We’ve been on a bit of a zombie binge lately at completionist.com, so to break the undead chain, we decided to pick a game that has been languishing in the queue since the launching of this site:  Assassin’s Creed.

I won’t get into AC too much, because I think Chris is going to write a review, but when we started playing, I was immediately reminded of Tenchu, a series that I used to be a huge fan of, but then kind of forgot about for 8 years.  I played the first game, Tenchu: Steal Assassins, almost to death, and I also logged quite a few hours on the sequel Tenchu 2: Birth of the Stealth Assassins.  After that it gets hazy, as I remember hearing about a Tenchu 3 game for PS2, and vaguely wanting to buy it, but as far as I know, I never did play it. Wikipedia has kindly informed me that various developers have been putting out Tenchu games every few years since then, and I just wasn’t aware of them.  I missed 2 PS2 releases, one for PSP, one for DS, an Xbox Arcade download, and a 360 game.  WTF, advertisers, if you can’t make me buy a game from a series that I love, something is wrong with you.  While I’m assuming at least half of those games were total crap, I’m sure that I missed out on some legitimately fun ninja action in there somewhere.

For those not familiar, Tenchu is a stealth assassination game, complete with roof-jumping, poisoned rice packets, ninja stars, all the good stuff.  The second game wasn’t as good as the first one, but I’d like to hope the series got better after that.  If only they hadn’t made the game releases as stealthy as the game ninjas, maybe I’d have a more informed opinion.

In any case, someone in marketing finally got their act together, because I’ve seen ads creeping up online and elsewhere for the latest installment, Tenchu: Shadow Assassins, which comes out in February.

When I heard that a new Tenchu game was close to launch, I was pretty psyched, until I heard it was for Wii, which dropped my excitement level down a few pegs.  Don’t get me wrong, I am a card-carrying member of the Nintendo fan club, but there are certain games that I want to be able to play without waving my arms around like a fool.  I am guaranteed to not look as cool as a super-stealth ninja while wiggling my hand around to execute a silent decapitation. Also, I was pretty disheartened to learn that they hadn’t resurrected an old favourite of mine, but merely bothered to inform me this time that a new game was coming out, unlike the last 6 times they released something.  I hate to play new games unless I’ve already played the whole series.

Despite my misgivings, I’ve decided that I’m going to pick this one up, and I’ll write a review to let you know how it goes.  At the rate we’re clearing up the queue, you can expect that in 2012 sometime, at about the same point that I learn they’ve stealthily released 3 more Tenchu games without my noticing.

I’ve never played a Tenchu game, so I will instead share with you the amusing conversation we just had:

Chris: “You are not a card-carrying member of the Nintendo Fan Club.”

Julie: “I don’t think that’s a real thing.”

Chris: “Yeah, it is.  They just launched it in North America.”

Julie: “What?!”

Chris: “Yup.” (I spoke in HTML)

Julie: “Oh, I’m totally joining that.”