There's a squid in my Assassin's Creed II

Deep down in the catacombs of the Santa Maria Della Visitazione Assassin's Tomb lives a lovely creature of the deep. Link your way to the video, which gets interesting around the 0:40 mark.

Games of the year

When I look back at 2009, I see a great year in gaming. Below I’ll go into a little detail on my favorites. My rules are simple. I’m picking platform exclusives, cross platform titles, and an overall game of the year. I didn’t put any meaningful time into Wii or DS so I don’t have any entries for them.

A Christmas Casualty

Overall, we had a great Christmas this year, everything went pretty smooth (Santa did have to put out Christmas presents by flashlight and candlelight due to a blackout). Kids were happy, Mom and Dad weren't too stressed. However, it didn't go all that well for one individual...

Assassin's Creed II Collector's Edition swag

A short note. I picked up my Assassin's Creed II CE from Gamestop this week. The Ezio statue (figurine?) is fantastic! The statue itself is huge, my Altair figure sadly only comes up to his knee. As for the other CE items? The Bonus content disc is pretty much a throwaway. My soundtrack? It's buried as a menu item on the Bonus DVD and it's not even the full soundtrack. It has only 14 tracks, while the soundtrack available on Amazon shows a total of 35 tracks. And because it's on a DVD I can't take it with me to listen while I drive to work. And why on earth did they not include the awesome Lineage movie is beyond me. The Art book is nice but nothing to write home about. After having purchased the three CE versions of World of Warcraft and it's expansions, my expectations for an art book are pretty high. I've yet to get to the Palazzo Medici or the Santa Maria Dei Frari (the pre-order bonus map and the CE bonus map, respectively) so I can't say much about that.

The statue is pretty sweet, so that soothes some of my disappointment with the contents of the CE, but as far as I'm concerned, the Bonus disc is pretty lame.

Assassin's Creed Lineage Part 1

Last year Ubisoft bought Hybride Technologies, the visual effects studio that created the effects for '300' and 'Sin City'. Why would a game publisher buy a movie effects company?

Ubisoft said that it acquired Hybride "to share technology and to develop tools in order to optimize the creation of both video games and visual effects and to offer gamers visual experiences that rival those of the cinema."