Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Assassins love their dens almost as much as foxes love theirs. It’s where they hang out, sharpening their knives and polishing their coins, so it’s hardly surprising that when gangs of angry Templars start storming those dens, trying to dull the knives and mar the coins, the assassins are having none of it. Admittedly, it’s a little surprising that there appears to be a tower defence minigame simulating those myriad historical moments in Assassin’s Creed Revelations. We can now add magically barricading streets and commanding troops to the list of things parkour-killers are capable of. What next? I say fishing and basketball.

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A body of Far Cry 3 details and footage has come bubbling to the surface of E3 like a bullet-riddled corpse in a greasy river. Since I was encouraging you lot to buy Far Cry 2 not two weeks ago, you’d think I’d be pumped as hard and tight as a tire about Far Cry 3. But I’m not, really. Come take a look for yourself. It looks great, but it doesn’t look like it has the same will to break new ground.
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There were so many RPS news posts yesterday! What was going on in my absence? This is like coming into work as a mechanic and finding repaired cars not just in the car park, but on the roof, in the basement, balanced on top of lamp posts.

To business. I have lots of great headlines that might benefit this ICE-cool new trailer for Assassin’s Creed: Revelations (“Some More Mr. Knife Guy”, “Cool Runnings”), but I can’t use any of them because the game’s title is too long. That’s going to be a theme today, isn’t it? Ah well.
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Head south for a sprawling walkthrough of Assassin’s Creed 2, courtesy of Destructoid. As well as detailing some of sprawling renaissance city, it shows loads of interesting mechanistic stuff such as purchasing equipment with the money you’ve earned, exploring secret locations, hiring mercenaries to fight guards for you, distracting people by throwing coins, and so on. There’s also fun-looking chase sequence. So the missions do indeed look more diverse than the original, and I wonder whether the new spread of equipment to be bought on the streets of Florence will make the possibilities for delivering assassinations more varied too? All this and flying machines… The game is out on November 17th.
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“Prepare, execute, and vanish,” say Ubi Montreal of their new Splinter Cell philosophy. That, apparently, is the best way to explain the way Splinter Cell: Conviction will retain stealth options while boosting the action quotient. While standard sneaking allows you to prepare your approach, you’re going to be going through fairly ostentatious action sequences, before slipping back into the shadows. Hide and seek with neck-breaking, then. Also, “Mark and execute” is the new central motif – the tagging system which we saw in the E3 trailer – allows you to mark out enemies before you engage, allowing Sam to have the upper hand in the first moments of a fight. Anyway, go take a look at the developers making earnest hand-gestures about their game concepts below.
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UK-based blogchums Videogaming247 were clever enough to remember to go to Leipzig (unlike us) and consequently they’ve come back with special Far Cry information. Ubisoft Montreal are, apparently, already in the initial stages of the third Far Cry game. Here’s the interesting bit:

“There are still things we want to do with the African setting, and I think it’s safe to say we’ll continue to explore it. That said, we might find something new and compelling about the Antarctic setting that wants us to make the next game there, but honestly, we’re still at the preliminary stages.”

If Far Cry 2 ends up being good I rather hope this third game has a brief iteration time, rather than being another four-year project.

Far Cry 2 looks at least a couple of kinds of incredible. “You’re free to go anywhere you want at any time,” says creative director Clint Hocking of the stupidly detailed 50km2 slice of African terrain. “It’s about giving the player the opportunity to play the game the way he wants to play it.” Judging by some of the testimony and in-game footage we can see here, he might just be telling the actual truth. Mechanically, at least, it’s looking rather like an expanded version of Stalker, with plenty of open space and the ability to tackle things as you see fit. I’ve said it before, but my money is on this being the best game on PC this year. After the jump: that video diary.
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