AssCreed TV

We may not get Assassin's Creed 2 on PC for a few months yet, due to spurious excuses to pretend it's not about dodging piracy and not giving a monkey's about the IBM compatible, but there's no reason we can't enjoy the promotional run-up. For instance, 15 minutes of live-action footage of a dude being a 15th century Italian assassin, by way of a prequel to the game...

From my limited time with the 360 version of the game - some of my impressions of which are over on Eurogamer - it's quickly clear dude in this video is AssCreed 2 main-chap Ezio's dad. I say that because I recognise his face, not because I can read Wikipedia. I recognise the actor, which is quite the thing. It's a bit Seal Knot / live action roleplay, but at the same time I appreciate a move to posit videogame characters as actual people rather than creepily pretty CGI types.

While I couldn't say this live-action video was an unqualified success and still be able to sleep at night (that degree of low-rent with that degree of ultra-seriousness doth not a marriage made in heaven make), what I can honestly claim is that, by basing the in-game characters on actors rather than on renderfarm-made faces, there is genuinely something a bit more believable and tangible about the NPCs in the couple of hours of AssCreed 2 I've played. Attaching someone's voice to their real-world face (or something like it) does, I suspect, make all the difference. Why do we have to have perfect, beautiful, impossible people in our videogames? Embrace the imperfect too, for the good of us all.