Assassin's Creed (2 and Brotherhood): PS3 vs PC experiences

I've recently spent over 100 hours with Ezio/Desmond and crew. That's a lot of time, and I'm a little burnt out. So instead of contuning to write reviews like all the game sites do, I'll try to come up with new angles to write about. For this one, I thought I would write about the different experiences because of the change in hardware.

I first began playing Assassin's Creed (AC) on the PS3 whent it first came out. At first, HD gaming was all pretty knew to me, so I was blown away. Sadly, that was about all that blew me away in the first game.  The game play was extremely repetitive, and I found myself bored about halfway through that game.  Eventually, after sitting on my shelf for over a year, I traded it in to my local Gamestop for pennies on the dollar and never looked back...until now.

Time had passed, AC2 had come and gone to great reviews, and AC: Brotherhood was out with high scores as well.  When messing around on the PS3 in February after moving on from my WoW days, I noticed that they had a download version of AC2 for $30.  That price point was enough, since it included all of the DLC, that I thought I would give it a go.  It turned out to be a fantastic decision!

The game was smooth.  I really felt like a (virtual) badass, sneaking around on rooftops, tracking guys, taking down those I needed to (and some I didn't), and genuinely loving the pace and story of the game.  I thought the graphics were fantastic.  It played at 720p on the consoles, and delivered a pretty solid frame rate throughout the experiences, though I did notice a bit of drop in the cities where all the activity of the people moving around were clearly impacting performance.

I ripped through the title, and blew threw the DLC.  The story of the game took a great turn at the end, and made me anticipate the AC: Brotherhood title.  I finished a few days before the new title was releasing on PC via Steam, so I went that route instead of the PS3 to see about the experience on the PC and whether I could get even higher visuals on it.

I did have a problem to overcome, though, because the thought of playing the game on a mouse and keyboard appalled me.  I don't own a 360 contorller for Windows, only the PS3 controllers.  After some research and help from Kinto, I came across MotioninJoy Gamepad tool.  Using this software, you can plug your controller in (or use Bluetooth), and emulate an XBOX 360 controller, which I can say works perfectly. Even the vibration on the newer Dualshock3 controller will work.  So if you're in a similar boat, where certain games will be better with a controller, but don't want to drop $50 on a 360 controller, then this is the solution for you.

With that solved, I got the game and started to play.  The first thing to notice was the amazing difference that just the 1080p resolution makes.  It's easy to forget this when you're on a console, but it really is a giant difference.  I even went so far as to plug the PS3 into my LCD monitor to compare and contrast by flipping back and forth between the sources.  The second thing I noticed was the in the PS3 game, the draw distance/textures weren't cranked as high as the Brotherhood version on the PS3 was.  I can't confirm if that is because of the two games being different, or if it was just tuned down on the consoles for better frame rate play, which I suspect the latter to be true.

After playing about 10 hours into AC Brotherhood, I had a birthday where some family gratefully donated to my video card budget.  I upgraded my GTS 250 to the AMD 6950, and cranked the game back on.  I expected to be blown away with the increased horsepower...but I was not.  With the settings cranked up, I did notice a more consistent FPS out and about in the country, which was so smooth it was shocking, given I clearly haven't played many games above 45 FPS in my life.  But for $250, I expected more.  After a lot of research and experimentation with settings and drivers, I did manage to get the FPS up to a solid rate that made the game that much better, which is detailed in an earlier post.

This has gotten long, so I'm going to leave this post as it is so I can start to write my new post that is based on these type of experiences.  I'll end by saying if you haven't gotten into Assassin's Creed, do it.  You won't regret it.  You can skip the first one and not be lost, but you have to play AC2 to understand Brotherhood.  The series is fantastic, and I can't wait to see where they go with the new one.  Speculation is already that they will be going to Rome, NY, USA because of the DLC on Brotherhood, but the ending doesn't seem to tie to that, IMO.  Needless to say, I will play more of this game, and I will likely stick to gaming on my PC for non-PS3 exclusives.