Xbox Living

I just finished up Assassin’s Creed this weekend. It’s a pretty fun game, although tedious at times. But one thing that always gets me shamefully excited when I wrap up a game is the rush of Gamerscore that usually comes with that last Achievement or two.

I’m not one to spend hours trying to get a single Achievement unless the gameplay required is lots of fun. I’ll never boost an achievement and I don’t care if most games on my record have less than 1000G earned. But I do have fun picking them up, and sometimes I will go out of my way to get them. They’re a great part of the Xbox 360 experience.

So I was a bit disappointed when I realized I’d missed one of the achievements you can earn by completing the game. The ‘Conversationalist’ achievement is earned by entering into a dialogue with the Lucy character at every opportunity. I missed one near the beginning of the game. Oh well.

To save you the trouble if you haven’t been through the game yet, here are a few quick achievement tips to keep in mind when playing Assassin’s Creed:

• Talk to Lucy repeatedly: Lucy is the technician who operates the Animus. Between each memory segment you can talk to her by approaching and pressing a button when prompted. This usually happens immediately after each memory is completed, and before you go to your bedroom. Talk to her repeatedly to get all of the dialogue, until she starts repeating things like “can’t talk” and “aren’t you tired?” If you get them all, you get the 20G Conversationalist achievement.
• Activate all Memory Glitches: Memory glitches can be accessed whenever you see the screen flicker white and the DNA codes appear over top of the screen. They happen in many of the cutscenes throughout the game. You activate them by pressing any button on the controller — you can tell they’ve activated because the perspective will change and you can see a closer view of the scene. They usually occur during the scenes immediately before fighting a target (when they’re giving a speech, for example) and during the scene immediately after each assassination (occurring each time the target speaks to you). There are multiple glitches in each scene.You need to access 85% of all the glitches in the game to earn the 20G Hungerer of Knowledge achievement.
• Flag locations are available online: Normally I’m not a huge fan of using guides, but the flags can drive you crazy if you’re missing one or two. I’m not sure if I’m going to go back and complete them all, but if you choose to, the best maps are available at AssassinsCreed-Maps.com. This site has nice, big, easy-to-read maps that show all hidden flag and Templar locations. Try and get them all on your own, but before you pull your hair out, swing over here to track down the last few. The Flag and Templar achievements can be earned after you beat the game.The eight “Keeper of” acheivements are earned by collecting flags, and are worth 105 Gamerscore in total. The Personal Vendetta (kill every Templar) achievement is worth 40G.
• Save Every Citizen: There are a number of citizens calling for aid in each district of each city. Save them all and get the three “Defender of the People” achievements, worth 20G each. The description of these achievements says you need to complete every “free mission” in the city — this only refers to saving citizens. You only need to complete 3/6 investigations per district to advance to the assassination point, and you won’t miss this or any other achievement by not completing them all.

Most of the other achievements are self-explanatory, and the secret ones all come to you during the normal course of the missions. Hopefully these tips will keep you from missing anything!