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Assassin's Creed: Renaissance
I originally downloaded this book when I still thought I might be participating in Yuletide this year, and between watching ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
myrialux play Assassin's Creed 2 and Assassin's Creed 2: Brotherhood for hours, Wikipedia, and this book (not to mention myrialux's offer to replay any sections that contained plot that might be missing from the other places), I'd have enough of a working knowledge to be able to commit fic. As things stand, I'm not participating this year -- and given the amount of stuff I have to do in the next week and how far behind I am on it, that was a Very Good Idea -- but I'm idly reading a few pages here and there.
(I'll add here that when we were in Barnes & Noble, I pointed out the novelization tomyrialux and a man standing next to us said "That's actually really good," which was another factor in my going ahead and purchasing it. Was he correct...? Read on to see.)
Anyway. Book. This is not an award-winner of a book, but I don't really expect video game novelizations and tie-in novels to be. I'm finding anachronistic attitudes that I could laugh over and move on in the game to be annoying here - I'm someone who knows just a little bit too much about Renaissance Italy to be able to accept this as anything other than pure fantasy...fantasy that doesn't hold together logically, at that. This particular fault is not the writer's, however, but the fault of the original game writers and worldbuilders, and it's not a huge fault there because you're looking for other things when playing the game.
The biggest problem I have with the book is that the game is full of lush visuals and yet there is almost no sense of that in the book. It's collecting plot coupons and getting Ezio from one place to another to hit the scenes in the proper order at the proper time to overhear political scheming and pick up his bits of armor and weapons as the player does throughout the game, and you don't get the sense of Florence and other cities that the game had.* How close to Renaissance Italy was the setting in the game? We are friends with Jason and Christy, a couple who went to Italy this fall, at about the same timemyrialux and I went to the UK. Chris picked up the game a few weeks ago and found their hotel.
Considering that the setting is the best part of the game, this is a serious lack in the book.
At any rate, I'm about a third of the way through and so far I've discovered that the bits of a video game that you need to do in the beginning -- the cruddy stuff designed to teach you the controls and moves within the game - really don't translate well to fiction. The first few chapters of the book were concerned with these things, and you get to thrill to scenes like Ezio Delivers a Message! and Ezio Carries a Box!** Not to mention Ezio Seduces an Unmarried High-Class Girl! in which her dad discovers them in her bedroom the next morning and Ezio is not concerned that he's ruined her prospects of marriage, and mentions that it's OK because she can talk her father around. Er, well, I know the Italian Renaissance was not known for being an exceptionally prudish era, but that sort of unconcern should really be reserved for after marriage, I think. Again, something I can accept in the game, but not in a book, where it gives me too much time to think.
I haven't reached the bits where Ezio starts renovating the villa - Flip This Villa!*** - and I'm wondering how that's going to play out in the book, or if it's going to be swept under the rug in order to make room for improbable plotting.
Also, the book seems to be aimed at young teenagers who have played the game, and the editors or the writer have decided that they're too stupid to pick up the meaning of terms from context, which means awkward word and phrase choices at times. Here's one, from an Ezio Overhears Plotting! scene:
I rather enjoyed the game. I can deal with the anachronistic attitudes and laugh at them because I know the writer is constrained by the plot of the game, but I really dislike the perceived need to talk down to the reader like that.
* Okay, Florence and other cities full of people who wander aimlessly around until the AI glitches and sends one of them walking into a wall or stuck in a corner.
** The best part of carrying the box in the game is that if you wiggle the joystick back and forth rapidly, Ezio whirls back and forth with knees bent and looks like he's doing a little dance. Unfortunately, he carries no more boxes for the rest of the game. Dead bodies yes, boxes, no. You can do the same thing during the loading scenes, and Ezio will dance a bit, and in Brotherhood, if you take him in and out of high profile rapidly, he looks a bit like he's headbanging.
*** And the Brotherhood version, Flip This Villa: EXTREME ROME EDITION!
myrialux play Assassin's Creed 2 and Assassin's Creed 2: Brotherhood for hours, Wikipedia, and this book (not to mention myrialux's offer to replay any sections that contained plot that might be missing from the other places), I'd have enough of a working knowledge to be able to commit fic. As things stand, I'm not participating this year -- and given the amount of stuff I have to do in the next week and how far behind I am on it, that was a Very Good Idea -- but I'm idly reading a few pages here and there.(I'll add here that when we were in Barnes & Noble, I pointed out the novelization to
myrialux and a man standing next to us said "That's actually really good," which was another factor in my going ahead and purchasing it. Was he correct...? Read on to see.)Anyway. Book. This is not an award-winner of a book, but I don't really expect video game novelizations and tie-in novels to be. I'm finding anachronistic attitudes that I could laugh over and move on in the game to be annoying here - I'm someone who knows just a little bit too much about Renaissance Italy to be able to accept this as anything other than pure fantasy...fantasy that doesn't hold together logically, at that. This particular fault is not the writer's, however, but the fault of the original game writers and worldbuilders, and it's not a huge fault there because you're looking for other things when playing the game.
The biggest problem I have with the book is that the game is full of lush visuals and yet there is almost no sense of that in the book. It's collecting plot coupons and getting Ezio from one place to another to hit the scenes in the proper order at the proper time to overhear political scheming and pick up his bits of armor and weapons as the player does throughout the game, and you don't get the sense of Florence and other cities that the game had.* How close to Renaissance Italy was the setting in the game? We are friends with Jason and Christy, a couple who went to Italy this fall, at about the same time
myrialux and I went to the UK. Chris picked up the game a few weeks ago and found their hotel.Considering that the setting is the best part of the game, this is a serious lack in the book.
At any rate, I'm about a third of the way through and so far I've discovered that the bits of a video game that you need to do in the beginning -- the cruddy stuff designed to teach you the controls and moves within the game - really don't translate well to fiction. The first few chapters of the book were concerned with these things, and you get to thrill to scenes like Ezio Delivers a Message! and Ezio Carries a Box!** Not to mention Ezio Seduces an Unmarried High-Class Girl! in which her dad discovers them in her bedroom the next morning and Ezio is not concerned that he's ruined her prospects of marriage, and mentions that it's OK because she can talk her father around. Er, well, I know the Italian Renaissance was not known for being an exceptionally prudish era, but that sort of unconcern should really be reserved for after marriage, I think. Again, something I can accept in the game, but not in a book, where it gives me too much time to think.
I haven't reached the bits where Ezio starts renovating the villa - Flip This Villa!*** - and I'm wondering how that's going to play out in the book, or if it's going to be swept under the rug in order to make room for improbable plotting.
Also, the book seems to be aimed at young teenagers who have played the game, and the editors or the writer have decided that they're too stupid to pick up the meaning of terms from context, which means awkward word and phrase choices at times. Here's one, from an Ezio Overhears Plotting! scene:
In the silence that followed, Bernardo turned to Stefano de Bagnone. "I'll need to borrow a set of your priestly robes for tomorrow morning, Padre. The more they think they're surrounded by clerics, the safer they'll feel."What, you couldn't drop the term vestments in there? You can't trust that your readers - the ones who have already played the game, mind you, because the ones who haven't won't make it this far - would go "Huh. I guess vestments are those clothes priests wear."
I rather enjoyed the game. I can deal with the anachronistic attitudes and laugh at them because I know the writer is constrained by the plot of the game, but I really dislike the perceived need to talk down to the reader like that.
* Okay, Florence and other cities full of people who wander aimlessly around until the AI glitches and sends one of them walking into a wall or stuck in a corner.
** The best part of carrying the box in the game is that if you wiggle the joystick back and forth rapidly, Ezio whirls back and forth with knees bent and looks like he's doing a little dance. Unfortunately, he carries no more boxes for the rest of the game. Dead bodies yes, boxes, no. You can do the same thing during the loading scenes, and Ezio will dance a bit, and in Brotherhood, if you take him in and out of high profile rapidly, he looks a bit like he's headbanging.
*** And the Brotherhood version, Flip This Villa: EXTREME ROME EDITION!
no subject
Also: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/4/27/
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I think my attitude towards it is the same one I have towards movies based on comics, which has turned out to be true: the fanboys and girls are going to go see it anyway, so their money is guaranteed - what you need to do is aim it towards the ones who aren't fans of the source material, to widen your potential audience and bring in more money.
I knew the movies had finally cottoned on to that fact after I stumbled on a message board where a bunch of serious comics geeks were complaining about how awful Spider-Man was, and the things they complained about were the exact things that made it good. XD
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1. A decent writer.
2. A game with a background which is either reasonably rich or at least easily allows for elaboration by the writer.
3. A willingness on the part of both the writer and the people owning the rights to deviate from/add to the game plot where necessary.
It sounds as if the Assassin's Creed book fell down on point 3, and maybe on point 1 as well. Planetfall's main problem was point 2, I think - the game has a very sparse setting and exactly two characters, the viewpoint and a robot. I don't know that it would have been possible to add enough to this to support an entire novel while still keeping anything like the feel of the game. At any rate, Cover didn't manage it. Particularly when he got to the voyeurism and related activities.
I can think of a few old-school games that had backgrounds that might make for decent fiction (I can't think of anything new since I haven't played anything in years). The Ultima series - and in fact I see that Lynn Abbey wrote some tie-in novels. The Starflight games. The Star Saga games (which are mostly text to begin with).
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I couldn't get through it because the writing was just so bad, and the author seemed to add in NEW historical inaccuracies every two pages! Which is a shame because, while the game obviously isn't perfect, Ubisoft did do a hell of a lot of research and they get more things right than wrong. I think the book somehow manages to reverse that.
And then they hired the same dude to do the Brotherhood novelization, so I had a froth over that a few weeks ago. Sigh.
Re: Decent game tie-in novels: I'm pretty fond of the Myst novels, but those aren't really novelizations as they tell original stories rather than retelling the games. (Which is good, because trying to novelize exploring a landscape and doing puzzles would be extremely boring on paper.)