OXCGN – XBox News Reviews and Views

by dkpatriarch

© 2009 David Hilton

Ah Venice…There’s just something so magical and surreal about the place.  Featured in films from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to James Bond: Casino Royale and games like Timesplitters: Future Perfect and The Club, it presents a perfect exotic local in which to set escapist entertainment.

Forgive me for the following nostalgia trip, but I arrived in Venice by boat a young 17 year old way back in 1989, the morning after a live Pink Floyd concert (these days you can watch it on Youtube).

Rueing my bad luck at having missed that, I disembarked to find the magnificent historic buildings and tranquil waters offset by the humongous amount of rubbish and filth everywhere and an unholy heat and stink that I’d never before experienced.  A plague of pigeons that would have made great extras in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and a mob of other tourists harassed our every move in the squares.

I and a few others of our party threw away our maps, got a bit tipsy and hit the back hidden maze of alleyways and smelly canals fully intending to get lost. Eventually, after accidentally breaking an ancient toilet we had desperately found after all that drink, we found ourselves away from birds and tourists and all the rubbish from the concert at a real non-touristy pizzeria.

It was there, dozing in the sun with glorious pizza and drink in my system, that I appreciated the romance of Venice and daydreamed a blissful if unoriginal promise that I’d propose to my future wife one day in some hidden tiny church-dominated square or on one of those sleek black gondolas slowly floating through the narrow canals.

Of course I was buzzed and an idiot.  I never had the money to do that and my proposal, when it came, did indeed involve a small boat and some Italianate statuettes in a fountain (nude nymphs on dolphins I believe), but not in Venice.  It did smell better though.

My point is that yes Venice is artistic, magical and romantic- but equally it shows decay and ruin.  It’s no wonder Ubisoft Montreal and Deck 13 have chosen it as their destination for tales of assassination and murder.  Light and darkness, life and death, fresh and foul… all in that glorious but drowning, dying city.

But I’m sure there will be quite a few gamers who are inspired to envelop themselves in the unique atmosphere of the slowly sinking city after playing one of the two soon to be released games located there: Assassin’s Creed 2 and Venetica.  And for all its contradictions, Venice is certainly still worth it.

Assassin’s Creed 2: Visions of Venice

Though Florence was recently featured at the GamesCom  in Germany and I discovered back in April that San Gimignano would also feature, 15th Century Venice remains the focal open-world city, as Ubisoft’s recent Da Vinci Code-like ‘Visions of Venice’ trailer demonstrates.

Diving into a Venetian canal from a building high above and then swimming is one of the new features in the Assassin’s Creed franchise.  But there are many more.  There is a new economic system where you can buy bullets for your hidden gun, smoke bombs, poison, and other weapons.

• Assassin’s Creed 2 Sept ‘Visons of Venice’ Trailer

You can now grab a weapon off a guard, use it to kill him, use your double hidden blades to kill your target, and throw a smoke bomb to confuse everyone so you can escape up the walls and swing away on flower pots to the rooftops.

Or, you can bribe some mercenaries to cause a distracting brawl with guards, sneak in and shoot your target with a hidden gun, then throw some coins to form a frenzied crowd barrier behind you as you run off  and dive into the canal and swim away.

You a sneaky bastard?  Then why not sneak up to the target’s guard and poison him so that he lurches around with his halberd and accidentally kills your target for you.  Then just saunter off and snicker.

•Assassin’s Creed 2 Dev Diary #2

You’ll now have the ability to use Eagle Vision while moving, which may make things easier to find, but may also become something you rely too heavily on, and if that happens then you won’t get to see the environment in all its splendour.

And Venice does look splendid.  Historically re-created with amazing graphics, it is like a virtual tourism trip, except you can do more with Ezio than even the best free-runner could in real life. Besides…like I said earlier, you wouldn’t really want to swim in those canals for real, trust me.

So there are more involved factions, more moves, more dynamic crowds, more weapons and Da Vinci gadgets and more Eagle Vision.   Importantly though there will be more mission variation (see vid below), including getting messages from those pigeons I mentioned earlier (I wonder if a mini-game will be to try and find the pigeon with the message amongst the millions of them in Venice…sounds like an Amazing Race task to me!).

This variation continues into side-missions which are Prince of Persia-esque.  In a church, catacombs, or a palace you’ll have quests that are more corridor-like in structure where you run and jump your way through to find more details about the Templar-Assassins war, objects and special rewards, or to pursue a certain enemy while free-running at speed.  These will offer a stark contrast to the more open-world environments.

• Assassin’s Creed 2 Gameplay walkthrough

This is a game that looks to be a must-buy.  It has added so much since the last Assassin’s Creed and I can’t wait to re-visit the recreated historical Venice.

Venetica: Magical Venice

Where Assassin’s Creed 2 is well known by the gaming public, gritty and realistic, Venetica is relatively anonymous with its more fantasy-oriented perspective on Venice, despite having gone public with the locale first.

• Venetica Part 1

The game’s setting is described as:

..set in a fantastic Venice of the Renaissance era. On your journey you will visit many impressing sites ranging from spacious squares to huge palaces and narrow alleys within Venice as well as remoter regions outside the lagoon city.

Certainly the recent GamesCom trailer shows the game also looking spectacular with its different visual art style.  Yes it looks more like a Fable-ed up version of Venice, but the game also seems to share some similarities to Assassin’s, despite it being a Role Playing Game (RPG).

If Assassin’s Creed 2 is adding elements (like the economic system and factions) to make it more RPG-like, Venetica looks to be including more action to its RPG frame.

Though, as with most fantasy RPG games, the cinematic style and deep story is still a focus, Deck 13’s game also centres around action fighting and murder.  As the main character in the trailer, Scarlett, who is the daughter of Death, sadly states: “This is all you see me as- a weapon…I’m no less an assassin than [those] I slaughtered.”

The plot begins similarly to AC2 as well:

Set in the fantastic world of long ago Venice, the young Scarlett falls victim to a terrible mystery, which begins with the murder of her companion by a secretive alliance..

Two Venices and two protagonists who have loved ones killed by evil-doer secret alliances and so become assassins themselves, then.

But wait there’s more. The experience is described as an open game world with dynamic night and day cycles- like AC2 will be.

Then there is this from VG Arabia- Scarlett, in her fight against a necromancer intent as always on total domination and destruction, “walks the streets, enjoys the beautiful view from the roofs of Venice’s houses and swims the canals…from there she can reach dark catacombs underneath the city, which are filled with creatures, treasures and puzzles.”

• Venetica Part 2

Sounds a bit like AC2 too, right?

But this game is firmly in the realm of fantasy.  There are nightmarish creatures, a variety of characters to deal with including merchants, rogues, allies, and evil magical necromancers and Scarlett is the daughter of Death who can enter the Twilight World (no, not the vampire kind of Twilight) where she can communicate with the dead.

I’m pretty sure Ezio won’t do magic or enter the Twilight World of the dead….

Venetica will be released in October this year and may be one of those titles that sneak up on you but are a surprise hit.  I’m certainly looking forward to trying it.

So there you have it: not a tale of two cities, but two tales of one city: Venice.

It certainly is strange that we have two games released around the same time with such similarities, but I believe there are enough differences between them that they will each provide a different entertaining vision of the city I experienced so long ago, and made you experience with me in this article.  Ah Venice….

• Venetica Part 3

What do you think of both these games being set in Venice?  Do you have any interesting stories about any of your visits there?  Share them in the comment section below.

© 2009 David Hilton

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