be they gun battles on rickety trains or collapsing buildings. The building battle is another of Uncharted 2’s moments that make the chaos in other games feel safe and, in retrospect, less exciting. Conquest In Three Seconds (Half-Minute Hero) : Half-Minute Hero seems like it is being ridiculous when it requires the player to complete a standard Japanese role-playing game zero-to-world-saving-hero quest in 30 seconds, even as it eases up and lets that 30 seconds stretch to, say, four minutes. If that’s ridiculous, then what’s the bonus mode unlocked after completion of the game’s adventure? Now you have three seconds to save the world (or at least to find a way to restart the clock again). It’s wonderfully absurd and oh so hard to do. You’re Welcome (Demon’s Souls) : It is an amazing and terrifying moment to be carefully playing through a dungeon of Demon’s Souls only to have some other player invade your game and rush you for the kill. Even better and more magical is the experience of getting a surprise re-fill of your health bar as a result of someone, somewhere else on Earth, having found a message you wrote into the game world, having decided that message was helpful and giving it a thumbs up. You indirectly helped someone in a game and now, right when you needed it and had no idea it was coming, you get the “thank you” in the form of a health-bar refill. Amazing. Another Famous Building Scaled (Assassin’s Creed II) : It is common to finish playing a game like Crackdown or Assassin’s Creed and to suddenly look at the buildings nearby in the real world a little differently. Maybe I could scale that one? Would that gutter work as a handhold? Could I make that leap? For those of us who have been to Florence, Assassin’s Creed II sort of inverted that. In the game is the Duomo, a building of unscalable magnificence in the real world that stands, in the game’s virtual Florence, as a jungle gym waiting to be summited. Getting to the top, either outside as game hero Ezio on one’s own time, or doing it in an even harder way from within, during a mission to find a hidden tomb in its dome, is a terrific realization of an impossible feat. Bringing Down The Bridge (Red Faction: Guerilla) : There is a massive bridge in Red Faction Guerilla, set over a canyon. It must be brought down. Try to do it with a sledgehammer. Or, try shooting key pieces of it, one beam at a time, with a disintegrating ray, until the whole thing collapses. Or, as someone suggested to me, park a lot of cars on it and then blow them up. So many options, all of them amazing. And then, later in the game, there’s a bigger bridge. At Last, Motion Controls (Wii Sports Resort) : It was a mistake to think the Wii Remote would work with the nuance of movement that a reasonable person may have initially expected. No, it couldn’t really tell the difference between a big arm swing and a quick jolt of the wrist, discern. reliably, a vertical sword swipe from a diagonal one. Bolt on the Wii MotionPlus and try it in Wii Sports Resorts’ archery game, however, and all the dreams come true. The Remote, held vertically, is the bow, as sensitive to a tilted aim as you could dare hope it to be. The Nunchuk is the bow string, yanked back for maximum pull, held steady for perfect aim. Release a button on the Nunchuk and the arrow flies. Just right. So subtle. Wii controls worth waiting for. Those were 10 of my favorite in-game moments from 2009. I’m sure you have some of your own. Do tell. (See my 2008 picks here, and my 2005-2007 picks here.)

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My 10 Favorite Gaming Moments of 2009 [Editor's Choice]

Capcom To Adopt 2.5D For Future Fighters [Capcom]

Capcom made quite a splash in 2008 when their near reboot of Street Fighter IV combined the depth and detail of 3D graphics placed over the traditional controls and mechanics of a 2D fighting game. The developers liked the 2.5D effect so much they decided to apply it to upcoming Wii fighter Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars and producer Ryota Niitsuma tells Kotaku that all Capcom fighting games for the foreseeable future will also use the visual effect. “I think that was the best way to present the Capcom and Tatsunoko characters to their fullest,” Niitsuma said through a translator. “I think at Capcom one of our specialties is 2D fighting action and we have had a great history of making games like that. “The 3D models on a 2D plane is a very good match and all of the (game) systems are capable of supporting such a feature. When making such games we can show our knowhow. Going out into the future I can’t say it will remain like this forever, but for the forseeable future I can see us making our games in this style.” In some ways, giving Capcom games 3D graphics without messing with the company’s fighting system allows them to update the look of the game without reinventing them. But Niitsuma says that isn’t the biggest challenge he faces as a fighting game producer. “I think one problem that fighting games have is that there is a real split between hard-core fighting game fans and casual gamers,” he said. “I don’t think there has been a game made that addresses that divide. You have a lot of good fighting games out there, but the problem is that the learning curve is pretty intense. You have these casual fighting fans who get overwhelmed by that.” “From here on out whenever we are making a fighting game the challenge is to make a game that appeals to fighting game fans and draw in new fans. That’s my a personal challenge.”

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Capcom To Adopt 2.5D For Future Fighters [Capcom]

2009 Game of the Year Finalist Debate: Assassin’s Creed II [The Great Debate]

There aren’t many ways that the multimillion-selling Assassin’s Creed II can be seen as an underdog, but in a discussion of 2009’s Game of the Year, it’s the dark horse. It’s not the interactive-movie-with-heart that is Uncharted 2. Nor is it the likably rough-edged innovative experiment Demon’s Souls. It is a sequel that atones for the design sins of its hot-selling predecessor, which maybe obligates it for some praise but also some karmic punishment on behalf of the gamers who felt the first game let them down. Assassin’s Creed II is nevertheless my 2009 Game of The Year (beating out Art Style: Box Life). The exploits of Ezio de Auditore in Renaissance Italy and Desmond Miles, the man living vicariously through Ezio, gave me everything I want in a video game, much of which I didn’t know I wanted: Good action, beautiful sights, interesting movement through its world, a story I cared about, conspiracy theories, surprises, and an adventure that felt fresh from beginning to end — doing that rare thing for a video game of not getting repetitive or dull in its second half. The game’s novelty is its maturity. Like Uncharted 2, it treats its players with respect, as if gamers were old enough to expect some emotion and wit from the experiences through which games pull them. It surpasses Uncharted 2 for me due to some unexpected joys, such as its intersection with interesting historical figures and the marvelously distinct brain-teaser and platforming sequences that branch from the game’s main adventure. The best of all the game’s surprise delights is its redundancy of options, its offering the player so many fun ways to do the same thing. Make money, for example, by pickpocketing, investing in a villa, or assassinating messengers you chase to the rooftops. Get from A to B by walking the alleys among thieves or running up and over the Duomo. That this game can be so grand, so varied and so captivating for so long makes it, for me, the year’s best. Owen’s Reply Historical fiction is my favorite literary genre, so Assassin’s Creed II perhaps had an unfair advantage with me. But it delivers. Even though crossing paths with famous names at times seems gratuitous – Vespucci, Dante Alighieri, Catherine Sforza are A-list figures getting cameo mentions – I can’t tell you how delighted, if not personally honored, I was to join the Medici and foil history’s first mob hit. The addition of the villa as an economic weapon, and the need to raise money to improve it (and your own power) gives a purpose to the side missions, which you blend with core missions to create a unique personal story at your own pace. The first Assassin’s Creed was a fascinating concept, but the repetition broke me down about two-thirds of the way through, and I left the game feeling a powerful regret at what it could have been. The improvements made in Assassin’s Creed II are nothing short of wish fulfillment. It is my game of the year. Fahey’s Reply I didn’t expect to enjoy Assassin’s Creed II as much as I did. I had such great hopes for the original title, only to be let down by a game that contained interesting ideas but wound up boring me to the point of dozing off, once the joy of free running wore off and the repetitive missions kicked in. I fully expected the sequel to be more of the same. I couldn’t have been more pleasantly surprised. Like the first game, Assassin’s Creed II puts me behind the wheel of one of Desmond Miles’ ancestors, tasking me with learning the ways of the assassin, leading me down a path punctuated by the bodies of my enemies. What II does differently, however, is set up a story in which I care about the main character, feeling his early joy at the freedom afforded him as a young noble living in Renaissance Italy, and then the pain of his loss, setting events in motion that made each subsequent assassination more personal and, consequently, much more satisfying. So the story caught me, but if story was the sole motivator for choosing my game of the year, my vote would have gone to Uncharted 2. The plot is a compelling one, and the Renaissance Italy setting is simply breathtaking in scope and detail, but the deciding factor for me is the little gameplay elements Ubisoft added to the second title, saving it from being an assassinate, flee, repeat experience. Whether tracking down pieces of data hidden in the game environments, maintaining and upgrading my villa, or taking on challenging dungeons for a chance at rare, powerful equipment, I was always completely entertained, and that’s what a good video game is all about. It’s strange to say this about the sequel to a game I openly despise, but Assasssin’s Creed II is my game of the year. Crecente’s Reply On this I think we can all agree: Assassin’s Creed II was a much better game than its predecessor. But finally delivering on the promises of an interesting concept isn’t enough to make it my game of the year. I found the way the game progresses, unfurling as you work your way through the story, to be subtle and satisfying. And the world created by Ubisoft is astounding both in its depth and beauty. But in the end the game felt almost bloated to me. There are so many things to do, so many ways to do them, and so little direction for the player that Assassin’s Creed II felt like it was missing a crucial voice: The guiding hand of a lead producer or director. Someone who could step in and clear a path for gamers. I often rail against overly simple titles, but making a game complex and deep doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice direction. When I played Assassin’s Creed II it felt as if the heart of the game was lost in all of those options and as a player, so was I. Luke’s Reply Hrm. The game had a clear path, as clear as any Grand Theft Auto title. There are core missions you can follow, and following those will see you progress through the story. I should know, it’s how I tore through the game on my first playthrough. Then, the second time through, I took a little more time, wandered off the path. I’m on my third time through now… For me, the joy of Assassin’s Creed II came from its polish. There’s not a single aspect of Assassin’s Creed II that really grabbed me; more a sense that this was the kind of game only a development team numbering in the hundreds could pull off: the little flourishes of the Italian language, the breath-taking depictions of the game’s cities and inhabitants, a hero who moves and fights exactly as you’d want (and expect) him to. What let the game down in my eyes, though, is the fact it still felt so artificial. That everything in the game’s world existed only to serve the purposes of Ezio’s quest. The worlds of other open games like this are so compelling because they have a life of their own; you get the feeling in ACII that once Ezio moves on, the gangs of whores and street thugs would simply go home for the day. Because of this (as well as issues with the combat, enemy AI and need for subtitles to truly get a handle on things ), it’s not my favourite game of the year. It’s my second-favourite game of the year. If these were the awards for “best ending sequence of 2009″, however… McWhertor’s reply The sense of scale, the wealth of options, the intricately woven story: These are the facets of Assassin’s Creed II that impressed me most during my time with the game. That Ubisoft Montreal could create such a modern-feeling period action game, one with platforming that flows so masterfully, was what inspired me to purchase and play the game of the year contender. But it was my apathy toward Ezio (and Desmond) and the familiar feeling of repetition that lead me to set aside Assassin’s Creed II just a handful of memory sequences into the game. For as thrilling as a rooftop bounding adventure peppered with assassinations and chase sequence initially seemed, in practice Assassin’s Creed II simply bored me. Eventually, I revisited the game, but found my interest had not been re-ignited, despite the colorful cast, open world and Ubisoft Montreal’s best effort, the platforming thrill rides known as Secret Locations. While I was genuinely impressed with the thrill of Ezio’s better-than-his-ancestor’s ability to traverse Renaissance Italy’s architecture, the sometimes comical AI, dull combat and meandering plot prevented me from building much interest beyond the agile rooftop movement. I can appreciate the praise heaped upon Assassin’s Creed II for all the things it attempted to do, but my ultimate indifference to its events and much of its gameplay keeps it off my game of the year shortlist. Totilo’s Final Response Well, less drama here than I expected. McWhertor’s a Demon’s Souls man. I can’t change that, not even if he clearly does not care about the centuries-spanning conspiracy that goes back to, well, Adam and Eve, I think, and probably even involves Crecente in some way. If a game’s plot can’t grab a gamer, I can’t argue with that. Gameplay is king anyway and I’m sympathetic to McWhertor’s dismissal of “dull combat.” That is a fair knock on the game. I’m intrigued by Luke’s critique of the game world seemingly not existing when Ezio isn’t there. I’m less certain that the game’s prostitutes lack a life when Ezio is gone than I’m worried that, for the decade during which the game takes place, Ezio’s mom hasn’t stopped praying next to her bed. And his sister, enough with that book. Go flirt with the architect who has been hanging out in the same room as you, for years! Take a hint. These non-player-characters need a few hobbies or, hey, at least the notion to stand up once a year. As fluid as Ezio is, Assassin’s Creed II’s world is indeed too stiff in places. Still, while I’m more and more of a small-games person, a champion of games that do just a few things and do them very well (Box Life, people), my favorite game of 2009 is unshakably a game that tried to do a lot, and, I believe, did just about all of it superbly.

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2009 Game of the Year Finalist Debate: Assassin’s Creed II [The Great Debate]

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