James spent all day playing Assassin's Creed II.

So yeah, I'm already slacking off on the image/vid links and thoughts for the day. As some may know, Assassin's Creed II is a new and mildly popular little game where you relive the life of a young noble in the Italian renaissance as he becomes an assassin in the rough political landscape of that era. I won't go into all the nice qualities of the game's controls, graphics, and storytelling, nor will I indulge myself in long stories about some crap I did in a video game, but I will list a few things that really stand out to me as enjoyable. Then I'm going to sign off and play more video games.

-The history of the setting. Personally I would have preferred 1640s London or perhaps 14th century Paris, but all the little details of life with merchants and politics and real-life figures to immerse oneself in 1476 Florence is nice. I like having the database to look up historical places and facts; they're light, but good reference.

-Scaring the ever-living daylights out of people from the rooftops. The game's a bit easy, but often that means I have ample opportunity to have fun with its obstacles. Take guards on the roofs; sprint up from behind and stab them. Usually the result is a body sliding off the roof and falling to the streets below, which causes people to immediately disperse. But then they'll return, just to stare and voice their fears and confusion of the incident. Sometimes two guards will soon arrive on the street to investigate, which is the perfect opportunity to jump right on top of them and stab both in the neck. This completely scares the shit out of the crowd and the process repeats until there's too many guards to instant-kill.

-Chasing thiefs and pickpockets. The moment a red & white icon appears on my mini-map I drop everything I'm doing and run after the dude at full speed. The trick is keeping momentum and watching your path on the roofs, trying to gain shortcuts and keep up with the thief. When I finally punch him and throw him off the roof if I feel like it, the 500 florens is a nice bonus to the real reward: the chase itself. Then I realize I'm on the other side of the district and have to find my way back to what I was first doing.

-The distractions of crowds. You can stay out of sight by standing in the middle of a group of people, including ones you hire to follow you. Gives a nice excuse to slow down and enjoy the sights. I've been walking down a street avoiding the attention of guards when suddenly some pair of minstrels prance up to me, lutes in hand and signing me praises. This can be turned around by throwing some coins on the ground; the entire street suddenly becomes clogged by dozens of Italians shouting 'mahney, mahney, mahney!' which enables a pretty clean getaway.

-Doing cool stuff is really slick. This is actually more of a tossup between sword fighting and running around the city, but the underlying enjoyment of both stems from how well the game lets you pull them off. There's a lot of smart features for lock-ons and simple controls, but the result is I can fight five guys at once with a sabre with fancy counters, parries, disarms, and violent stabbing, and vaulting around roofs and swinging like an acrobat is mostly a matter of holding down the buttons to run and pressing jump when I need to. If I fail it usually feels like I made a specific mistake. I don't know how they did it with a game this big, but it seems everything is traversable in this city.

Well, that's it from me until tonight or tomorrow.