Just about everyone I know that played Assassin’s Creed says the same thing… “I got bored and stopped playing after the 3rd assassination”. It’s true that the first game played all of it’s cards pretty early on and the remaining 70% of the game felt like an arduous grind. Ubisoft created an amazing world wrapped in a cool science fiction story that had a ton of potential, but it kind of felt like they forgot to flesh it out with an actual game. For whatever reason, I muscled my way through the original game and found the story compelling enough that I wanted to see what happens next. Just a note that this article contains some light spoilers…

As you’ve probably heard, Assassin’s Creed II delivers in every way where AC1 came up short. It features an emotionally driven story with a charismatic main character. The missions (for the most part) don’t feel repetitive and drive the plot forward rather than acting like an obstacle. Most importantly, AC2 fills in the void of the enormous world with actual stuff to do… revolutionary, I know.

The first bullet point on my list of improvements is the main character. Ezio is infinitely more likable than his brooding ancestor Altair. His development over the game’s 10 year span is not only physical but very emotional. The first few missions in the game give you an idea of Ezio’s world. He’s basically a naive kid, with a loving family and an ideal life. When all that gets ripped away from him it really makes him a sympathetic character that is easy to connect with. Altair’s main motivation was to regain his status in the Assassins, which I personally found very shallow and uninteresting. Ezio is all about vengeance and making sense of his tragedy.

With yesterdays surprise release (well, we knew it was coming anyway) of Flipnote Studio for the DSi, I feel like I can safely say that the DSi has finally come into its own.

Flipnote Studio, for those who don’t know, is a free animation program that feels like it should have been called Mario Paint 2. Sure, as a somewhat experienced animator, I don’t truly have a reason to use Flipnote Studio. I get to use real deal stuff like Flash to do all my animating, but Flipnote is a pretty amazing piece of software regardless.

It features a simplistic interface with some bare minimum features, yet at the same time it has more than enough there to keep aspiring artists entertained for hours on end. Like any worth while animation tool, the program has a light box feature letting the creator to see the frames before and after each page. Users can sort their frames through the means of a film strip like timeline/editing bar, and even have the ability to work on two layers per frame. Sound wise, the DS microphone is used to record up to three audio clips and one music track. The music track can either be recorded with the mic, or imported as an AAC file. The timing of the animation is set by the means of a Mario Paint style “speed bar” where the user simply clicks a series of arrows to set a frame rate.

When I decided to get into all this Sega Genesis business, my plan was to try and find the titles that made the Genesis the machine it was. Naturally, I gravitated towards the Shinobi series, a bunch of Sega developed games that I had limited exposure to in the past. From what I have played of the Shinobi games (such as the Tengen port on the NES, and the Arcade version) I didn’t think very highly of the series, but I still wanted to give the Genesis editions a chance.

I had assumed that the Genesis games were simply ports of the Arcade games, but I was surprised to find that this wasn’t the case at all. The first game, The Revenge of Shinobi is a sequel to the Arcade original. The second game, Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi is a spin off of sorts, and while it shares the same name as it’s Arcade counterpart, it’s a completely different game. The third and final 16-bit Shinobi, Shinobi 3: Return of the Ninja Master, is also a Genesis exclusive.

My quest started off with The Revenge of Shinobi as I won it in a lot of games off eBay. One thing that never occurred to me about these games is that they were actually somewhat genre defining. I guess the reason I never liked the Shinobi games is because I wanted them, and expected them, to be like the old Ninja Gaiden titles. When I was younger, I had always assumed that Wrath of the Black Manta on the NES wanted to be like Ninja Gaiden, but as it turns out, it really wanted to be like Shinobi. This more slower paced and deliberate game style also shares a bit in common with the Rolling Thunder games.

Being a parent who is into video games means you’re constantly fighting an internal struggle. On one hand, you look at games like Dora Saves the Ice Princess and Littlest Pet Shop with utter disdain. On the other hand, you know at some point you’re going to end up playing them… and you’re going to have to act like it’s fun. I still try to be somewhat selective in the games I let my daughter play. I’m happy to say I’ve instilled a healthy dose of Kirby, Banjo Kazooie and Mario Kart into her gaming diet. Instead of the latest Pixar movie-license game I’ve introduced her to Wario Land Shake It and Rhythm Heaven.

Still, there comes a time when you have to try out things you would ordinarily avoid. enter Hasbro Family Game Night. Now, I know this is available on the Wii and PS2… but I’m writing specifically about the Xbox Live version. It’s interesting in that you download the game for free and then unlock the individual titles for 800pts ($10) each. To start you have the option of getting Scrabble, Yahtzee, Connect 4, Sorry!, Boggle, Battleship, and Sorry! Sliders. So far, I’ve only purchased Sorry! and Connect 4 as they’re pretty easy for a 4 1/2 year old to play.

At first it might seem kind of stupid to play board games on a game console, you may say to yourself “Why not just play the board game?”. However, after spending some time playing I have to say it’s a pretty genius move. Everything that is fun about the game is intact, you can play it and enjoy it as much as ever… only now you never have to clean up pieces, or set things up. Five seconds and the whole family is playing the game and having fun (mandatory fun, that is).

I’ve logged about 6 hours into GTA: The Lost and Damned and I’m loving the goddamn hell out of it. At first I thought I’d miss playing as Niko and all that odd-ball characters that come with him. Still… Niko had a lot of baggage by the end of the main game and it was nice to drop all that and get back to the meaner, fun side of GTA. Less than an hour into playing as Johnny I had practically forgotten about our old Serb buddy.

Make no mistake, Johnny is a mean son-of-a-bitch. He’s not a conflicted criminal trying to make a living in a foreign land… he’s a murdering bastard who wants to make money… a lot of money. This was actually refreshing after a fairly heavy story-line in GTA4.

I love the refined motorcycle controls and after spending so much time with them, I prefer riding a chopper over any other form of vehicle in the game. This is totally different for me as I hated riding motorcycles in the original game.

So I guess Hudson’s WiiWare remake of Adventure Island came out this week over in Japan, and as a result, videos are starting to trickle out. Last week on “Born Again Casual” I was asked how I felt about remakes in general and I stated how I’m all about them if they’re done right. Adventure Island: The Beginning for Wii is not a good example. Did you watch the above video? Yeah, yikes indeed.

Sure, it’s a Wiiware game and the thing has to be compressed to holy hell in order to meet Wiiware’s space limitation, but damn is that a terrible looking pile of crap. Lets ignore the generic and bland graphics for a moment and just look at the way it “appears” to play. The Adventure Island games have always played a little strange, a cross between the momentum based control of Super Mario Brothers and the more deliberate jumping and restrictions of something like the original Castlevania. This appears to fail to emulate that style and instead looks clumsy and sloppy. Again, I haven’t played it, so maybe it does emulate the previous games rather well. Regardless, it looks like rubbish. Even the Master Higgins character model and animation fails to capture the look of Higgins and his constantly moving legs from the originals.

Funny thing is, Hudson did a Japan only budget release of Adventure Island for the Playstation 2 and Gamecube back in 2003 and it more accurately captured the essence of Adventure Island than this pile. Why not just base this remake on that remake? Graphically the game looks similar, so they couldn’t pull from this?

I’ve had this sitting on my shelf for months now, I cent even remember when I got it to be honest with you… Anyway, on a whim I threw it on this weekend just to see how it was. First off it takes a FUCKING LONG TIME to get to a point where you’re actually playing a game. It is easily a couple of hours until you fight anything, or even see a monster to fight. Still, the story and atmosphere were compelling enough that I was interested to sit through a megaton shitload of reading to see what the hell was going on.

Here’s the basic premise: You’re sent to live with your Uncle for a year in this small town. Shortly after arriving in the town a bizarre series of murders start occurring. These murders appear to be tied to a ‘Bloody Mary’ type game that you learn about from your new friends at school, though the exact connection is unclear. After a bit of investigating you find that through this game you are able to go through your TV and enter a sinister world that is linked to each victim. I don’t want to go much further than that, I’m trying to stay as vague as possible to keep from spoiling anything.

I’m glad I stuck it out because when Shin Megami Tensei: Reading Adventures end and the actual role-playing game begins its a hell of a lot of fun. The game has a Sims/Animal Crossing type aspect where you have to maintain relationships with characters in the game. These relationships (called Social Links) lead to various enhancements for your Personas which are like ‘Summons’ if you think of it in Final Fantasy terms.

Phil finishing the PS3 version kicked me in the ass to wrap this one up. I’ve had my save file sitting on my PC since December 21st 2007. It literally required that I kill 5 more enemies to complete the game. However, on my old Pentium 4 PC this sequence would drop below 10fps making it virtually impossible to play. Last Summer I built a new gaming PC which was more than capable of playing this game on the highest graphic settings. For whatever reason I just never got around to sitting down and playing this game. So this afternoon I fired the game up and spent 15 minutes clearing this game from my backlog.

The ending was pretty cool, it certainly made me excited to see what comes next for this story. Who knows when we’ll actually see Episode 3 come out. I think the whole “Episodic gaming fails” has been driven home by the length of time between each episode. Still, there’s no denying the level of quality that Valve achieves with their games. I’m hoping that E3 2009 gives us some great news from these guys (*Closes eyes and makes a secret wish for The Black Box*)… I guess time will tell.

So this was kind of a cheesy backlog entry since I was right at the end. Still, it is the essence of why I need to clear out these games. There’s no good reason to have unfinished business lying around. I’m working on The World Ends With You and Resident Evil 4 now. Hit the jump for the rest of my list:

It’s been a few weeks since my last official entry in my ‘Clearing the Backlog’ series, but I’m happy to say that tonight I knocked Chrono Trigger (NDS) off the list. Chrono Trigger was originally released in 1995, which was my senior year in High School also known as my ‘dark period’ of video gaming. I’m glad I finally got a chance to play through this game, especially since it was presented so beautifully on my new favorite game console, the Nintendo DS.

I literally just finished the game 15 minutes ago, so I’m not sure if i can completely express my feelings on the game. I spent about 21 hours in the game and completed all of the side quests except for one. The final battle was absolutely epic and I simultaneously hated and loved every minute of it. I can’t even tell you how many times I accused Lavos of being an avid felatiast (I don’t think that’s a real word).

So, in regards to the backlog task at hand. I made some significant progress on Resident Evil 4 during the interim, so I’ll probably get back to that. I’ll report back when I have something to report.

2009 is turning out to be quite a year for me gaming-wise. So far this year I’ve purchased two EA titles, something that rarely happens with me any more. Something has been going on over there at EA, you’ve probably heard about it. Over the past year they’ve been putting out ambitious titles like Mirror’s Edge, Skate, Burnout Paradise and Dead Space in an effort to get themselves known for more than the yearly Madden update. I guess they’re doing something right because two EA titles in a month is more than I’ve bought from them in the past 5 years.

I’ll be honest, I haven’t played a Tony Hawk game since THPS4 several years back. I was a huge fan of the series for 2 and 3, but somewhere in the middle of playing through the 4th game I became bored. It just seemed like the series was getting too “over-the-top” and had lost the element that I enjoyed so much in the beginning. So I moved away from skateboarding games and had pretty much forgotten about them. When I saw that EA was entering the Skateboarding arena, I’ll admit I kind of chuckled to myself. Well, after I checked out the demo for Skate 2 i realized just how wrong I had been.

Luckily I had some store credit for GameStop sitting in my wallet so I promptly went over and bought a copy for the PS3. I’ve only spent about 4 hours or so playing the game as of writing this… so please don’t mistake this for a full review. My general impression so far is that Skate 2 embodies all the things I loved about the early Tony Hawk games. The controls take a bit more skill to pull off tricks than the combo system of THPS. If you haven’t played Skate 2 (or the first game), it uses the right analog stick to pull off various ollie and flip tricks. This takes a little getting used to, but once you get it, you’ll wonder what you did without it.