Assassin's Creed Wrap Up

I finally reserved a few hours to finish up on Assassin's Creed. Yawn... all this cheap pseudo-science crap was really getting on my nerves towards the end. It seems that every stupid conspiracy theory ever invented has been stuffed into AC's "story".

The game itself was actually quite a chore during the last few hours, because nothing really unexpected or new happened (yes, the game tries to have some sort of a surprise ending, but one can see this coming from a mile away). For the little variety the game-play offers, the game just feels too long IMHO. Everything is just too stretched-out. Overall it's a pretty good game, but now that it's over I feel somewhat ... unsatisfied. The fact that the game doesn't seem to have a real ending doesn't help either. Yes, I discovered the credits ... but what the hell now?

Mass Effect

Holy shit, Mass Effect is f*cking E-P-I-C. The "acting" and story-telling is better then in any Star Wars movie, game-play is (surprisingly) very Deus Ex'ish. The last 2 or 3 hours are simply breathtaking (I clocked in at about 36 hours with most of the side quests). Mass Effect is simply one of the best games ever made. There are some technical glitches (most notable and annoying is the extreme texture popup, especially after loading a saved game and at the beginning of some cutscenes... only low-detail textures are displayed while the high-detail textures are streamed in, sometimes it takes several seconds until everything looks right). There's also some stuttering during game play (most likely also loading related). The graphics quality is a mixed bag, some of the less important NPCs look very bad compared to the extremely detailed and convincing main characters, most of the environment graphics looks last-gen, interestingly one of them (Ilos) looks extremely good, almost like it has been done by a different team, or the designers had a lot more time reserved for this one location. But all in all these are just very tiny flaws and don't stop the game from being an absolute masterpiece.