So my laptop, purchased in January 2006, has taken another turn for the scrap heap. Until such time as I can replace the hard drive and some form of optic drive (internal or external, though internal would be preferred), or I can afford to replace it outright, I won't be playing any PC based games. That being said, I have recently acquired Venetica and Assassin's Creed IV. Venetica was not very well made, but is still worth one play through (so far). My wife got it for me for my birthday, and gave it to me about 2.5 weeks early (the night it arrived). AC4 showed up about a week later, and Venetica got set aside. So far I am loving AC4. Nearly the entire map is open. You can go from running around on foot to jumping in the sea, swimming out to your ship, taking the wheel and sailing to the next destination without waiting for a loading screen. I think in my explorations so far there are only ~4 cities where you can't get directly from the sea to the city without game mechanics and loading in the way. Another neat feature in this one is their mini game management. Since Brotherhood (third AC title released) there has been some sort of mini game. Brotherhood and Revelations had you training your recruits, 3 and 4 have you trading as a way to earn additional gold. The switch in 4 is that you can manage your trade empire off console. I use my iPad because my compy is out of commission, and earn ~20k Reales overnight. I have a problem putting the controller down with this game. I got it the day it was released (never done that before), and ended up staying up until 1:30 the next morning. I had to work at 9:30 the next morning, and would have stayed up much later had my wife not noticed the time, so, yeah.