There is something interesting with games these days, as they have evolved so fast and so many titles have come out, original ideas are running out quickly, but also spontaneously appear making an unique concept. But are games fully prepared to be out when we all see them in shelves now?

Let me talk to you about an experience with Assassin's Creed.

Last week there was an offer of it on Steam which was for 5 bucks (reaaaaaally good price checking out eBay, Amazon and GameStop), so without a doubt I downloaded it and popped it in.

Now let's go with the whole concept, the idea behind it seems very deep and original to me, and I enjoyed being on the era of the crusades after the corrupt people in the middle east be them Islamic or European. The scenery is also fantastic, the first time I saw the gates of Damascus with the glorious Arabian music amazed me and made everything look worth analyzing, as the place felt more alive. Constantly, I have heard complains about too many side quests and the lack of actual assassination, but I actually enjoy side missions because they make the characters and setting memorable. That goes without saying every of them gets registered in a memory log and has a little of "collect-a-ton" with the flags standing in random places around the world which so far they look like a mindless MacGuffin and I am used to it after wasting a couple of years in my life playing Donkey Kong 64 and still not being able to complete it 100%.

All in all sounds like the ideal single-player game for me in PC aside the Half-Life series, that is if it wasn't because some tiny details that ruined all of the experience for me.

Just today I want to continue the long advance I did yesterday like rescuing a lot of poor villagers from merciless bandits or take down the corrupted merchant, but when I loaded the file, I was back at Jerusalem retrieving my sword back after completing my first mission instead of being in the climax of Damascus! I just got dragged back a whole chapter! What happened?!

There is no real excuse for the game there, a "Saving" icon appeared when I was completing side missions, and there was no option for saving manually. So in other words, the game fucked up with me. I have faced many similar cases in which I frustrated because I forgot to save (if you played Pokemon and Final Fantasy, you REALLY know what I mean), but this time it was not me who fucked up, it was the game who did it. And for all this, I lost pretty much the whole intention of keep playing this on a long time.

So, while I still cannot figure what was the deal with it, I just have to wonder what happened with the testing or supervision Ubisoft had behind this. The cutscenes are unskippable, it takes 10 steps to quit the game without using Alt+F4, and now there seems to be no way to trust the game is really saving or not which leads to an endless amount of blind frustration of what could happen or not. If the problem was in not closing it the right way, they at least should have considered in:

1. Not make it so long and time wasting.
2. Tell me that it had to be performed that way in first place!

Oh wait, you DID told me that quitting could lose everything that was not saved, which makes sense to me, but I saw the "Saving" icon, so I did not worry. Remember? Because when a game tells me that is saving a game, I suppose that all of it is ready for my next use.

Games are supposed to take a long time to release so the bugs are eliminated, not only for making all the pretty textures and polygons, even then, games like Team Fortress 2 keep updating for sudden bugs or flaws the staff finds chronically. So the graphics, gameplay and concept are completely welcome for me, but seems that the skeleton behind is shattered.

So why am I whining about this when it was only 5 bucks? Well, just think about all those people that bought it in full retail price! We are all expecting to get what we payed for, many read reviews to be sure their purchase is worthy, but to see at the end that it's broken, it feels like you got scammed no matter the amount of cash. Money is money.

This is why I love companies like Nintendo, they have a big debugging department to make sure there are no bugs and glitches if not tiny ones that could be funny to see. The whole wonder of Assassin's Creed just crumbled by some technical details which greedy executives and HD nazis these days would call them "irrelevant".



While all the trip started great, and the feeling was fantastic, all of it got interrupted with no climax, and no cigar.