Usually I ignore bad reviews. Hell, why should I care if someone else doesn't like a game I do? Then I saw Jim Sterling's Assassin's Creed 2 review, where
he states flat out lies about the game and he gave it a 4.5 when about 50 other reviews scored it no lower then a 7 or so. It caused a shit storm, and intentional or not, dtoid readers should know the actual truth about AC2, and disregard Jim's review completely. I wonder if he even noticed if the game takes place over 30 years, a comment below explains.
Comparison between Jim's AC 2 Review and actual truth.
JIM SAID
"...needless cutscenes that show levels being rendered by the Animus for no good reason whatsoever. "
-You failed to notice this only happens as time passes in-game such as a year or two going by. How this went over your head is beyond me but this shows you what kind of reviewer we are dealing with here.
JIM SAID
"if you know you've stuffed up a timed mission, there is no option to simply restart the mission. You have to let the timer run out or abort it and sit through the pre-mission unskippable cutscene again."
- True there is no restart mission but all you had to do was select ABORT MEMORY, and then BAM! Your character is right at the mission giver again ready to restart. There should be an option though.
JIM SAID
"Players cannot simply travel speedily from one city to the next, instead having to first find a "fast travel" station."
- How many games do you know of where you can simply pause and teleport to the next area? In AC2 yes, you must find a travel station but again you fail to inform the reader it's not like AC1, you can teleport to different parts of a town now.
JIM SAID
"So many of the new missions are pure filler, with a number of them literally consisting of walking around town with nothing else to do. You just follow a character slowly around a portion of the city and that's it, mission done."
-There are a few of these but the characters are usually/always having story related conversation. They are few and far between as well.
JIM SAID
"The whole idea of improving the town and earning a steady income is great, but as usual, it's let down by pointless ponderousness. In order to receive your earnings, you have to travel all the way back to Monteriggioni itself, finding a fast travel station, sitting through a loading screen, and then walking from one end of the Villa to another to find that treasure chest I mentioned earlier. To make this even more annoying, there is a limit to what the treasure chest can hold, effectively forcing players to drop what they're doing and march back to the Villa if they want to keep making money. There is absolutely no reason for this decision, other than to falsely extend the game's running time."
- Most of the time you have to go to your town anyways, so its not like a big chore to go and collect your money. From travel station to chest it takes less then a minute. 1 minute 30 seconds with loading, and thats being generous.
JIM SAID
"Speaking of absolute crap, I don't know what Ubisoft has done to the game's engine, but Jesus Christ is it bad. This game has some of the most puzzlingly bad graphics I have seen on a console this year. "
-It speaks for itself.
I also noticed you didn't find one damn glyph in the whole game. Were you just rushing through it or what? It's pretty hard to miss the first one, and each glyph offers a puzzle. Such as rotating parts of a painting into place, pointing out an object in various real world pics. (houdini, ww 2, ghandi, and so on)
I'm sure I'll get his fanboys leaving stupid comments, hopefully you actually read through this post. A review is just an opinion, but a reviewer should have some credibility, and play the game thoroughly.
Sapato's blog
Follow
RSS
Contact
Because it's a horrible opinion. BUT IT'S STILL AN OPINION AND WE SHOULD FIGHT IT. Or, whatever.
I can't forget. I won't forget!
While I thoroughly support the people's right to opinionate and of course to attempt to disprove seemingly distorted opinions you say Jim lies but if I'm reading your article right you never once catch him in a lie. You justify the developers decisions and you call Jim out for whining about things you don't think are noteworthy complaints. Bravo.
But to say he's lying seems farfetched. I haven't played AC2 yet so I have no opinion of the title. I'm basing this purely on what I read.
@manasteel88
Yeah the review blantantly said the title is worth a rental but people saw the number and got all tightass for some reason. The number simply states, in his opinion, the idea was a poorly executed however the idea itself justified a rental.
Remember we've had titles with a score of 3 that had Editor's Choice plastered on them. It's because despite the piss poor execution the ideas were so original or well thought out they were worth the experience. People seriously need to educate themselves on the DToid review system and stop taking fucking numbers so personally. Of the three scales of DToid reviewdom the number is always the least important. People are conditioned I guess.
Jim can hate the game and be fine just like someone can point the finger, say he's wrong and this is why, and that's fine. In the end, if you take the Pi out of Opinion, you're just left with Onion and that's just not very funny.
Now, I haven't played Assassin's Creed II...
But isn't that the costume from Assassin's Creed I in that photographic evidence?
Cuz this is the new guy, right?
and this is the old guy...
BURNALISM!
Seriously, for fucks sake, it was a god damn review. Have you been sitting there all day playing ACII and just brooding about his review? If you like the game, WHO THE FUCK CARES?! And in the big scope of things do you really think Jim's review is going to change anything? Is Jim's review preventing you from enjoying the game whatsoever? No? Then shut the fuck up already.
Seriously, it was one person's opinion, and for reasons unknown to me every one is getting sand in their fucking vagina over it. Does the review or you not like the review even matter? no. go play the game, enjoy it, stop bitching about how one person didn't like it for god's sake.
4.5/10 is failing last I checked.
Seconded.
yes it is...in grade school. What's the point of a numerical scoring system if no game can truly achieve mediocrity for any one reviewer? Since when is failing determined at 60% and below?
Also, if anybody is actually surprised by this go read Anthony's review of the first game. His was a 5.5 which clearly means its +1.0 better than this game could ever hope to be. Or it means that Destructoid and its editors look upon this series with ambivalence.
There...I got that out since I totally could care less about this game (after the utter mediocrity of the first) and skipped over Jim's review completely. My mandatory rant has been fulfilled for the day.
"if you know you've stuffed up a timed mission, there is no option to simply restart the mission. You have to let the timer run out or abort it and sit through the pre-mission unskippable cutscene again."
You then say:
- True there is no restart mission but all you had to do was select ABORT MEMORY, and then BAM! Your character is right at the mission giver again ready to restart. There should be an option though.
He acknowledges that you can simply abort the mission. You act as though he completely ignored this fact when he mentions it. His complaint is equally about the fact that you must "sit through the pre-mission unskippable cutscene again."
Something you have no response to.
In general, your reasoning's bullshit. As said before, you don't catch him in a single lie (and make one or two yourself). You're simply attempting to justify poor game design.
Feel free to believe that Jim's opinion is wrong, but if you're going to call him a liar, you should really back that shit up, because your "evidence" is pretty pathetic.
Also that's a picture of AC1.
Somebody really needs to do a side by side shot with the Altair from the new game. He looks so bad that they should've just used the same character model from the first one. I guess that would've required some brains though.
The saddest part is that the graphics are probably the least important of all the things they messed up. It's way too easy to the point that I never died in combat, only from falls caused by the way the game guesses what you want to do, which Jim rightly criticized. The story and characters also have less depth than the Power Rangers.
I traded it in yesterday, and my only regret is that Ubisoft already got my money.
JIM SAID
JIM SAID
No one likes a parrot. Or a whiner.
wait what
where
I predict the rage will calm by about February, in place of another rage subject. God damn innernetz.
If he's going to falsely call somebody out on being a liar, he should expect to be criticized for the amount of mistakes made here.
1. Jim doesn't mean that the levels are rendered arbitrarily, he's saying that the rendering cinematics are extraneous. I completely agree with him on this point. The first time you arrive in a city, Venice for example, sure, the big reveals of the level rendering are nice but why repeat them? Venice doesn't change one bit in the 5 years between memory sequences. The big reveals aren't revealing anything anymore. Every stone of every building in Venice in 1488 is exactly the same as it was in '83. It's tedious to watch it being rendered again after spending so much time in that city.
2. Another commenter pointed this one out but I'm completely baffled by it. Jim obviously acknowledges that you can abort the memory. He writes the word "abort" in the very same passage that you quote. He's objecting to having to speak to the NPC and being forced to watch the same cutscene again.
3. I can name one off the top of my head: Fallout III. I didn't think this was a problem either but his description is accurate so this isn't a lie.
4. Again, not a lie and you acknowledge that.
5. You never have to go to town except for the few occasions when a mission begins there. You can buy supplies more cheaply in town if you invest some money in the shops, but that's always completely optional. The chest usually fills up way before you have to return anyway. Regardless, this doesn't excuse an arbitrary limit on the amount that it can hold. Jim's description is reasonable: there's really no reason to do this except to force the player to return to the villa. You may not find the travelling and loading irritating but he did. You might call this an exaggeration but it's not a lie.
6. It's really bizarre that you chose a screenshot from AC1. A screenshot of AC2 might be better at speaking for it self. It probably wouldn't, though. Jim's bald-faced assertion that AC2 had poor graphics with no supporting arguments may have been on flimsy ground but it probably wouldn't be invalidated by posting a screenshot with no further commentary besides "it speaks for itself," and it certainly wouldn't prove that he's a liar.
I wouldn't be surprised if he rushed through the game. I doubt he wanted to spend much time with a game he disliked. He really didn't miss much though. They were uninspired puzzles strung together by a sub-Da Vinci Code conspiracy. When your revelatory extra game content is poor imitation of the worst literary piddle, that's pretty damn sad.
PANCAKES!
Who knows, maybe he was strapped for time? That shouldn't matter, as a game should be enjoyable whether one speeds through it, or takes their time. A truely great game can acommodate both types of players
epic failure.
Would rage again.