Assassins Creed vs Assassins Creed II

[size=+1]Assassins Creed vs Assassins Creed II[/size]
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Assassins Creed is a really clever story. Ubisoft have all the advantages of the Holodeck from Star Trek and time travel all bundled into one thing. Think about it: no need to think about non-linear continuity that normally comes with time travel plots where you have to think about whether everything links up properly. No need to invent a reason for the random individual that will get to visit the past suddenly decide to follow the clearly insane person with the funny shaped box that has a strangely large amount of special effects budget behind it. The Animus is obviously inspired by the idea of past life regression and so ends up being a technological version of some bloke droning you into a trance so you can be a milkmaid in the Cotswolds or something. It's like in media res.

It's interesting sci-fi, to me, especially with the idea of the often mentioned bleeding effect. Most sci-fi machines have these side-effects. Time Machines can erase you from history, Virtual Reality can ruin your perception of true reality and even the Improbability Drive can conjure sperm whales out of nothing. The Bleeding Effect of the Animus is the danger of loosing your identity as your past lives pile on top of your own. It's already shown to drive someone insane and transform Mr Personality Desmond Miles from useless wimp to slicing killer.

Then there's the more subtle thing about the games. It's a simulation of the past, not the past itself. Whenever you play something like Skyrim and it goes wrong because a horse have fallen out of the sky, landing on you, your taken out of the experience. You know that's because your PS3/Xbox/PC has done goofed and generated an equine assassin of its own to come and get you. Either that or the Greybeards are starting to get pretty bored up in that temple of theirs.

However, if you find that there's a man trying to talk to himself or walk through a wall, your not likely to blame anything else on this latest AI fail than your machine, but Assassins Creed is able to ride that sort of thing well. By actively admitting that it's a computer program inside of a computer program, the game wont ruin the experience when something goofs. In fact, you'll actively alter your expectations of the game as you play it, making exceptions for the limitations of the game's engine. In fact, if reinforces the idea of this being a meta-story so that the consideration of the effects of the past on what you know of this present isn't particularly jarring. The game gets rather good at being able to pull you in and then back out of the game's world.

But that's just what both of the two games I've seen so far can do. There's a large gulf between the first and second games in many respects. I can understand many but I hope that they keep the good stuff in the next few games as they stab their way through history.

Assassins Creed, as in the first game this time, is a very well crafted game. Firstly, it had to set up everything. The secret war between the Assassins and the Templars, the abilities and limitations of the Animus, the Assassins themselves and, above all, what sort of man Altaïr is. As it turns out, he's rather arrogant and proud. Al Mualim is there to beat him into behaving properly