Ho ho ho - Merry Christmas. Not that merry for me this year, unfortunately, as I've had tonsillitis since Christmas Eve (I did, with the help of lots of painkillers, manage to eat my own weight in Christmas dinner though).
Game-wise, this year I received the excellent Assassin's Creed Brotherhood (nothing says 'Christmas' more to me than assassination*) on 360 from my wife and a book, 1001 Videogames you must play before you die from my daughter (a handy reminder of my own mortality from my first-born).
Assassin's Creed Brotherhood uses the same characters and setting (albeit mainly set in Rome this time) as Assassin's Creed II - sort of an Assassin's Creed 2.5. There is enough new content and new activities (mainly related to killing people, admittedly) in the new game to make it an essential purchase for fans of the previous game (my Game of the Year in 2009).
1001 videogames... is a slab-like (960 pages) trawl through seminal (and some less so) videogames from the 1970s up to Heavy Rain in early 2010. With any book like this (whether it be videogames, films, footballers etc), I usually try to catch it out with games that I think *should* have been included (the answer to which would be, of course, 'write your own bloody book then') but so far I've only thought of 3D Ant Attack on Spectrum (first isometric-perspective adventure game) and Vandal Hearts on PS1 (niche strategy RPG from Konami), both of which are quite obscure. It is a great read and I highly recommend it to everyone with an interest in the history and progression of videogames.
* this is literally, if oddly, true - I received both Assassin's Creed and Assassin's Creed II as Christmas presents over the last few years.
One word: Ico.
ReplyDeleteHappy new year.
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ReplyDeleteI hadn't checked for Ico - I went for the obscure, not the obvious. It would be like missing God of War from the PS2 games included. But, as you imply, it is missing.
ReplyDeleteFunnily enough, I'd checked Shadow of the Colossus (the lesser game, in my opinion), which is included and the entry for which namechecks Ico throughout.