Lazyest Gallery cannot access Gallery/Videogames/Assassins_Creed/

With my PC reinstall, which is pretty much done except for me losing a odd few programs’ settings (where my Filezilla settings disappeared to I have no idea, sigh), I’ve started reinstalling games. Assassins Creed I decided might be worth replaying – I got installed, patched, and copied my old save into the bizarre place they put saves (It’s in a folder named “Ubisoft” in the Application Data folder in your Documents and Settings/Users folder).

Then I tried playing it. I realised, while I had enjoy the game, it was only when I had played it for long amounts of time and for the first time. Mandatory logo screens on boot up, slow progress through menus to get anywhere, and unskippable cutscenes (fine the first time, horrible any other time). Luckily I know the exit shortcut of Alt-F4 – exiting manually takes an amazing amount of effort (several menus to find “Exit” – it was made for the Xbox primarily, and it shows).

The game also forces 16:9 widescreen (hilarious if you’re on 4:3, and just annoying on 16:10 – the Steam overlay stays on screen in those black bars. Sigh).

The killing blow, I think, to me fully getting around to replaying the game is the insistence on only allowing me to reply entire chapters from the beginning…so I have to do all the minigames (although hopefully not explore the city fully), sort the civilians and so forth, before doing an assassinsation – the one part of the game which was awesome, and which I wanted to replay.

Poor decisions from the Ubisoft team on this. Lazyness is all I can account for the decisions (especially the insistence on unskippable cutscenes and 16:9 resolution), since they seem relatively easy things to solve – let me start at save point X, where I can immediately start an Assassination, just like how the game allows you to replay from that point if you die.

I wish I had made backups before each assassination now. If only I had known in advance 🙁 It seems I’ll be forced to do the bare minimum of minigames for each one, and go through a good 15-25 minutes of cutscenes per assassination, to have the 5-10 minutes of fun doing the actual task. I do like the game, as I’ve said before (beautiful looking, the character is cool, assassinations great, exploration relatively fun), it’s just painful to replay any part of it. This has been said before, but it’s worth saying again. 🙂