Blarg. I already look at the cost of Xbox Live as a bill, just like my utilities or phone bill. And now I’m hearing one analyst state that he anticipates it to increase? What next? Interest rate hike?

Maybe I’m throwing it out of proportion. But a price hike is in the cards, he says. In the most current episode of Game Trailers’ Bonus Round, Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter stated that “we all know” that the price of Live is going to increase to help MS drive profits.

“You really want to hook every gamer who has a 360, you want them to buy all their games on 360, play everything multiplayer, pay you 50 bucks a year so that, in a couple years, it’s a 100 bucks a year,” Pachter said on the show.

“And that’s going up, we all know that … it’s a profit deal.”

Well, sh*t. I didn’t know that. Did you guys know that?

[via CVG]

Via Destructoid

In advance of Assassin’s Creed II’s release, Ubisoft plans to roll out a three-part short film series, called collectively Assassin’s Creed: Lineage, that explores a bit of the game’s background. The first of those films is now available above this text stuff. It’s a live action thing, created by Hybride Technologies, the studio behind the visual effects of the motion picture 300. Full of quick cuts, concise dialogue, more swift cuts, and even a dash of gore, it’s quite the one-minute spectacle. Not exactly on par with the ODST stuff we saw, but it’s close.

And here’s some confirmation: Ezio is a chip off the old block. This film, and the two subsequent ones, will revolve around Ezio’s daddy, Giovanni Auditore da Firenze. He’s an assassin like his son whom the second game actually stars. As such, daddy Ezio has a knack for killing people in explosive ways — violent and terrible, throat-slashing kind of ways made even cooler by the 300-style visual effects, we should note.

Via Destructoid