This week on CrunchArcade, your weekly roundup of gaming news, commentary, and downloads: Assassin’s Creed on the PC, Aerosmith on consoles, achievements in TF2 and indie developer Cactus in a zip file. Read on, bold CrunchReader.
The week that wasn’t
Not a lot of big news this week, but we found cool stuff anyway. The entire Atari Catalog from 1981 has been scanned and put online for your perusal, and there’s more old school stuff like that over here at Metafilter. It’s interesting how it’s all illustration – no screenshots for you!
Peter got to try out Guitar Hero Aerosmith, which he said was sweet, but I think liking Aerosmith is kind of a prerequisite. I’m more into Team Fortress 2, where the first set of extra achievements and unlockables has been revealed, for the Medic. Some of the achievements are, as far as I am concerned, completely impossible, even if you’re working with pals to game the system.
Assassin’s Creed PC first impressions
The controversial creeper that got mixed reviews on its release has finally made its way to my PC. I happened to agree with the positive reviews for the consoles, but that doesn’t mean it would necessary be any good on the PC (see Resident Evil 4 and numerous racing games for examples of bad ports of good games). Fortunately, the game has for the most part made a good transition.
I’m using an analog gamepad, but some people say the mouse/keyboard controls are better. That sounds weird to me since it’s essentially a platform/action game. I’ll give it a try, though. The new gameplay includes some extra investigational tasks, although the biggest difference is the graphics.
Oh, the graphics. This game is utterly beautiful. Above you see a screenshot resized from 1280×720 and a crop from it at that resolution. I am running it on my rig at 1920×1200, and it is unbelievably good-looking at times. Every little detail is there and the animation in the game shows no flaws in the move to high-res. I’ll put up another shot as soon as I get back to my home PC.Check it out, it looks even better in motion:
Unfortunately there are still a few bugs to work out. For instance, in the "Kingdom" area, there is a freaky stutter no matter where I go or what settings I change. It’s nowhere to be found in the cities. I’m a few missions in and I’m looking forward to the rest of the game, though I am definitely hoping for a patch to smooth out the more obvious bugs.
Cactus Arcade
No matter what you’re looking for in the indie game community, whether it be platformer, puzzler, shoot-em-up, or whatever, prolific developer Cactus has probably released a game in that genre. It’s a bit troublesome to keep track of all his releases, even though they’re the cream of the crop, so a compilation has been thoughtfully put together.
It has fully 17 games included, it’s free, and it has an interface included so you don’t need to worry about tracking 17 extra directories (my "indie games" folder is a hopeless mess). Here it is (direct .zip download), and if that dies here is Cactus’ directory of games. Try Akichuzoku, Fractal Fighter, and Mondo Medicals if you’re feeling adventurous.
That’s all for this week, kids. Tune in next week for more.