Assassin's Creed DS details

Clever Internet men have hunted down box artwork for the upcoming Nintendo DS version of Assassin's Creed, subtitled Altair's Chronicles, and an examination of the wordses and pictures sheds some light on how it will all work.

Apparently it tells the story of what happens to Altair prior to the events in the console Xbox 360 and PS3 versions already on the market, but the shots and feature details also suggest that it will be trying to deliver something to fit the other game's sense of scale.

For a start, it's all done up in a 3D rendered world, with fancy-looking graphics that allow Altair to perform the sorts of acrobatic moves he does on the big-boy consoles, including sword-fighting, stealth assassinations and combo attacks, with plenty of weapons at his disposal.

The game will also draw on the stylus for use in interrogating informers and pickpocketing, although specific mechanisms are left somewhat to the imagination by the screenshot to which the caption declaring as much is appended.

These are of course things Altair got up to on the consoles, where he had to track down nine evildoers in the cities of Jerusalem, Acre and Damascus as his mentor Al Mualim pranced around his castle at Masyaf throwing pigeons out the window.

It was a largely enjoyable game that we felt was badly let down by lots of repetition and a pretty silly storyline, but it's worth pointing out that we still felt compelled to go back and play it again. (In fact, second time round I did absolutely all of the side missions - it wasn't worth it.) Check in with our 360/PS3 review if you somehow missed all the fuss.

Ubisoft reps weren't around to tell us when exactly Assassin's Creed: Altair's Chronicles will be released, but nothing is true and everything is permitted so as soon as we hear back we'll let you know.