Altair can be very.. Persuasive..

Assassin’s Creed II seems to be doing well after a week of its release.

If there was any doubt about the fervour surrounding Ubisoft’s recently release Assassin’s Creed II, then fears can be put to rest as the company is estimating first week worldwide sales of around 1.6 million copies. Edge notes that AC2 is now right behind Modern Warfare 2 in the UK format charts.

In doing so the Xbox 360 and PS3 title outpaced opening week sales of 2007’s Assassin’s Creed by 32 per cent. The original game has sold over eight million units.

“Assassin’s Creed remains the fastest selling new videogame intellectual property ever in the US,” said Ubisoft.

AC2 launched on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on November 17th, and the PC version is expected to release early in 2010.

Those numbers are quite nice if you consider that it was right after Modern Warfare 2 was released. Some game companies decided to push back their release dates from the end of this year just because of Modern Warfare 2. Looks like Assassin’s Creed 2 didn’t need to worry about that!

Games.. One of the main reasons to skip out of work!

Well this doesn’t come to me as a huge surprise!

GameSpy writes:

Just in case we were in any doubt, Modern Warfare 2 has been a global success. So much so that The Times ran a news story about a British judge who decided to “pull a sicky” and not show up for a trial the day after the game enjoyed its UK midnight launch. The man in question feigned illness due to being tired from staying up all night playing his newly acquired copy of Modern Warfare 2.

Will was in the queue almost an hour early and feeling, he said later, “like Charlie waiting outside the chocolate factory”. As soon as the shrink-wrapped package was in his hand he ran home and sat up long into the night machine-gunning his alarmingly life-like enemies.

The following day, tired but happy, he feigned sickness to get out of his commitments despite the chaos that would inevitably follow. After all, if the judge doesn’t show up, it’s rather tricky to get a trial to run smoothly.

I really wonder how many actually skipped out of work and school to play Modern Warfare 2? I actually got sick (and no, it wasn’t swine flu) during the week that Modern Warfare 2 was released but unfortunately not enough to skip out of my studies and work.

By the way, I really like the fact that The Times wrote this: “sat up long into the night machine-gunning his alarmingly life-like enemies.” They just had to pull off the old “games are evil” card into this article!