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Assassins Creed for PS3

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This is the game or the type of game that we bought a PS3 for. It’s outstanding. A better Prince of Persia if you will.

The story line is good, albeit a bit odd with the whole ‘memory thing’ with the Animus, but the actual game play portion is outstanding. The Animus and memory stuff will simply provide the lose strings to tie all of the upcoming versions together. I get that but it’s uneccessary.

The visuals are incredible and map is huge.

This game does have some freezing issues, enough to be very annoying especially with it’s slow load and restore time, but even with those issues, it’s still worth it. I understand a patch is forthcoming from Ubisoft. Which given it’s release on or about the 15th, isn’t too bad.

As with other reviews, the game does get somewhat repetitive. After the first 3 assassinations, you’ve pretty much seen it all. You continue to travel back to the same cities and repeat similar assassinations. Each city is unique as are the towns folk and soldiers but they all fight the same. The game does get progressively harder and the soldiers become more aware. To balance that out you’re given more weapons and or expertise with each of the ones that you have.

Collecting flags is optional and don’t benefit you in any way. It would be nice if they did, if they gave you additional weapons or strengths by finding them. After the game is complete it would be nice if they unlocked the flags on the map so that you could actually find them all. Some of them are challenging enough to get once you see them, but finding them is often like looking for a needle in a haystack.

If you do get stuck the walkthroughs on the assassins creed website are great.

www.assassinscreed.com or directly here: AC Help for PS3

This FAQ has almost everything in it, and will spoil the end of the game if you read it all.

Things I really wish they would change for the next installment. All of the cut scenes should be OPTIONAL after you’ve watched them once. It’s probably the only thing keeping me from going back and re-doing everything I missed. I’d gladly do the quest again if I didn’t have to sit through the cut scenes and speeches. They were OK the first time, perhaps a little long but we shouldn’t be forced to watch them every time we need to move forward.

Any review that rates this an 8.5 or above is spot on.

It could use more variety as the game progresses which I suspect Ubi will tackle the next time around.

I highly recommend this game. It’s much more playable and enjoyable than say ‘Resistance’ to me. It’s not just about killing monsters or mutants, yet it’s not as technical as a splinter cell game. It’s right in the middle and very well done.

ASSASSINSposingALPHA

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Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium and Cici’s Pizza

Last night on a whim we decided to take the girls out to dinner and a movie. Kind of a last minute thing because Michael was gone for the evening.

Because we were being spontaneous we were kind of hosed by the movie times. We had to leave ‘now’ and find somewhere we could eat ‘fast’ to get to the 7:20pm movie.

We didn’t really want fast food, but we also didn’t want to take a chance on going somewhere we’d have to wait, or potentially get bad service which would make us miss the 7:20 showing.

After a little discussion we chose:

Cici

Now I had never been there, the kids had and so had Claudine. She warned me that it wasn’t any good, but it was food. It’s pizza for crying out loud. I thought of the saying: “There’s good pizza and great pizza, but never bad pizza. And, never, never, bad free pizza.”

Well, that was proven untrue last night. It was cheap enough, $27 for two adults and 3 kids, but not worth that. The place is a gold mine though, any time you can suck $7 out of people for food who’s ingredients cost about $2.00 or less regardless of how much they eat is a great business model.

I think that was my biggest problem with the pizza. For the most part it was basically cheese and a spattering of one ‘other’ ingredient, maybe two. But none of them really any good. Eatable? yes, but not good. The only good thing was the ‘Cheesy Garlic Bread’ but you can only eat so much of that.

We did end up taking too much time so we had to defer to the 9:40 showing. Which meant after dinner we wandered around Cincinnati Mills for a bit. Maria got to sit and talk with Santa so that was good. For a Saturday night Cincinnati Mills was hurting. There wasn’t anyone there.

The Movie:

We took the kids to see: Mr. Magoriums Wonder Emporium

A clean ‘G’ rated flick that wasn’t animated.

It was clean, and keeping in mind the intended audience it was probably pretty good.

The ending seemed like they ran out of budget and just decided that they were at a good place to stop. For a rated G flick it was probably OK. B+ at best, more like a B- but the kids thought it was OK.

The tally for tonight’s extravaganza:

$28 at Cici’s Pizza, cheap, but you could taste it was cheap with every bit.
$7 for candy at Jungle Jims in an effort to save money at the concession stand at the movies.
$35 for tickets, two adults, 3 kids
$30 at the concession stand for 2 large popcorns, and 5 drinks. $3.50 for bottle water is absurd but it is what it is.

Total: $100 for dinner an a movie.

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How big is too big?

We’ve been struggling with our washing machine for the last couple weeks. We bought it used, but it was like new.

Literally used by a little old lady to wash her clothes (Sorry Barb). I think we’ve had it for 4 years now? It was a high end front loading Kenmore, but we do a LOT of laundry. Having 4 kids will cause that.

After a couple attempts at fixing the current washer to no avail we decided to replace it.

The new machine:

A Whirlpool, 4.5 cubic foot high efficiency, blah, blah, blah.

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Yeah, 4.5 cubic feet. We can wash all of the pets and small children in this thing. It’s HUGE . Not like our best robotic vacuum for pet hair but still close enough.

It was delivered today and we bought an self cleaning fish tank for the kids too. I’ll hook it up tonight and we’ll see how it goes. It wouldn’t fit down the basement steps so we had to use the other celler ‘stairs of doom’ to get it in the basement.

It must be special because it has a glass top so you can watch all the action.

😀

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Ratchet and Clank Future Tools Of Destruction.

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Well it’s finally here.

The reason to own a Playstation 3

The quest into this 5th installment started last night with the return of our ‘dead’ PS3 from the Sony repair facilities.

After approximately 4 hours of game play here’s my initial reaction.

It’s friggin beautiful! By far the most visually appealing game I’ve played for the PS3.

Game play

  • Is as smooth as butta. It’s a pleasure to play and is just simply visually stunning.
  • Even the parts that use the 6 axis for control, this is by far the best implementation of this technology.
  • It’s not hard. Though no Ratchet and Clank game has been all that ‘hard’, this is somewhat too easy. After 4 hours of play I died only a handful of times, most of those were from jumping off into the abyss by accident and not by the hand of any of the foe’s.
  • Some parts of the game, like piloting the ship and fighting the big bad Pirate ship on the way to a planet are down right dumb. There isn’t any skill involved in this portion of play. Just fly in random circles and shoot. You won’t die, and if you do this long enough, you’ll eventually beat the pirate ship.
    • Note: in this day and age of video games, no games should be so easy a monkey could play it, and that’s not what I bought R&C for.
  • You start out with too much stuff. In prior adventures you’d have to work a bit to find the good gadgets. In Future Tools, you start out with too many.
    • Granted, if this installment was aware of prior quests, and you started out with them because of that, I’d be OK with it. I don’t know yet if I’ll receive any super cool weapons or discounts because of these prior quests as in previous games.

The Weapons

This is what we buy R&C for. To blow stuff up in creative ways w/o any attempt at realism. There’s no blood or gore, it’s just down right fun.

4 hours into it, and with a few weapon upgrades, I’m a little disappointed. But perhaps I just haven’t unlocked the fun stuff yet. I don’t have a Quack-O-Ray, or a Taunter, or anything fun (yet), nor certainly anything as devastating as the Flux Rifle. But time will tell.

The whole game feels as though it was rushed by Insomniac. The storyline/plot is same/same. Game play is great, but it’s missing the ‘hook’. The comedy and wit isn’t nearly as good as in the past. It really feels like I’m playing a previous version that was simply mastered for high def. It’s like watching the Newly mastered Jungle book from the Disney archives. Same story only prettier. Less exciting be case after four hours I haven’t been ‘wowed’ yet by anything other than the artwork.

If Resistance was given a 9 out of 10 stars, then Future Tools will score an 11 just based upon the smooth game play and visuals. It’s still entertaining, dot get me wrong, but it’s lacking something. Something you just know Insomniac would give you.

I’ll report back when I’m finished and hopefully I won’t feel so torn.