14 DAY TRIAL // About a month ago, out the door of the Entertainment Software Rating Board came word about a DS release for the stealth-action game Assassin's Creed II. Yesterday, the game got the official green light from Ubisoft, along with a launch date of November 17. The game, entitled Assassin's Creed II: Discovery, will be available on the DS and DSi and will share its launch date with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions, but also with the PSP edition of the same franchise, Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines.
Discovery, unlike the PC and console versions of the game, will not put gamers in the sneaky boots of Altair. The DS release tells an alternate story of the universe, following Ezio on his trip to Spain, to the Iberian Peninsula to rescue a fraternal brother from the hands of the Spanish Inquisition. As Gameloft's DS version of Assassin's Creed didn't really make an impact on the market, Assassin's Creed II: Discovery is developed by Griptonite Games, a Foundation 9 studio.
In other Assassin's Creed II related news, Ubisoft's Twitter informs us that the PC version of Assassin's Creed II won't be coming out this year. The PC edition of the game, unlike the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 ones, doesn't have a release date yet and is simply marked as to be launched somewhere in the first quarter of 2010. This is supposedly made to accommodate the fine tuning that will allow “a bit more time for the dev team to deliver the best quality game to you.”
Ubisoft should have learned better from previous experiences with Assassin's Creed regarding delaying the game when it is in its final stages of development. The first Assassin's Creed was leaked a whole month and a half before the official release. An employee at the company charged with reproducing the game's disc provided over 700,000 gamers with a way to download the game. In the law suit filled by Ubisoft, they claimed that this pirated version of the game cost the publisher millions of dollars.