@Rocker6 That's true if you care about the modern part of the story, but many AC players seem to care very little about Desmond and the end of the world business. If AC ended, I think it would probably just result in at least another series aping the idea of a historical open-world game with an athletic protagonist because it's certainly a popular one (and of course AC wasn't the first: PoP Sands Of Time, Tenchu, etc).

I agree with your disappointment with Revelations, but I disagree that the hookblade was good or that the series needs more technology of that nature. The hookblade is part of the problem because, as a mechanical device, it removed the illusion of danger you used to feel from just about grabbing a ledge with your fingertips (even though you were never going to fall, of course). If there must be tech, I'd rather they brought in non-violent items, such as a telescope for planning out a route to your target. I want it to be almost impossible to defeat a group of four guards - make me afraid of them, force stealth play. All the "play it your way" talk at E3 was dishonest, since they virtually wiped out the suspenseful stealth aspects of previous titles instead of developing it and working on enemy AI.

Tidal_Abyss - absolutely correct. My machine is nowhere near as good as the average machine you could buy off the shelf today (3.0ghz Intel quad, 8GB RAM [recently upgraded from 4GB], GTX280) but I can run most games on high-to-very-high settings most of the time. Those beast set-ups you mention would be lovely, but as you say people with lower budgets shouldn't worry. Those machines are mostly about future-proofing and getting the best out of the very few games which exploit that hardware, but of course many games don't even use the 3rd or 4th CPU core (let alone the 6th, 8th or whatever) and gigantic RAM counts are only really useful if you do something else with your PC too (such as video rendering or multi-layered Photoshop work at massive resolutions.