Article 7 of the gamer bill of rights: the player is allowed to skip the end credits after 60 seconds. Not so in Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed III, the recent AAA title. The end credits clock in at 18 minutes and 15 seconds, can’t be skipped, and the game doesn’t save until they’re over. Those credits are bookended by 6:35 of cutscene before and 1:45 of cutscene after, for a total of twenty-seven and a half minutes of non-interactive crap at the end of the game.

Here, watch for yourself. No spoilers starting at 19:29 unless you didn’t want to know who the poor bastard was who spent weeks testing the accuracy of the Finnish localization or that Kathleen Parent is the “Human Ressource Director (Interim)” (sic) of Ubisoft Québec.

Credit creep is growing in movies too, but at least you can walk out at the end of the film. What’s particularly offensive is if you quit out of the unskippable credits it doesn’t save, so you can’t keep playing in the after-game until you have half an hour to leave the console running. Awesome.

The game itself is only OK. It shows signs of being rushed to release; the second half of the story makes no sense for all the things cut, there’s lots of animation glitches, etc. I love the core Assassin’s Creed game mechanics but AC3 frankly has too many different things in it, none polished to be really fun. And that final cutscene is pretty lame, they failed to deliver on the grand story they set up back in 2007 with the first game. The best part of the game is the multiplayer, an entirely different game, and a subtle alternative to the Battlefield / Call of Doodie / Halo shooter franchises.