Design Exploration - Assassin's Creed

The Assassin’s Creed websites are two of the more well designed sites that utilize flash in a creative way.
First is the US Assassin’s Creed 2 site - http://assassinscreed.us.ubi.com/assassins-creed-2/#/home/

Being an M-rated game, before you enter the site, it asks how old you are. Upon entry to the site, you are greeted with a view that is reminiscent of the game and four choices, leading to gameplay videos, character bios, where to buy it, and the fourth one that I found the most interesting, and also the most interactive. If one doesn’t care for the aesthetics and wants to get straight to the point, there is a menu button that will give you links to nearly everything on the site.

The fourth option on the homepage is titled motivations, and while unclear at first, upon entering you can infer that it is about the main character, Ezio Auditore da Firenze. While not really spoiling much of the story, it plays somewhat like a point and click game, you click the various symbols and it either plays a clip, or takes you to another location with different clips, all showing bits and pieces of the game and giving a feel of its atmosphere.

The second website - http://assassinscreed.us.ubi.com/abstergoindustries/#/weapons

This site was also used to advertise their newest game, which is Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. Like the last one, this site also welcomes you by asking how old you are. This site, while heavily using flash, is fairly simple in design, consisting of a revolving wheel of weapons that disappear into the foreground. Before the game was released, they would periodically update this page with more weapons, revealing more info in order to generate hype. If clicked on, each of the weapons give out information of their uses, most are darkly humorous. There is one of the icons that is not a weapon, but a wall of seemingly random symbols that act as a puzzle. Looking at a weapon also flashes one of these symbols, hinting at which symbols you have to click.

What I appreciated the most about these sites, is that despite knowing that the site was created solely for the purpose of selling more copies of their product, it still keeps the viewer immersed within the world of Assassin's creed, whether it is the historical backdrop or the flickering screen that gives an artificial feeling, as if all is not as it seems.