Review: Assassin's Creed Pirates (iPad)

Review by Matt S.

I'm not sure why, but the big publishers seem to struggle with coming up with compelling ways to bring their important franchises to the iPad. EA has both hits and misses in equal measure, and Activision has only made token efforts with its Call of Duty franchise.

On the other end of the spectrum is 2K Games, which is more interested in releasing premium-priced and full featured itirations of its games. Good on the producers over at 2K for that decision; it's good to see some publishers understand that there are genuine fans of gaming with iPads. Somewhere in the middle sits Ubisoft. It doesn't exactly produce AAA-games on the iPad, but what it does do is take its popular franchises and produce "mobile" titles that far exceed the normal quality of such things. Exhibit A - Rayman Jungle Run and its sequel. Not a "full" Rayman game, but a darned fine runner with all the Rayman charm packed into a small download.

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Trailer: Assassin's Creed IV makes pirating look glam

Ubisoft has released the second in its "Black Flag Diaries" video series; essentially trailers for the game with the developers talking about how awesome it is.

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Friday 10s; Ten game franchises that need a rest

Everyone likes a top-10 list. They're a bit of fun, and always good for discussion. And so each week we pull together a "top 10" list. These are here for fun and laughs - we're not pretending that we're the authority of good games taste in the world and this is purely the author's preferences. Agree with him/ her or not, it's all good. We'd love to hear your own personal preferences in the comments below the list. But please do be civil. We're all friends here.

This week Digitally Downloaded journalist, Joseph, looks at a series of game franchises that are all superb, but possibly need to stop while they're ahead. It's a difficult challenge for game developers and publishers, to know when to stop, but too often we've seen wonderful game franchises that have fallen into mediocrity because the developers didn't know when to say enough is enough.

Be sure to let us know what you think of the list below in the comments, and of course if there are any franchises that you think should be added in there, let us know that as well!

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