Time to party like it's 1191.
I've somehow managed to avoid the Assassin's Creed franchise for the last five years. Towards the end of 2007 and beginning of '08, when the first AC game was released, my gaming time was being dominated by World of Warcraft and Call of Duty 4. Leading WoW raids 4-5 nights per week for 4+ hours a night has a way of cutting into your free time, and there are a bunch of universally-acclaimed titles that I've just never played.
I picked up Assassin's Creed from Amazon last year during the holidays. I was aware that it was a successful series about a guy in a hood who sneaks around and dispatches bad guys, but that was pretty much the extent of my familiarity with the games. As it turns out, that's only half of the story.
The Setup
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| Warren Vidic, aka Dr. Douchebag |
The game's protagonist is a bartender named Desmond Miles and it's apparent from the start that he's a prisoner in a high-tech facility. We quickly learn that he's being held hostage by a doctor who's after something in his head - information stored in memories, though not his own. Warren Vidic, some sort of doctor and a member of the group holding you hostage, explains that human DNA is an archive that contains the past memories of our ancestors. He claims that Desmond's ancestors were assassins; in order to access the memories of one of those assassins Desmond jumps into a machine called the "Animus." It kinda reminds me of
The Matrix: hop onto a table, strap in, and enter a different world.
Once inside the Animus, Desmond starts reliving the memories of an assassin named Altair, a distant ancestor, in the year 1191. This is the part of the game that everyone's familiar with from the commercials and trailers - a guy in a hood running around like a parkour champion stabbing people.
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| Desmond sitting on the Animus. They need an interior decorator. |
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