Ah, Friday. And with it, links:

One of the most interesting details regarding the forthcoming PC-version of Assassin’s Creed was the promise of new pre-kill missions you could perform. The utter lack of variety in these missions (which make up the vast majority of gameplay) were one of several problems I mentioned a while back, and there was a slight glimmer of hope that these missions would be diverse enough to spice things up a bit. According to an IGN interview with Ubisoft’s Tech Lead, I shouldn’t have bothered:

“…we are talking about 4 new investigation missions: archer assassination, rooftop race challenge, merchant stand destruction challenge and escort challenge. The archer assassination requires the player to assassinate the archers in a dedicated zone without being seen. In the rooftop race challenge, the player will meet an informer and will have a set amount of time to reach a second informer. In the merchant stand destruction, some merchants have ties to the assassination target and their activities must be stopped by Altaïr. Finally, in the escort challenge, the player needs to securely escort a fellow Assassin from point A to point B.”

A rooftop race and destroying merchant stands? How very exciting and assassin-y! And thank god that laziest, most annoying of game mechanics, the escort mission, is finding its way to a game ostensibly about sneaking about on rooftops and turning the city into your jungle gym. The archer assassination mission sounds interesting, as it involves actually assassinating people, but no. There’s no word yet as to whether any of this additional content will ever come to the 360 or PS3 versions via download, but I think I can live without. (via Joystiq)

Elsewhere, Ste Curran of The Triforce posts about the perilous nature of the creator/audience relationship and how it can very nearly ruin everything. It’s a good post, bouncing back and forth between reaction to Passage creator Jason Rohrer’s follow-up game Gravitron and his own experience at Edge during one of the peaks of its respectable life as games’ leading magazine thing. His final message regarding both positive and negative feedback from the teeming anonymous masses seems like it should be obvious to anybody making things for a reason, but it’s so easily forgotten that it’s nice to have it repeated from time to time. (via a href=”http://www.kierongillen.com”>Gillen)

Also from the world of nice things, freelance journalist Evan Narcisse brings us “Don’t Bogart That Controller”, an article on the fun of turning a single player game into a co-op experience. This is hardly a new phenomenon – the first time I beat Super Mario Bros. was with my dad and a friend of his, trading the controller between us with each level. The same thing happened with Super Metroid over a long summer with my cousin Bill, where we’d replay the game over and over again in search of all its secrets. It’s great to see a common occurrence discussed in public like this, however, and would love to see more games use this kind approach to multiplayer. (via a href=”http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/levelup/”>Level Up)

In sadder news, Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons died last Tuesday, as you’ve no doubt heard. While not necessarily new, the internet has produced a number of nice tributes, such as James Wallis’ post about how one moment of genius, the Old Board Gamers Blog thanks for the chance to create so many memories, and Order of the Stick’s sweet webcomic tribute. And then of course there’s Penny Arcade, memorializing the man in their own unique way. It’s hard to measure the sheer magnitude of Gygax’s influence on gaming (from a design perspective, I can’t imagine what the landscape would look like without his contributions – I mean, he invented leveling up. How do you just do that?) so it’s probably best to leave it at an understated “nothing would be the same without D&D.” Having played my first-ever game last night in an adventure lead by some veteran coworkers based on the new Fourth Edition coming this summer, the weight of that is more apparent than ever. (via the internets)

And finally, anybody in need of a final boss for their game need look no further than Russia’s bucket-wheel excavator:

(via the always-fun Astronomy Picture of the Day)

Filed under: link roundup