Assassin’s Creed
November 14, 2009 § Leave a comment
The entire world has gone haywire today over the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Forgive me for not stifling my yawn. Another shoot’em up, bang, bang video game. More terrorists and bad guys, complete with funny accents. Just what the world needs.
No, what excites me is Assassin’s Creed II, to be released next week. OK, call me a nerd, geek, whatever, I could care less. Besides, I’m an historian, I’m used to it.
This game is so totally cool because it’s not just another shoot’em up, bang, bang affair. No, sir. Set in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the game centres around the Florentine nobleman Ezio Auditore da Firenze, who, in his spare time, is an assassin. The beauty of Italian Renaissance cities Rome, Venice, and, of course, Florence (the centre of the Renaissance), around the time of the rule of the Medici, as well as the Tuscan countryside, is on full display.
The game was developed by Ubisoft’s Montréal-based studio, and the developers were assisted by two historians from McGill University, in order to ensure accuracy. If there’s one thing that amuses me about gamers, they are sticklers for historical accuracy in the background of the games they play, if not in the action itself.
Ubisoft have gone full-out on the advance publicity for the game. In 2008, it bought out Hybride, which had done the graphics for films like 300 and Snakes on a Plane. Ubisoft’s gaming expertise and Hybride’s graphics have led to the release of Assassin’s Creed: Lineage, a movie, essentially, designed for marketing purposes, and to test the waters for Ubisoft’s movie-making capabilities. Parts I and II are below. This is frakin’ wild, my dudes and dudettes:
Cross-posted at Current Intelligence.
Matthew Barlow 
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