Top 10 Tuesdays : Pulling an All-Nighter (With Assassin’s Creed)

There are about 4 million metric crap-tons of reasons to pull an all-nighter.  Some people do it for school, especially college kids in the week before a big exam.  Other people (myself included) do it to catch your favorite show on Adult Swim.  For some people, their work schedule turns their nights into their days, or you just can’t sleep.

Whatever the case, your bed is nearby.  It’s warm, it’s comfortable, but you aren’t getting into it any time soon.  So why not stay up and catch up on some great video games perfect for ignoring sleep with?  And then I “write a lame segway line into”…

The Top 10 Video Games to Play While Pulling an All-Nighter!

I’m going to be honest with you now.  This isn’t a top 10 article.  Sad, I know.  But this week, I don’t need to share with you 10 games that you need for an all nighter.  Because there’s only 1.  The best game to play while pulling an all nighter has got to be Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood.

This beautiful bastard is the brainchild of a team that, I’d be willing to wager, is bigger than the entire NFL.  Not just the players on the teams… but anyone that receives a paycheck from the NFL, including all of the guys who write the checks.  Everyone from the head-honcho’s, down to the people that bring you your flat beer back in row 62.  There were a lot of people that contributed to this game, is what I’m saying.

Anyone who has played this game can attest to this.  After you beat DNA sequence 9 (I’ll explain all that in a minute!), the credits start to roll.  And as usual, you can’t skip the credits and go back to the main menu until the credits are done.  Well, after coming off of the extreme adrenaline high I got from beating the game, I sat there satiated and relieved, not to mention amazed that after about 83 hours of game play, I finally beat it (I thought).  So I sat there and watched the credits for about 5 minutes.  Getting bored with that, I went downstairs, and made a pot of coffee.  At 2am.  Don’t judge me, I needed something to calm my nerves.  I waited for the coffee to finish, poured a cup, waited for it to cool, and drank it.  I repeated that again.  Then I poured one more cup and then checked my e-mail.  After all of that, I went upstairs and the credits were still rolling.

All that aside, as I said I thought I had beaten the game.  But there’s so much to do!  Honestly, I recently went to a doctor for some tests, and by the end of it, I was diagnosed with having what is scientifically called “Having an astronomically gigantic… ego.”  I’m about 130 hours into ACB now, and I’m still around 40% done.  This game is huge, and in talking about it to some of my friends, and other ACB fans, it really is almost like living the life of the character in the game.

Brief Synopsis:

The game is [obviously] the sequel to Assassin’s creed II, making it the 3rd game of the franchise.  You play as a modern day man named Desmond who has hooked up with this team of scientists and hott women in order to save the planet from some unforeseen mystical power (or something).  In ACB though, Desmond is not the star of the show.  The scientists hook him up to a machine called “The Animus”.

Pictured (left to right): Desmond, Hott Scientist, Animus.

What the Animus does is it lets him replay memories his ancestors had back in 1400’s Italy.  In ACB, you end up playing as Ezio Auditore de Firenze.  A very intelligent, assassiny, good guy who lives by the code “Nothing is true.  Everything is permitted.”  The game is so named around all of this, and the fact that he is a part of a brotherhood of assassins.

Why it is fantastic to play during an all-nighter:

THERE’S SO MUCH TO DO!  Okay.  As I mentioned before, there are DNA sequences when Desmond is in the Animus.  He replays the memories (meaning you play the part) of Ezio. Your job is to fully synchronize all of the memories in each of the 9 sequences.  I’ll be honest, I didn’t count how many memories there are, but I would roughly ballpark each sequence as having 8-10 memories.  So 80, total?  More or less?  Something like that.  Therefore if you have a bigger break, or just plain can’t sleep, try synchronizing all of the memories.  If you’re studying for an exam, there are a lot more, less time consuming things to do.

I’m just going to shoot through all of this in order to try and get this out there for you to take in, otherwise I could write a novel.

Your best friend is Leonardo Da Vinci, he was captured and forced to design/invent war machines for a treasonous guy wanting to become king (who also sleeps with his own sister).  Because of all of this, there are side missions that let you seek out and destroy those war machines AND the blueprints.  You can also find secret meeting places to meet Da Vinci so that he can make you better weapons, armor, etc.  All the while, you have to fight off guards, you can pickpocket the citizens walking around, you can watch the street performers (who are actually pretty good!).  Of course this is while you are rescuing other citizens who are being attacked, you recruit them into the brotherhood, and visit your pigeon coops often in order to send said citizens out on missions to progress them through 10 levels of skill sets in order to make them full-fledged assassins.  Whew… not done yet.  Pickpocketing only gets you so far, so if you save up enough money, you can buy different shops.  There are blacksmiths, art merchants, banks, landmarks, doctors, stables etc.  The more property you buy, the more income you get every 20 minutes.  You can then buy a crap load of items from each shop, and one of those items is treasure maps.  Then you go around and look for treasures, and collect different items.  If you find the right combination of items, you can take them BACK to the shops and go on “quests” which unlock EVEN MORE items.

Some of these things take 5 minutes, 20 minutes, 45 minutes, up to about 2.5 hours.  So no matter what in the world you are doing staying up all night, or how long of a break you are willing to take, this is the game for it.

It is so easy to get lost in it, I promise you, you could pull an all-nighter solely dedicated to playing this game.  On second thought, this might be the worst game to play for this situation.  It doesn’t put you to sleep, so it doesn’t help insomnia.  It’s addicting, so you won’t get any studying done.  Unless you have 2 televisions in the same room, you’re going to miss whatever show you were planning on watching.

Yeah, maybe this is the worst game to play for an all nighter.

See you around 4am.

The Jester.

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