Assassin’s Creed: Pirates Free Online

Assassin’s Creed: Pirates | Screenshot by Alison Young

Ubisoft and Microsoft have teamed up to offer you a free online version of Assassin’s Creed: Pirates. If you’re an Assassin’s Creed fan, you may recall the initial version of Pirates was released last December and was designed for your mobile device. This iteration is stripped down and doesn’t involve any of the shooting you would typically see in an Assassin’s Creed title.

As the first-ever Assassin’s Creed title on the Web, you step into the shoes of Alonzo Batilla, a young captain racing your ship through Caribbean seas, evading mines and other obstacles while you search for treasure. Really, it’s more of a demo as opposed to a full game. It gives you a glimpse of what is possible for 3-D gaming on your Web browser (especially touch-screen devices).

You can play this on just about any browser – Internet Explorer (IE), Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera – with support for touch and mouse/keyboard input. Pirates uses the Babylon.JS technology that was created by a team of Microsoft developers, which is an open source 3-D engine based on JavaScript,

WebGL and TypeScript. It is designed to assist Web developers in easily adding several effects and 3-D scenes to games.

WebGL is what makes Pirates’ great graphics possible. It provides a 3-D rendering surface that runs in your browser, and adding Babylon.JS to it all makes it almost seamless. Further, while the game will run in just about any modern browser, it’s recommended to use IE 11 to receive the best integral gaming experience. In IE 11, the game also will detect your Windows device/input type and adapts itself accordingly to best fit your screen’s resolution.

While most Web games require a fixed screen resolution, the new technology allows you to play Assassin’s Creed on any screen resolution or device. Start enjoying it for free here (no login required): https://race.assassinscreedpirates.com.

Feeling antisocial? The Split app helps people avoid people | Photo courtesy Split Tech

Click Chick’s Mobile App of the Week: Split

All of us have our antisocial moments, especially in our sometimes overly connected world. Split, a company dedicated to helping people avoid awkward encounters, recently announced its app to help you avoid people (for whatever reason – an ex, old boss, etc.). This is possibly part of the next social craze: being antisocial.

Split gathers your existing contact and social information from your social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Insta-gram and Foursquare – then you select people to avoid. You can do a scan of your immediate area to make sure none of your unwanted folks are around. Some intuitive features for your antisocial experience include the ability see Who With (see who is hanging out with your avoidees); Who’s There (scans distant locations and your favorite hangouts); Danger Zones (prevents you from going where your avoidees frequent); Escape Route (shows you map routes to avoid encounters); Event

Alerts (tells you if an avoidee is planning to attend an event you’ll be going to), and Off the Grid (allows Split users to avoid being detected for up to an hour).

This is an interesting app idea, but I’m not sure if it really works. Just to test it out, I selected two names of friends who were sitting right next to me, and the app didn’t even detect them. But I’m guessing it might have been because, at the time, they had not posted anything on their social networks for awhile. In any case, it’s free and fun to play with for your iOS or Android device.

clickchick@outlook.com