Move over, Portal. Take a graceful bow, Team Fortress II. Pout bitterly and begin a plot to break your competitor's kneecaps, Psychonauts. There's a new gaming funnyman in town, and his name is Assassin's Creed II. And he isn't even trying to be funny. Erik Wolpaw, eat your heart out. 

After taking the game home last night and deciding to unwind after a hard session of zombie killing (more on that later today, maybe) with a bit of the ol' face stabbery, I was immediately struck by how dumbly-written, dumbly-performed, and just generally dumb the script was. Of course, I was just coming off three hours of Left 4 Dead 2, whose writing is concise, witty and never obtrusive, so the experience was coloured for me -- perhaps unfairly.

Now, I've been led to believe that the game does indeed manage to cultivate a genuine sense of intrigue as the story presses forward, but I'm not very far in, so all I've seen is a hokey intro, some oh-so-stiff plotting and a whole mess of affected Italian accents. And for a game that proudly opens with a disclaimer saying that it was created by a variety of people of "diverse ethnic backgrounds," I think pointing out that everyone speaks as though they're in an endlessly-looping East Side Mario's commercial is fair comment.

But that isn't even the hilariously stupid part that inspired this post. It contributes to it, but to be fair, American films have been doing this kind of thing for decades with nary a raised eyebrow. I think Inglourious Basterds done raised the bar on this particular brand of hookenany, but the ol' vaguely-ethnic accent as a stand-in for another language remains a proud convention of American film making and, apparently, Canadian videogames. (Tangent: Have you ever noticed how, in most foreign films where an English speaker is called for they tend to cast someone who can actually speak English? They often don't speak it very well, but I'm just saying: I always appreciate the effort.)

And, to be even fairer (I am being so fucking fair right now), the first Assassin's Creed had both these problems as well, so maybe I shouldn't have been expecting an improvement. But the fact that the game is improved so vastly in every other respect is enough to make me wonder why the same attention wasn't paid to the writing, acting and, while I'm at it, facial animations.

But none of this is why I started this post. No, Internet, I started this post because I wanted to share one of Assassin's Creed II's worst moments with you. It is a moment so bad that I hesitate to even transcribe it, for fear of it losing some of its impact if you ever play the game. It is a moment so bad that I laughed harder at it than I did at any of Portal's various funny moments.

It's a moment that takes place very early in the game, when I'm escorting my mother through Renaissance era Firenze to meet with her pal, Leonardo Da Vinci (yes, really).

"I just would-a like you to find another outlet-a for your energies, Enzio," she says to me.

"I have-a many outlets, madre," I reply.

Long, awkward pause where my mother's creepy plastic eyebrow seems to arc upward, but perhaps is just the result of her low polygon face bending subtly when she shifts her weight.

"I-a mean besides-a vaginas!"  

But wait, it gets better. Not only does my mother spout an anachronistic, vaguely sexist one-liner in an Italian accent so bad that an Italian baby probably started inexplicably crying somewhere in the real Florence, but afterward she pauses. She fucking pauses with that ridiculous eyebrow still stretched into a soft-focus parabola over one eye, and though the Dead Thing on the screen remains as impassive as ever, it's obvious that the actress, the animator and the writer are all mugging for laughs. It was enough to make me burst out laughing, then immediately start hammering buttons on the controller, seeing if I could rewind it. I couldn't, of course, but if any of you reading have recording capabilities (and the game, importantly) upload a clip to Youtube and drop me a line at francikyle@gmail.com, and I'll post it here.

I've been working on a "Decade in Gaming" article for one of the December issues (can't remember which), and in my research I've been coming across a lot of evidence of the form's continuing maturation. It's probably good that I'm reminded, occasionally, that for all the gains the media has made of late, it is still, in more ways than one, infantile.