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Assassin’s Creed 2 for PC, mark your calendars

As many of you may know, while I’m not busy with books, papers, friends or HP products, I also love, love, love PC gaming. Did I mention how I recently picked up Assassin’s Creed 1 for PC, played it on a borrowed HP Envy 15 and loved it? No? Well, now you know. After playing Batman Arkham Asylum for PC last December (and writing about its singleplayer experience earlier this month), I sort of went on a “third person action” gaming spree. My “latest” third person perspective game was 2007/2008′s Assassin’s Creed 1, which I started and finished within last week – strange how I missed picking it up when it first came out.

Since it’s an old game, I won’t be writing a full length review about it (though you should lookout for my reviews of Batman Arkham Asylum 1 and Left4Dead 2, as well as a few new HP notebooks, in the coming weeks). But simply put, it was a game with a great storyline, decent character development, lots of nice scenery and part-action, part-stealth gameplay. Though it had its fair share of issues such as missions that get slightly repetitive after awhile and jagged edges/below average image quality (due to either lack of anti-aliasing and/or upsampling from 720p to 1080p, not sure which one, because the PC version of Assassin’s Creed 1 was a direct console port), I still loved it as a whole… and I’ve been looking forward to Assassin’s Creed 2 for PC since.

Well, the release date of Assassin’s Creed 2 for PC, the direct sequel to the original game, was announced less than 12 hours ago – mark your calendars for March 16, 2010, if third person adventure games are your thing (or if you just like intriguing storylines). I hope that after all that waiting (and delay, compared to the console versions which were already out since November 2009), the developers have gotten their act together to go that extra mile to make Assassin’s Creed 2 less of a console port, and more PC optimized (real 1080p and anti-aliasing up to 16X CSAA please!).

While I’m all up for Assassin’s Creed 2, and really happy for the fact Ubisoft is including the full game (unlike consoles, whose players have to buy the two DLC’s which were supposed to be part of the story), they’re charging a whopping $60 for the game. For the record, the MSRP of new PC game titles has been and is usually $50. And I think we have that console game (which was lazily turned into a crippled, console-lified PC game) to blame for starting off the “$60 for PC games” trend. Yes, I’m sure with the launch of Assassin’s Creed 2 as the second ever PC game with a $60 price tag, many PC gamers are praying hard that the disgusting, plain horrid “$60 trend” set by Modern Warfare 2 will not become a norm as other developers release games in the future…

What single-player gaming should be…

Batman: Arkham Asylum for PC (I'm enjoying it, "only" 47% done)

The date is January 2, 2010. No sign of any HP news or rumors so far… so before we get all busy with CES 2010 (Consumer Electronics Show) and the rumored new HP notebooks and stuff, I’d like to take some time today to talk about gaming.

For the last two days before the New Year, I had probably the most exciting and enjoyable single-player gaming experience of 2009. Batman: Arkham Asylum (yes it has a superhero in it, but it certainly won’t be small little children playing this game) is a game which came out in September 2009 for PC, and yes, I’m noticeably late to the party (3rd person perspective games have never been my thing, but a recent experience of Metal Gear Solid 4 on a friend’s Playstation 3 has motivated me to try out more recent 3rd person games for PC*). In terms of single-player replay ability, the Left4Dead series are easily at the top for most re-playable games recently released but in my opinion, Arkham Asylum takes the cake for single-player playing depth.

I’ve spent about 12 hours spread out over two days (New Year’s eve and the eve before the eve) and I’m only 47% through the game (see my little screenshot above). I estimate it’ll take me about 26 hours in total to complete the entire single-player of Arkham Asylum – which is excellent! Compare that to the 4.5 hours it took on the latest Call of Duty title: Modern Warfare 2… and Modern Warfare 2 pales in comparison with its overly short single-player campaign. Granted, Arkham Asylum and Modern Warfare 2 are two games of two different genres but Arkham Asylum is a great example of how single-player should be on every game.

Not only does it take several days (or longer, if you don’t spend too much time playing in one sitting) to complete the game’s single-player mode, the game also makes you feel like you’ve been playing much longer than you really have (especially with some scenarios where you have to sneak around and be stealthy, combined with several high-packed, heart pumping fights/boss fights – there’s a really nice stark contrast here). Arkham Asylum’s gameplay essentially gives you a dose of some ‘stealth’ elements along with quite a bit of action, though it won’t be replacing games dedicated to those respective genres anytime soon.

Oh, did I mention the graphics and environment are both awesome (save for the few pre-rendered cutscenes. My eyes tell me they’re pre-rendered because the details and graphics in cutscenes are much coarser and lower resolution). The “world” of the Arkham Asylum island is nicely sized, and though you have to pass through or go back to some places at times, you don’t really feel “oh no, I’ve been here before, why am I here again” because there’s always something new: be it new bad guys having come back to patrol the area or giant “beanstalk” plants bursting through the walls and floors, presenting the need to find another way around.

What single player gaming should be: Sufficiently long with a good story line (this should be one of the top priorities in my opinion) – 24+ hours of singleplayer gameplay should be good, some level of non-linearity or dynamic/changing in-game elements and/or plot twists. With that all said, I think Eidos (Arkham Asylum’s developer) has won me over and just turned me into a potential customer for the upcoming sequel, Arkham Asylum 2. *Note: I still stand by the fact that I really wish someone would make an MGS4 port for PC!!

Notebook screen size comparison (9 vs 12 vs 14 vs 17 inch)

For those trying to decide the ‘perfect screen size’ for your next notebook, look no further – here’s a nice illustration/comparison between screen sizes of four screen sizes commonly found on notebooks/netbooks.

Starting from the bottom is HP’s Elitebook 8730w Mobile Workstation, featuring a massive 17 inch DreamColor display (1920 x 1200 pixels here!). Brilliant notebook and beautiful screen but perhaps size is the reason it sits on Mark’s desk 99% of the time.

Next is my trusty silver+black HP Pavilion dv4 notebook PC. It’s not the latest edition, as some HP fans should be able to tell “all-black” is the color scheme for the latest Pavilion dv4. It has a 14 inch screen (1280 x 800 pixels) which is a good compromise between size and portability.

The HP Pavilion dv2 has a 12 inch screen (Also with 1280 x 800 pixels)… and the reason why its screen seems to sit higher than that of the dv4 is the same reason why Trisha hates the design of this ultra portable – big bezel around the screen. But other than the design annoyance, the dv2 is a pretty good portable notebook: slim, light and it plays modern games like Call of Duty, Left4Dead and Need for Speed, and possibly Batman: Arkham Asylum for PC that I wanna get soon. In real life, other 12 inch notebooks with smaller screen bezel areas would be lower-profile, making them even more compact.

And lastly, sitting on top of all the other notebooks (good thing the Elitebook down there can support all that weight), is the HP Mini 2133. Yes, I still use it, although the 2133 has been feeling a little cranky this week – refusing to come out of sleep mode if I leave it for more than an hour. The Mini 2133 has a 8.9 inch screen, slightly smaller than the 10 inch displays that have become the staple of 90% of netbooks this year. The screen is a little small but it’s high in resolution (1280 x 768 pixels). People do ask me if I can actually see the tiny, ant-sized letters on the screen when I’m typing out a Word document at 80% magnification (so I can see two pages at one go).

That’s it for now. I’ll be talking about the HP Envy 13 and Envy 15 more later this week, so stay tuned for that!