Who else is coming to New York Comic-Con? Ubisoft, that's who. The French publisher's bringing Ezio's last hurrah, the latest Just Dance game and more to the Jacob Javits Convention Center this weekend.
The full line-up of games at the show includes:
• The Adventures of Tintin: The Game
• Assassin's Creed Revelations
• The Black Eyed Peas Experience
• Just Dance 3
• Might & Magic Heroes VI
• Rayman Origins
• Shoot Many Robots
All of the titles will be playable, with AssCreedRev will be available for multiplayer play at 2 p.m. on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. What about the swag, you ask? Well, pre-ordering Assassin's Creed Revelations or The Black Eyed Peas Experience will get you a t-shirt or signed BEP poster. Doesn't seem like Ubi's holding any panels this year, but if expect an update if word of anything drops.
You can contact Evan Narcisse, the author of this post, at evan@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
Over the course of the last few weeks, Ubisoft has been running a contest for Assassin's Creed: Revelations, inviting people to submit entries of themselves singing the game's theme song. The winner will be featured in the game singing the theme, and credited on the soundtrack!
In cooperation with UJAM, Ubisoft opened up the entries to a public vote. Those contestants who were voted into the top 20 were subject to a final judgement by a panel of jurors, including legendary composer Hans Zimmer.
Ubisoft provided an instrumental tune for the contestants to sing along to, providing no guidelines or lyrics. Singers could choose to add their own lyrics (some even singing in latin or french), or stick with wordless vocals, as most opted for. After weeks of voting, the contest has finally come to a close.
The winner is Madeline Bell, who sang her way into the 10th position and was then chosen by the judges as the most fitting entry. Congratulations, Madeline!
You can listen to her entry, and the others, through the link above. The jury had a lot of good things to say about the competition, and Madeline's entry.
"We chose Madeline because we felt that she had a quality in her voice that inspired and moved us all. This was never going to be a contest about right or wrong, but about the 'perfect fit' and we were all deeply impressed with the submissions.
The overwhelming response clearly proves that we made the right decision to find a voice among the Assassin's Creed fan community, and that there is a lot of undiscovered talent out there that deserves to be heard."
There were 346 total submissions, with entries largely from female contestants; 17 of the top 20 entries were from female singers. Thousands of votes were tallied, and the contest was an entertaining success.
"We were overwhelmed by the passion and dedication of those who entered and the tens of thousands of people who got involved to support them in the contest. It proves our contest approach was the right one – there is so much great talent out there, waiting for a chance to be heard and UJAM is the platform they have been looking for to make their musical ideas happen."
Below are links to some of the other entries worth listening to, even if some of them might've missed the mark:
Get with the 16th century, Ezio! What do you mean you've never heard of a shrapnel packed tripwire bomb? They're all the rage these days among the assassins of Constantinople. The Templars seem to have grown from a sinister behind the scenes force infiltrating the upper echelons of the world's most powerful regimes into a loose collection of artfully armoured jerks who go around menacing peasants and stealing their apples. The Ottoman assassins idea of a proportionate response to this is a lethal explosive, but their experimental bombs look more interesting, the coin bomb that sends peasants scrambling for loose change is especially neat.
I've been revisiting Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood in anticipation of the soon-to-be-released fourth game in the series, Assassin's Creed: Revelations. I started a new game, and within an hour or so protagonist Ezio Auditore was effortlessly laying waste to dozens upon dozens of enemies—guys on horseback, heavily armored pikemen, and scores of sword-wielding Roman guards.
I paused and blocked, then countered, then chained my attacks to insta-kill foe after foe. Maybe it's all the Witcher 2 and Arkham Asylum I've been playing, but I found myself mentally checking out the more I fought. It's not exactly new news, but damn, this game is easy.
I like a lot of things about Assassin's Creed. I like how classy and clean it is, how effectively it weaves together timelines to tell a story that somehow feels coherent despite, y'know, being a total mess. I like the sense of vertigo I get when I climb to the tallest point in the city and jump, and I like the audio design and how it blends with Jesper Kyd's musical score.
But I've never felt satisfied by Assassin's Creed's combat. It's too forgiving, too prone to exploitation. The more toys Ezio gets, the further the imbalance is exacerbated—facing eight enemies, I've got my choice of shooting them, chain-killing them, picking them off one by one with counters, crossbowing them, throwing knives at them, overpowering them by hammering the attack button, or if I get bored, just dropping a smoke bomb and assassinating them one by one. The menu in Brotherhood offers no way to change the game's difficulty. I don't know what kind of balancing would be required to make variable difficulty possible, but I can't help but feel like it's a shame that it's not an option.
I have spent a lot of time this year playing The Witcher 2—CD Projekt's game lacks the smoothness of Assassin's Creed, but it's refreshingly challenging. The addition of the extreme new "dark" difficulty and its challenge arena only serve to enhance my enjoyment, and to highlight how different the game feels than Assassin's Creed. I've had a sadly small amount of time to dig into Dark Souls, but if it's anything like Demon's Souls, the swordfighting remains unforgiving and tense, and therefore incredibly exhilarating. Batman: Arkham Asylum's ever-escalating challenge rooms work well despite not having variable difficulty settings, and the more-complex, layered challenge rooms in Arkham City sound like an evolution of an already winning formula.
In Revelations, Ezio's arsenal continues to grow more varied and powerful—the new trailer has him seriously ruining some shit. He's got bombs now, and in demos we've seen him manning some mounted, heavy weaponry as well. So in addition to all those new tools of destruction, I'd love to see some options that let me give myself more of a challenge. It'd have to be adjustable, of course—plenty of folks love Assassin's Creed just how it is. But give me the option to lower the power of Ezio's counters, or make his healing potions take effect over time. Shrink the windows that allow for successful dodges and counter-attacks. Make me work for it!
This would be especially nice for a second playthrough, particularly with some sort of New Game+. With each past Assassin's Creed game, I've torn through the campaign doing a pretty large amount of sidequesting, but I haven't felt that pull to go back and do it over again. A higher difficulty would help with that, and give the hardcore a reason to do a second playthrough. I can tell you for sure that I'll be doing a New Game+ in Arkham City, but at the moment I'm not as sure about Revelations.
I'm writing this just before I head down to Ubisoft's San Francisco HQ for an extended hands-on with Revelations, so when I get there, difficulty will be one of the first things I ask about. But even if we don't get a variable difficulty in Revelations, Assassin's Creed is a franchise that Ubisoft will clearly be supporting for a good while. Hopefully as they continue to add inventive new ways to kill my enemies, they won't forget to teach my enemies some new tricks as well.
2-Player Addendum
Stephen and I talked a bit about this article over chat.
Totilo: How many of Brotherhood and II's side-missions did you complete? I've never minded the difficulty and have played through all the side missions in both (I just don't collect all the treasures) and I find that there's so much content that I would never want to play it all over.
Kirk: I completed a lot of both. All of the major sidequests, and a lot of the collecting.
Totilo: Last year, when I reviewed Brotherhood, I commended Ubi for "fixing" combat, by which I meant that you no longer had to wait during a fight against multiple enemies for each guy to attack and open themselves to counters. Brotherhood, you'll recall, let you chain kills once you did the first counter. I was like: They did it! MANY commenters were like, "Uh, the problem was that combat was too EASY... this makes it worse." What do I know?
Kirk: Yeah, I agree with those commenters on this one—it makes combat such a cinch! It really struck me as I've been replaying, you just WAIL on dudes. One successful counter, and you cleave through like six guys.
Totilo: It's better when your assassins in the brotherhood just do it for you. Minimal effort! Top badassery.
Kirk: I do think those are cool (and fun!), but a variable difficulty would also be nice. In case you want a challenge.
Totilo:There ARE in-game modifiers in Brotherhood that you access when you beat old missions under special conditions. And maybe one of those is a difficulty modifier. But I can see from this chat that they should just let there be a higher difficulty.
Kirk: Some of those extra "100% synchronization" challenges bugged me, weirdly. I think I just wanted the option to make the missions themselves more difficult, not to give them more stringent requirements.
You can contact Kirk Hamilton, the author of this post, at kirk@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
"When I started this fight, I did not think that it would span a lifetime," says Ezio. But then Assassin's Creed 2 sold so well, and he's had to come back for one game, and now another. That's no bad thing. Ezio's charm and exuberance has gradually turned into grizzled awesomeness. Now he has to track down the clues left by his more boring and angsty ancestor, Altair, and figure out what the hell is going on with those ancient gods and magic orbs, and all that stuff about the garden of Eden. The Assassin's Creed Revelations PC release date was pushed back recently. It'll now arrive on December 2.
According to Ubisoft, this is a trailer highlighting the story of Assassin's Creed: Revelations. That's odd, because I'll I can see is more than two minutes of Ezio showing me why I love the Assassin's Creed series so much.
For some of you the Assassin's Creed series features a rich, complicated storyline that spans the ages, weaving historical figures together in a gorgeous fictional tapestry.
For me, it's about leaping off of things and stabbing people.
Thankfully the video contains plenty of both, so I won't have to leap off of anything and stab you guys.
You can contact Michael Fahey, the author of this post, at fahey@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
A means of aerial transport jutting from your right hand, capable of launching you on shoulder-dislocating rides above a city in turmoil? Why, where have we heard that one before?
Unlike BioShock: Infinite's skyline wheels, though, the hook-blade itself has an offensive purpose which, more or less, means you can counter-kill with it. Yes, you can rake enemies off of their feet. Yes it has a slashing edge. The hook blade has two parts, you see—a hook and a blade. It's not that complicated, just sit on X/square and everything will be OK.
You can contact Owen Good, the author of this post, at owen@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
Assassin's Creed: Revelations was supposed to be the first time in the series that a game released for all platforms on the same day. Well, it won't. Ubisoft confirmed to Kotaku that the PC version of Assassin's Creed: Revelations has been delayed until December. No specific December date was given, nor a reason, but we're betting it's not to remove all the DRM from it.
The PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game will still release Nov. 15.
You can contact Owen Good, the author of this post, at owen@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
The release of the PC version of Assassin's Creed Revelations has been delayed by a couple of weeks. It'll hit consoles on November 15, but Eurogamer report that the PC version will come out on December 2.
So that's another Ubisoft gamed delayed on PC. From Dust, Call of Juarez: The Cartel and Driver: San Francisco have all received similar delays. It could be worse, though. Previous Assassin's Creed games have taken months to reach our machines. We should just start mentally adding a few weeks to every Ubisoft release date to avoid future disappointment.
This Assassin's Creed Revelations trailer from Gamespot claims to show every way in which you can die in Assassin's Creed Revelation's sneaky, stabby multiplayer mode. Kills have become more brutal and acrobatic with each edition of the series, but the latest bunch of killers are especially horrible. They're not assassins anymore, they're axe murderers. How did the guy at 1:22 manage to sneak up to victim with such an enormous weapon?
Who else is coming to New York Comic-Con? Ubisoft, that's who. The French publisher's bringing Ezio's last hurrah, the latest Just Dance game and more to the Jacob Javits Convention Center this weekend.
