October 11, 2007 - The madman Majd Addin is dead, but his murder has been a clumsy affair. What was supposed to be a lightning-fast kill has turned into a pitched battle in the streets of Jerusalem, and now every guard in the city is hunting for an Assassin.

Clearly, the balance of things has been upset, and the game world of Assassin's Creed, Ubisoft's highly anticipated action title, reflects the chaos. Warning bells are clanging all over town and guards are spreading out to track down the white-cloaked intruder who so brazenly jumped from a wall to strike down Addin, one of Jerusalem's most powerful men.

A more experienced Assassin probably would have been more cautious, but we were in a hurry and had a taste for blood.

We've come to Ubisoft's Montreal studio to spend some serious time playing Assassin's Creed, and the game's cruel developers have dropped us into the exact middle of the game, sans tutorial, for a go at the enigmatically-named Memory Block 4 section of the story. And no, that's not a reference to a game system's storage architecture. The game unfolds over a series of these blocks, which begin empty and are gradually filled in as Altair (pronounced ALL-TAY-EAR) completes objectives. Those include assassinating targets and reaching the game's many vertiginous View Points, scalable towers and spires spread throughout the kingdom.

The Memory Block we played had three targets, two of which we eliminated in the time we were allowed to play. The rest of the time we spent spying, roughing people up, climbing on cathedrals, killing innocent civilians (yes, you can do it, but not without penalty), antagonizing the smug Knights Templar and generally terrorizing the population of the Holy Land atop our rearing steed. We also collected flags - a lot of flags. They're spread out over every district of every city, and gathering them quickly became a sub-mission obsession.

If you were expecting, like we were, that Ubi's most recent round of Assassin's Creed previews would officially clear up the mystery surrounding the game's sci-fi backstory, prepare to be disappointed. The development team is still tight-lipped about what the game is actually about. We did, however, uncover some tantalizing clues in the few hours we played the game, but we'll unabashedly speculate about that a bit later.