There are two things to note about the title of this post:<\/p>\n
1)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Read aloud it sounds like the score from a football match.<\/p>\n
2)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This looks like it is following on from an earlier post.<\/p>\n
Number 1 is of course wrong, and number two is misleading.\u00a0 I was originally going to talk about Assassin\u2019s Creed II in my previous post but I got caught up discussing the binary nature of existence.\u00a0 Needless to say, also on my to-finish list was the slightly more recently released Assassin\u2019s Creed II.\u00a0 This doesn’t really need you to have read part one, but maybe there’s a theme.\u00a0 They’re both published by Ubisoft and I think they use the same game-engine, so that’s something I guess.<\/p>\n
Just a quick note, \u201cfrustrations\u201d might be the wrong word for this one, because I realise now that I\u2019m not really frustrated with this game so much, just moderately baffled by something it managed to do, but I wanted to have a couple of blog posts with \u201cPart 1\u201d and \u201cPart 2\u201d after it to make it look coherent, despite the fact that they\u2019re really about different things.<\/p>\n
This post is spoiler-riddled so if you\u2019re interested in not knowing how this one ends, look away now and come back another day.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve never been asked to kill the pope before.<\/p>\n
I approached the final wrapping-up moments of Assassin\u2019s Creed II this evening and things started to go a bit funny.\u00a0 It turned out that over the two years that the game jumped forward by at one point, my arch rival that had inexplicably managed to escape in my last excursion had managed to become the pope and the final showdown between us was to take place in the Vatican in Rome.<\/p>\n
Off to Rome and it\u2019s a bit of parkour across the ramparts of the Vatican city, a bit of horse riding (I\u2019m not sure if I was at ground level at that moment, but it still felt a bit roof-like to me, so goodness knows how the horse got up there) a bit of artistic murder, hiding in haystacks and blending in with monks: \u00a0All standard stuff so far, followed by a leap through the rafters of the chapel before landing wrist-blade-first onto the pope\u2019s mid-sermon-giving face.<\/p>\n
But the pope is fine of course due to the pope having super-powers granted to him by his pope-stick, which is actually an ancient artefact of unimaginable power which he then turns on me and his congregation, frying them all with more super-pope-powers.\u00a0 I am of course fine, because I also have an ancient artefact of unimaginable power tucked away in my belt.<\/p>\n
So then of course I fight the pope and defeat the pope, but again, the pope has super powers and he makes a startling recovery, takes my artefact and glues it to his artefact which makes a key to the vault-which-might-contain-the-secret-of-god-himself which is naturally underneath the Vatican and makes off towards the door.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not sure how, but I recover from the knife to the gut spectacularly well, possibly because I\u2019ve spent most of the game getting sliced up by various city guardsmen that I\u2019ve upset one way or another or face-planting onto the streets from upon high due to poor depth perception and misjudged distances when leaping across the rooftops.\u00a0 I then naturally chase after the pope and oddly challenge him to a fair fight with no weapons and no powers, just fists.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve never been in a fist-fight with the pope before.<\/p>\n
What follows is an odd anticlimactic fist fight between an agile-cat-like-master-assassin and an overweight-catholic.\u00a0 After winning the fight, the assassin doesn\u2019t actually assassinate the pope (despite the fact that the pope had killed your brothers and your father) but instead takes the moral high ground and rises above it all and goes off the vault to find that actually the pope-stick and artefact that you brought with you are some kind of alien technology and they left a message and it all gets a little bit hard to explain at that point, which is probably why it took me an hour or so for something fundamental to sink in upon finishing the game and going to make a cup of tea.<\/p>\n
There’s something that\u2019s known among film and television enthusiasts as Fridge Logic.\u00a0 This is where something happens on screen that doesn\u2019t really register with you until you leave the sofa, go and grab something to eat or drink from the fridge and think \u201chang on a minute…that doesn\u2019t make sense!\u201d.\u00a0 What I experienced shortly after finishing Assassin\u2019s Creed II was similar to that.<\/p>\n
My realisation:\u00a0 I have just fought the pope and that didn\u2019t register as absurd at any point for me.\u00a0 None of that growing feeling of \u201cOh…Kay….\u201d that I get when reading back the above few paragraphs was anywhere to be seen whilst playing this through.<\/p>\n
Sometimes when I\u2019m being particularly geeky and administrating a game of Dungeons and Dragons for my friends, I\u2019ll first of all write down something utterly absurd that I\u2019ll try and work in to the adventure and try to play it straight, just to see if they notice or mind*.\u00a0 I do wonder if perhaps the developers did something similar for this one:\u00a0 Maybe shortly before the project started, one of the lead developers\u2019 friends bet that they couldn\u2019t make the final boss battle in Assassin\u2019s Creed II against the pope in the Vatican and get away with it, and then the lead developer maybe worked back from there.<\/p>\n
In terms of context, it does make sense.\u00a0 The game is set in 15th<\/sup> Century renaissance Italy and this is not an ordinary pope of course, this is the leader, or at least high-on-the-food-chain-conspiracy-member of the Templars, well and truly spelled out as evil ne\u2019er do wells in the Assassin\u2019s Creed series and his popehood is obviously a calculated attempt to obtain the secret weapon (or whatever it is) in the vault underneath the Vatican.\u00a0 It\u2019s not like this is completely out of nowhere, but it does seem like it might have been lurking around in nowhere for a while before emerging.<\/p>\n It must be stated that I loved the game.\u00a0 I suppose my only major frustration is that it\u2019s finished, but I just couldn\u2019t help feeling that the team at Ubisoft (again) started with a silly premise of \u201cplayer fights THE POPE!!!\u201d and worked backwards.\u00a0 I\u2019m astonished that I was immersed enough that it was only when I stepped back and started thinking about it that I realised how daft the whole thing was.**<\/p>\n Additional Notes:<\/strong><\/p>\n *Flying sky-sharks are on my list.\u00a0 My players might refuse to jump a shark, but they can\u2019t help it if sharks jump them.<\/p>\n **Let me clarify:\u00a0 Assassin\u2019s Creed and Assassin\u2019s Creed II are both about a chap called Desmond in the future who is put into a special virtual reality machine to relive memories that are hard coded into his DNA of his ancestors who happened to be master assassins so that those around Desmond in the future can find where the Templars \/ Assassins hid the ancient-artefact-super-weapons.\u00a0 With something this daft, it\u2019s even more surprising that I didn\u2019t realise how daft the whole thing was.\u00a0 However, some of the final words you hear the protagonist utter are indeed \u201cWhat the f\u2014k?\u201d shortly before the first set of credits roll which you do sympathise with.<\/p>\n (I know, I know, I just censored myself on the internet.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are two things to note about the title of this post: 1)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Read aloud it sounds like the score from a football match. 2)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This looks like it is following on from an earlier post. Number 1 is of course wrong, and number two is misleading.\u00a0 I was originally going to talk about Assassin\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[31,240,18],"class_list":["post-128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer_games","tag-assassins-creed","tag-computer_games","tag-games"],"yoast_head":"\n