Spider-man 3 Review

Based on Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Columbia Pictures’ upcoming feature film, Spider-Man 3 allows players to experience the actions of heroic red-suited Spider-Man and, for the first time ever, his darker, more mysterious black-suited persona. Set in a larger, dynamic, free-roaming New York City, the game gives players the freedom to choose their own gameplay experience through multiple movie-based and original storylines, fully integrated city missions and performance rewards including improved speed, combat maneuvers and agility. In Spider-Man 3, players draw upon Spider-Man’s completely revamped combat abilities as they protect the city and defeat nemeses using expanded aerial fighting, finishing moves and dynamic webbing during missions and epic boss battles.

Features

* Welcome to the dark side – Fans control the legendary black-suit, which magnifies Spider-Man's strength, agility and durability. The game features its own Black-Suited Spider-Man gameplay mechanics which allow players to switch between the two suits at will. The black-suit makes Spider-Man more powerful and aggressive, but there is a price to pay by wearing it for too long which affects the game’s City Satisfaction Index and the overall look and feel of the city Spider-Man has sworn to protect.

* Conquest mode – In this PSP exclusive feature, players are challenged with completing missions and fighting crime before morning breaks. If good enough, a player will be rewarded handsomely with Hero Points, which allow them to upgrade and customize their Spider-Man skills.

* Let freedom ring – For the first time ever, players can experience a fully realized, free-roaming New York City on the PSP. Players decide how to proceed through the game and set their own goals. Should Spider-Man follow a plot twist, switch to an alternate storyline, fight off crime waves that threaten the city or explore vast towering skyscrapers and subterranean sewers and subways?

* Spider-Man is growing up – Gamers can customize Spider-Man the way they want. Fighting crime and earning Hero Points will allow gamers to upgrade and customize Spider-Man’s web moves, swing skills, and amazing melee combos.

* Don’t let the city go to the dogs – Four vicious gangs have laid claim to the boroughs of New York and must be taken down. As Spider-Man brings these criminals to justice, the City Satisfaction Index will increase in that section of town and city life will return to normal. If he doesn’t, the streets will turn to chaos. These super thugs won’t go down without a fight though. Their advanced AI will surround Spider-Man, grapple him, call in reinforcements, and do everything they can to retake their territory.

* Super Villains galore – Fans experience multi-stage, dynamic boss battles against movie villains, such as Venom, Sandman and New Goblin, as well as a host of legendary comic book foes who all take advantage of their environments, their minions, and the large-scale destruction that their superpowers cause in trying to defeat Spider-Man.

* Features two bonus villains in the PSP version: Morbius and Shriek.

Crysis Warhead - a fantastic stand-alone expansion to a superb shooter, and should be played by anyone who likes games with guns

All of the claims you may have heard that Crysis could only run on nuclear-powered supermachines were greatly exaggerated. But if for some reason you worry that this stand-alone companion to the ultragorgeous first-person shooter will bring your PC to its knees, you should know that it's highly scalable and ran smoothly on a number of machines during our testing. It also looks better, with clear attention given to the game's artistic sensibilities and the lusher, denser environments. But rest assured, developer Crytek has enhanced more than just the graphics engine. Vehicles are more fun to drive, firefights are more intense and focused, and aliens do more than just float around you. More emphasis on the open-ended environments would have been welcome, but a more exciting (though shorter) campaign, a new multiplayer mode, and a whole bunch of new maps make Crysis Warhead an excellent expansion to one of last year's best shooters.

If you didn't play Crysis, Warhead's story may be initially confusing, given that you hit the ground running with little exposition. You play as Sergeant "Psycho" Sykes, the brash Brit who was a bit player in the original game. Psycho tends to play by his own rules, always willing to ignore orders and jump into the fray if that's what the situation requires. The story runs parallel to the events of Crysis, though his strident attitude--and a dramatic cutscene near the end of the game--definitely make this Psycho's tale, even if the actual plot remains the same. In any case, you and your US Special Forces team are investigating a tropical island besieged by North Korean invaders. However, your greatest menace comes in the form of aggressive aliens that turn the luxuriant jungles and glowing beaches into a frozen wasteland. You and your teammates, clad in nanosuits that grant you special abilities such as super strength, temporary cloaking, super speed, and additional armor, confront both threats across a variety of large environments.

Psycho's brazen confidence does more than just establish a gutsy protagonist: It sets the stage for a more focused and intense series of battles that keep the pace moving more smoothly than before. Warhead still offers some of the same kind of sandbox levels, but thoughtful enemy placement and map bottlenecks keep downtime to a minimum. You can approach assaults on beachfronts and Korean encampments in a number of ways, so if you're a stealth enthusiast, you can employ your suit's cloak setting and sneak in, or attach a silencer to your sniper rifle and take out your human foes from a distance. If you would rather employ hit-and-run tactics, you can jump into the heat of battle, cause a ruckus, and use your suit's speed function to zoom away. However, Warhead is clearly focused on the guns-blazing approach, gently nudging you into full-on encounters with its mission objectives, character dialogue, and level design. When you reach primary and secondary destinations, you'll get besieged by large numbers of enemies, both human and (later on) alien. Given that human foes also don nanosuits, they're not necessarily quick to fall; as a result, these sequences are exciting and challenging, and you'll need to use your suit abilities and cover opportunities to your advantage. The easily triggered explosions of enemy vehicles and hazardous barrels further intensify these pockets of activity.

A number of set-piece battles confirm this slight shift toward action-packed mayhem. Your first encounter with a hulking alien war machine may not have the same impact as a similar one in Crysis, but it happens earlier than you'd expect, and it establishes the alien presence with adrenaline-fueled drama. That battle is a wonder, as is a later defensive mission that has you fending off a series of aliens, and requires you to shift focus frequently and use every weapon in your inventory. Another great sequence is a train level that, at first, seems much like similar sequences in a number of other shooters. You can stay on the train and use turrets to gun down the opposition, as expected--but you can also jump off and engage the opposition at any time, giving even this near-cliche sequence plenty of replay value. A linear journey through an underground mine is the obvious misstep in regard to level design, given that it never so much as hints at the open-ended action that makes Warhead a superb shooter.

more.........

Shattered Suns- Shattered Suns wastes its promise with terrible presentation values and poor implementation of its 3D combat system

Fully 3D real-time strategy games set in space are a rare breed. Adding the third dimension seems to scare off both developers and gamers, so many games simply ignore the oft-confusing vertical plane and stick to 2D stellar battlefields. Shattered Suns is a good example of why so many people shy away. The Clear Crown Studios game is certainly adventurous enough, due to the ostensibly more realistic depiction of outer space, the mix of RTS and 4X space sim traits, and a few innovative touches when it comes to custom ship design; but the production values are bottom-drawer, and your galactic adventures are highlighted by boring resource management and simplistic combat that doesn't really utilize those three dimensions. These issues, along with some serious problems with the in-game camera, all but ruin the reasonably original game design.

Originality doesn't extend to the plot, however. In the single-player campaign, you play Captain Max, a former starship commander in the Statian military who's drafted back into active duty during an invasion by the evil Qalan and Trexon Empires. So the story deals with the standard one-man-against-the-alien-hordes shtick, albeit with the rather interesting addition of a love story. At the same time as Max is trying to save Statia, he's also searching star systems for his missing fiancee, a fellow officer with the much more exotic name of Seeng-Si. A fair bit of the game is spent with the hero dithering over his duty and chucking it all to search for his woman, which gives the game a bit of teen-love cheese, as nobody over 17 actually thinks like Captain Max.

Still, much of this tale is fairly well told, regardless of the lapses into 90210 melodrama. The one huge flaw is that every plot point is described through text, as though you're playing the game via instant messenger. As the budget apparently didn't allow for any cutscene production, a single screen filled with a drab starfield map and a huge block of tiny, hard-to-read green-on-black text conveys all of the story and dialogue. Even some full missions take place here and are resolved entirely through answering questions. Many of the lines are well written, although apparently the designers realized this and allowed the writer free rein to ramble on to absurd lengths. Scenes meander for many, many minutes, and you're stuck waiting for every single line to slowly pop up onscreen because you can't skip ahead. All of this dialogue goes beyond sci-fi boilerplate to help develop realistic characters with depth and personality (like your snarky computer assistant, Citron), although it's hard to appreciate any of it when you're screaming "Get on with it!" at your monitor. More appeal is lost due to the text scaling in lower-resolution displays. Letters are shrunk to what looks like an 8-point height and scrunched so tightly together that you soon squint your way into serious eyestrain or a king-size headache. Keep eyedrops and ibuprofen on hand.

Shattered Suns isn't particularly easy on the eyes during missions, either. Ship design is generic, textures are plain, and the lighting and shadow effects are so primitive that there is no depth to any of the models. Star systems are just as rough and ready, with basic planet types like Earth look-alikes and lava worlds. The background is really odd looking, too, due to the inclusion of so much green nebulae gas that it overwhelms what should be a very black outer space. At times, this backdrop is so green and lush that it seems more like you're waging war in front of an English country garden than the inky darkness of space. Ship movements and explosions are nothing short of embarrassing. Vessels avoid colliding with planets by simply jerking to one side or the other, and the usual pyrotechnics of ships going ka-boom have been replaced with wimpy puffs of smoke and chunks of debris flying in all directions. And despite the game's low-rent appearance, loading times can be onerous. Initially loading the game up takes so long that you can not only safely duck out of the room to make a sandwich, you just might have time to bake the bread, too.

Of course, really ugly games sometime boast some really stellar gameplay. But that isn't the case here, as Shattered Suns is just as unappealing within as it is without. The game sort of blends typical RTS gaming with 4X space sims, with campaign missions that are split among building fleets for combat, focusing on space-station base building, and fulfilling economic duties such as setting up a trade route or gathering resources. You generally accept an order at the beginning of the assignment to do something like juggle the game's three resources of crystals, ore, and credits in an effort to repair ships, set up a mining operation on a moon, or simply crank out ships and blast into a system to annihilate the enemy. Everything is pretty straightforward. Most resource management can be done with a couple of clicks. To mine a planet for ore, for example, all you need to do is load up a ship with miners and send it on its way. Combat is equally simplistic, with the only complication provided by the ability to rig up different ship production lines on space stations to crank out vessels for different purposes. So you can build one line of ships with huge storage capacity to serve as cargo carries, another line with serious weaponry and armor for front-line combat, and so on.

more...........

Murder in the Abbey - Murder in the Abbey may not be entirely original, but it's an adventure with a lot of personality

The odd combination of monks and murder has been a staple of whodunit fiction for decades, so the biggest mystery here is why somebody didn't come up with an adventure game like Murder in the Abbey (known in Europe as simply The Abbey) before now. Developer Crimson Cow delivers a solid take on the murderous monastery minigenre, too, thanks to a smart story and impressively painted scenery populated by cartoonish characters reminiscent of graphic novels. Unimaginative puzzles and some overwritten dialogue make your sleuthing tedious at times, although the adventure still delivers a gripping, sharp-looking trip back to the Middle Ages.

However, if you're looking for something with the faintest hint of originality, you might want to look elsewhere. This utter lack of imagination extends to the storyline, a good chunk of which has been rather liberally scarfed from The Name of the Rose. Here you play Brother Leonardo of Toledo, a monk sent to deliver his teenage sidekick Bruno to the Nuestra Senora de la Natividad Abbey for study with the resident monks. Unfortunately, dark, dastardly murder interferes with this kiddie drop-off. Someone tries to kill Leonardo and Bruno on their way into the monastery by rolling a boulder onto them, Wile E. Coyote-style, and the duo then discover that a monk has recently died in a mysterious fashion. Given that Leonardo is basically Sherlock Holmes with a tonsure, right down to his nearly supernatural powers of observation that let him figure out nearly everything about everybody from just the briefest glance, he sets out to solve the mystery of the murdered monk.

Gameplay is focused almost entirely on interrogating monks like the usual adventure-game gumshoe, as well as collecting useful objects. There are just a couple of set-piece logic puzzles in Murder in the Abbey, and these are basic brainteasers in which you slide tiles around to form a picture and click on faces on a bas-relief to open a secret door. Carrying conversations and picking up whatever isn't nailed down are the cornerstones of your investigations. Most of the riddles here are based on common sense, at any rate, which keeps the game out of need-a-walkthrough land. Considering that you don't have to worry about the absurd leaps of logic that are all too common to old-school adventure games, you need to concentrate on your surroundings and simply grab items that have a reasonably obvious purpose. So when a key falls out of a book, you know to scoop it up. Spot some gunpowder? Ditto. Run across an icon of the Virgin Mary? Pocket that, too.

After you've done all of your junk-collecting, all that's left is a straightforward assessment of your situation and experimenting with combinations of objects until you find out what works. It's all very formulaic, and your time will be filled up with old-fashioned "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" jobs and a ton of busywork in scrounging for items needed to push the plot forward. As an example, at one point early on in chapter one, you need a document translated. The monk who can do it is really busy, though, so he puts you off until next week, complaining that he is so backlogged that he hasn't been able to eat and is faint with hunger. So you trot off to the kitchen, where you recently chatted with a monk who is cooking up a delicious soup, and, well, the rest pretty much writes itself. Most puzzles are as elementary as adding two plus two, although some are a bit obtuse. Key plot points are occasionally buried in dense dialogue passages. Some tasks require such an incredible amount of busywork that it's easy to get lost in all of the annoying minutiae. For instance, making the sleeping potion is an amazingly long and dull procedure that was apparently included simply to lengthen the game. Regardless, veteran adventure gamers should be able to wrap up their role as medieval Kojak in no more than a couple of evenings of heavy play.

more.........

Outcry - Outcry is one of the more surreal and impenetrable adventure games ever made.

Adventure gamers looking for something off the beaten path get more than they bargain for in Outcry. This point-and-click exercise in the surreal from Russian developer Phantomery Interactive is certainly a step removed from the norm, but it's also so relentlessly strange and impenetrable that it's nearly impossible to play. Style has been elevated over substance in every aspect of the design, resulting in a trippy game that's appealing only for its bizarre atmosphere, philosophical pretensions, and striking visuals.

Even the basic storyline is tough to figure out, because you're given little to go on. The game begins with the anonymous protagonist (you have to check the manual to find out that you're a "middle-aged writer") receiving a letter from his estranged brother. Apparently your brother is a scientist working on a "paramount experiment that unlocks new horizons of human cognition" and involves getting "in precise sync with inner frequencies." The letter he sends you is tangled and nonsensical, and it hurls you into the game knowing precisely zip about what you're supposed to be doing. Getting the news that your brother has disappeared is the only part of the game's opening that is the slightest bit understandable. Various documents and recordings left around his abandoned residence seem to indicate that his experiment involved ancient megaliths, time travel, checking out alternate dimensions, separating human consciousness from the body, coming up with a recipe for really great salsa...that sort of thing. You eventually uncover a grab bag of goofiness about ancient secrets and the nature of reality. Still, none of it really connects. Either something was lost in the translation from the original Russian, or the storyline was just too New Agey in the first place.

What the game loses in lucidity it gains in an inspired presentation. Outcry's visuals are downright hallucinogenic. Every scene is overlaid with an aging filter loaded with dark sepia tones, skips, a main light source that dims and shines like a strobe effect, and other film flaws that make it seem as though you're viewing a long-lost movie reel. Some scenes are even in black and white. Because this layer is placed between your first-person perspective and the backdrops of the adventure, everything seems like a dream or an old memory. Nothing establishes a particular time or place, either. Everything around you is decrepit--one of the first things you see in your brother's house is an old gramophone--but it's hard to say for sure what year it is despite references to the early 20th century, such as notes mentioning Sigmund Freud's "new" theories. The rooms are so dingy and the machinery is so rusted that they appear to have been abandoned centuries ago. It could be yesterday, it could be 1920, or it could be who knows when, which is an unsettling notion that goes hand in hand with the surreal story to keep you off-kilter throughout the game.

Poorly presented puzzles also keep you off balance, though not in a good way. The game mixes traditional adventure puzzles involving collecting and combining items with set-piece logic brain-twisters where you twirl valves, pull levers, and crack codes, but there is zero feedback provided for your efforts. It's nearly impossible to determine if you're on the right track, because the protagonist never says a word and the interface doesn't offer up any information about your surroundings. There's no indication that you've solved a puzzle, and when you click valves or levers into the right position you never receive "You've done it!" triggers like green flashing lights or the noise of a door opening in the distance. Instead, to check on your progress, you have to run off to see if the door has opened, the water has been turned on, the stairs have moved into place, and so forth. Not fun.

Interacting with objects is just as frustrating. Items that can be picked up look exactly the same as those that form part of the immobile scenery. Pixel hunts are necessary in every location you visit, and it's extra tedious here because those stylish, old-timey visuals make everything so dark and grimy that it's almost impossible to spot everything during your first run-through. You constantly find yourself backtracking to pick up objects that you have overlooked. Even worse, many items cause the cursor to change to indicate that they can be interacted with in some way, but they don't actually do anything. In the usual adventure game, such situations often provoke a quip from the hero indicating what you need to do to use the object in question. Here, though, nothing happens at all. There are no comments from the mute protagonist and no text tips from the game itself.

One example of this can be found early in the second chapter when you're trying to assemble the scattered pieces of a key. The last piece is right in front of you in one scene, and it looks like you can simply reach out and grab it. But when you try to do so, nothing happens. There is no note that you can't quite reach the component and no suggestion that you need a little help. So good luck determining that you need to take an apparently unrelated item from elsewhere in the level, lock it in a vise, bend it with a hammer into the shape of a hook, and then use this impromptu tool to grab the key part. You're always left to muddle through on your own, which is often impossible without help from a walk-through or a gang of similarly befuddled adventure gamers on a forum.

more..........

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Updated Hands-On - new starting areas in the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion

Logging into The Wrath of the Lich King feels just like logging into normal World of Warcraft. Things don't start to get a little bit different until you travel to a major city for, what else? A shave and a haircut. When you see the red and white barber's pole, you'll think "Why not? I've had this mullet for 70 levels. It's time for a change!" So you'll sit down in the barber's chair to flip through hairstyles, hair colors, and facial-hair dos just like you would in the character-creation screen; except that this time, your new look will cost at least a dozen gold. Now, before we go any further,
we must warn you that this preview may contain spoilers on the expansion's new content. Also, please note that our impressions are based on an unfinished beta version of the game, so all information here, haircut-related and otherwise, is subject to change.

Once you settle on a new look (Good-bye, comb-over; hello, red Mohawk!), you'll be ready to introduce your new self to the new zones. You're free to travel to either the Borean Tundra or the Howling Fjord, but you should definitely check out the Howling Fjord first. The quests here tend to run a level lower than they do in the Borean Tundra. They're also more concentrated around their respective horde and alliance strongholds. Once you've gained three to four levels in the Howling Fjord, you'll easily breeze through everything in the Borean Tundra for another quick and easy level or two. That's the beauty of having two starting zones; you'll always be ahead of the level curve if you complete them both.

The Howling Fjord is a zone dominated by the Vrykul--huge Viking men with terrible manners. Though there are many factions, none of them are friendly. As you make your way through the Howling Fjord quest lines, so too will you make your way through each Vrykul village. In many cases, you'll simply kill a set number of them, but in others, you'll burn their towers, blast their structures, and kill their dogs. Some of the best quests, though, involve a pirate stronghold known as Scalawag Point. The first two characters you meet are a Blood Elf-worshiping artifact collector and a beefy Tauren bookie. The quests of these two characters intersect because the collector owes the beefy bookie money; so don't be surprised if, when turning in a quest to the collector, another player comes in and kicks his butt.

You'll also meet the pirates' second in command, who won't let you get a word in edgewise before she assumes you're there to kill her boss; then she tells you how. You'll track him to a cave, where you'll face him and his giant bear pet. Both are tough as nails, so make sure to bring friends. Other quests in the Howling Fjord have you freezing contaminated spores, as well as shattering them, hunting critters with your brand new falcon pet, and running around in the body of a reactivated rune golem. This, in turn, will get you ready for the siege weapon warfare in Lake Wintergrasp and Strand of the Ancients.

Lake Wintergrasp is not a battleground or an arena. Rather, it's an entire world zone dedicated to player-versus-player combat; the first in World of Warcraft. The basic idea is that one faction will defend a keep and the other will assault it. Each battle will last a set amount of time, with both honor points and arena points on the line. Also, as you gain honorable kills, you'll gain ranks and access to siege weapons. At the first rank, you will only be able to make a simple catapult, but assuming you are able to kill enough of the enemy, you'll gain access to siege engines and flying machines. While the siege weapons will be balanced like rock-paper-scissors, it is less clear how Blizzard intends to balance the zone itself. Because this is an open-world PVP zone, it is likely that in any given battle, one faction will be able to field more troops than another. Blizzard is considering ways to equalize this, such as bestowing bonuses on a faction that has lost several battles in a row or on one that is fielding far fewer combatants. When we know more about the subject, you will, too.

more..........

Civilization IV: Colonization Multiplayer - The New World isn't any easier with friends, but it's more fun

If there's one thing settlers learned as they colonized the New World, it's that you always need a little help from your friends. Be it in the form of corn-farming lessons from the natives or an extra shipment of supplies from the homeland, a helping hand could ensure survival through a harsh winter in a strange new land. With that in mind, Civilization IV: Colonization is a strategy game more focused on trade and forging new alliances than it is about wiping out natives and competing colonies with musket fire.

We learned this lesson playing a LAN multiplayer match of Colonization this week. In addition to traditional LAN play and online modes, there's a direct IP connection, a hot seat mode in which multiple players take their turns on the same computer, and a slower-paced play-by-e-mail mode for those who don't have four hours to spare for the quick game. Yes, that's four hours for a quick game.


We took control of Samuel de Champlain set off in hopes of establishing a fruitful French colony, and quickly began construction on Quebec in the Southern Hemisphere. The Cherokee and the Arawak tribes were both located in close proximity, but gifts of rum and tools kept them happy neighbors. Keeping the natives happy, you'll quickly learn, is of immense importance in Colonization. What their villages lack in technology is offset by the huge combat advantage braves have in the forests, swamps, and hills. Building too closely to their villages is the easiest way to start a costly war that, early on in the game as you don't have many guns, you will lose.

It wasn't long before we ran into a village belonging to the English—controlled by another player. The city was low on resources, and it was the hope of that player that founding near our border would stymie our nation’s growth. In a way, this worked, because as it turns out, you can place citizens in your city’s town hall to increase patriotism. This caused the small borders of the city to expand so that several production squares in our city, Montreal, were cut off.

At the same time in the far north, another of our opponents, playing as the Dutch, was growing his holdings at a tremendous pace. The Dutch begin the game with advantages in trade, such as the Merchantman ship class from the opening of the match, and the colonies' treasury was filling quickly by trading raw silver and fur coats. However, we did commission a privateer unit to start raiding these wealthy Dutch ships for their goods. Privateers sail without their nation's colors, so they can attack without declaring war. Utilizing privateers in multiplayer is a fun way to pester your opponents without entering a costly war.

By building up your resources early in the game, you can focus on weapons production later during the endgame. Early on it seems the best strategy is to offer open trade borders to your counterparts, even building an alliance when your king eventually sends its expeditionary force after you when you declare independence.

With France’s skilled lumberjacks and carpenters, we constructed new buildings at a rapid pace. With expert iron ore miners, blacksmiths, and gunsmiths, tools and weapons became widely available through our domain. In another of our nearby cities, we ordered pioneers to improve the land by building lodges, mines, farms, and roads--this increases the amount of resources produced, and also decreases the time it takes to transport goods overland via wagon train. The French faction seems to have the ability to build a powerful economy indeed--we were also able to commission expert silver miners to producing staggering amounts of the precious metal. We then shipped the silver back to our home nation of France to purchase elder statesman and master tobacconists. Elder statesmen in city hall increase production of liberty bells that increase rebel sentiment--necessary to declare independence from your home nation later in the game--as well as increase the size of territory belonging to your nation. When your nation possesses enough influence--especially when you commission such powerful helpers to your cause--your borders can eventually come to surround several Native American villages. In this case, the chiefs of the villages we surrounded offered the settlements as gifts to our cause and relocated to the west. Tobacconists, naturally, produce tasty cigars that can be sold in Europe for a tidy profit

Over time, we developed our colony and attracted powerful founding father characters like Patrick Henry and Martha Washington. However, we remained mindful of the number of turns we had remaining in the game, since the ultimate goal of the game is to build your fledgling settlements into a nation that’s powerful enough to fight off the advances of your home country and declare independence. In fact, this end game provides the most difficulty in Colonization. As rebel sentiment in our colonies grew, the king of our home nation of France added soldiers, artillery, and warships to his expeditionary forces. We found our own forces to be woefully inadequate in comparison, but rebel sentiment in our colonies had eclipsed 50 percent. Rebel sentiment increases over time as your home nation levies more and more usurious taxes from your overworked colonists. In our case, the tax rate soared to 25 percent and our elder statesmen finally clamored for revolution.

And so, we declared our independence in the game year of 1755 and formed a new nation. When you take this bold step in Colonization, you must draft a constitution that declares a decisive direction for your new nation. This includes whether or not your nation will allow for slavery, whether it will subscribe to the belief of Manifest Destiny (versus rights for the natives), and whether you wish to have separation of church and state (versus a theocracy). Each of these decisions offer a variety of bonuses. For instance, you’ll have more production if you adopt slavery, but you have increased combat strength if every man is created equal. After crafting the constitution, our citizens were ready for a new beginning without taxes and tyranny. They were ready for a new country. And in the game year of 1762, just seven turns later, they were squashed flat

more...........

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway Hands-On - Very Realistic Graphics?

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway looks set to carve a niche for itself in the overcrowded World War II genre. But Ubisoft and Gearbox's insistence on qualifying its historical accuracy is becoming rather jarring. We were recently invited to central London to meet veterans of Operation Market Garden, the battle that features prominently in the game. The ex-servicemen offered their personal take on their involvement in the turning point of the second world war, which was both fascinating and moving to hear. The problem is that the game wants it both ways--it clearly wants to honour the soldiers, but it can't help glamourising the act of war itself.

Take the first level, for example, where we managed to score a headshot on an unlucky German. The camera moves from the first-person perspective toward a third-person view of your victim, at which point the directors of The Matrix take over and frame the blood-splattering, cranium-popping spectacle in painstaking slow-motion detail. On the second level, the same viewpoint is used to highlight the damage of a grenade as the explosion sent the limbs of two soldiers spiraling off in every angle.

If you're not surrounded by war vets, though, Hells Highway looks like it will be a more entertaining experience. The game has great cinematics with the obligatory Band of Brothers/Saving Private Ryan cinematography, while the excellent tutorial mission eases you into the game's cover-based combat system. It's heavily based on the "find, fix, flank, finish" combat style actually employed during the war, which means you have to pin your enemy down and then attack from a different angle to finish him off. You can use your teammates in either the fixing or flanking role, but you need to fire at the enemy until the red circle above his head turns gray to indicate he's been pinned down.

We got to fight alongside two different sets of teams during the first four levels--regular assault squads that use rifles and a bazooka squad for more explosive support. Both teams are easy to command--you hold down the left trigger to pull up a cursor and then point to where you want them to go. If you point at enemies, they'll start firing automatically, but if you try to send them somewhere dangerous, they'll automatically take cover and fend for themselves. On one occasion, our bazooka squad simply refused to pop out from around a corner to fire at our target, but otherwise, the system seemed to work just fine.

more..........

Multiwinia - "It really kicked off when we told publishers we didn't want them f**cking up our game," said director Tom....

Introversion Software has come a long way since it started out in a small English bedroom. From shipping its first game on CD-Rs to signing a distribution deal with Valve's Steam, Introversion is now successful enough to have a central London office where it's developing its fourth original title. The company's Tom and Vicky Arundel met with us in the south of the capital to give us an overview of the company's development, followed by a hands-on with new modes from its upcoming Multiwinia.

"It really kicked off when we told publishers we didn't want them f**cking up our game," said director Tom, referencing the company's famous IGF award acceptance speech for Darwinia. "Straight after, pretty much every publisher in the business approached us," he continues. He recounts how one major British name turned down his request for £50,000 of funding on one of the company's early titles--a decision that meant he had to survive on nothing, but one that's allowed Introversion to stay completely independent ever since. Having inked deals with Microsoft to develop titles for the Xbox 360, Introversion is now lucky enough to work with the business' major names while continuing to play by its own rules.

Today though, we're meeting with Introversion to see Multiwinia, the multiplayer take on the developer's first major hit, Darwinia. The game is pretty much complete at this stage, and although the control scheme went through a major rehaul recently, the PC version is on track for its September 19 release. Darwinia fans should be able to grasp the concept behind this four-player strategy game, but those unfamiliar with the company's games should imagine a game that crosses real-time strategy resource management, pikmin-like cuteness, and Tron-esque visuals.

It's clear that Multiwinia is designed from the ground up to be accessed by as many people as possible. It's designed for both PC and Mac, and it will run on fairly humble machines with just the keyboard and mouse for controls. You move the camera using the W, A, S, and D keys and zoom in and out using the mouse wheel. Control of the Multiwinians is all on the mouse buttons--hold the left down to circle the units you want to control, and then move them using the right button. New Multiwinians constantly spill out of your home base, though, so to stop you from having to go back and forth, you can create officers who will automatically traffic other units to certain destinations. If you have an Xbox 360 controller or other USB-compatible pad, then you can use that too.

more............

Dracula 3: Path of the Dragon - dreary and dated

Dracula again? Vampire fatigue is a legitimate feeling that you might encounter when ripping open the shrink-wrap of Dracula 3: The Path of the Dragon, given that it seems like Bram Stoker's infamous creature of the night has already been the focus of a lot of adventure games. This latest one, the third in a franchise that started nearly a decade ago with Dracula: Resurrection and Dracula: The Last Sanctuary, doesn't bring much new to the table. Developer Kheops Studio sticks to the ancient adventure-gaming formula that it has specialized in with previous releases such as Return to Mysterious Island and Voyage, and spins a dull yarn in which you research the biggest bloodsucker of them all in 1920s Transylvania. Busywork puzzles and stone-age visuals further drain the rest of the creeps out of this supposedly scary saga, which unfolds more like an uninspired detective story than an ominous encounter with a legendary monster.

The plot isn't what you would expect from a Dracula-inspired game, although you can't characterize that as a good thing. For a change, you don't play Van Helsing or any of his descendants. Instead, you take the role of Father Arno Moriani, a priest sent to Transylvania by his bosses at the Vatican to investigate a recently deceased Romanian doctor who has been declared a candidate for canonization. The good father soon finds out that the doctor held some odd views regarding a number of strange deaths in the village, and he finds his assignment quickly changed from sainthood vetting to disproving the existence of vampires. So you spend most of your time undertaking scientific research and questioning professors, not tracking down Dracula and his pointy-toothed pals. More time is spent with test tubes than with stakes, and you don't actually encounter any vampires until the very end of the game.

Another novelty involves moving the setting from the stereotypical Victorian age to the 1920s, when Romania was still reeling from the devastation caused by World War I. This doesn't make for many differences when it comes to gameplay, although shifting the game into the 20th century does allow for more-varied artwork involving semimodern touches such as telephones, trains, electric lights, and chemistry equipment. However, the overall visual quality is fairly poor, despite good use of shadows and fog effects to create a spooky mood. Most scenes are grainy, and character models are afflicted with slow-motion movement tics that makes it seem like everybody you meet is underwater. Voice samples often sound vaguely slurred in a rather similar fashion, lending a surreal vibe to many conversations that actually enhances the eerie nature of your investigations.

Gameplay offers some similarly unwelcome surprises, at least after you get past all of the "Brand X" stuff. Dracula 3 is dry, traditional, and stilted. Nevertheless, there is one big changeup here in regard to puzzles. The designers chose to move away from cliched vampire plot devices and play up a more modern "It's the 20th century--there are no such things as vampires!" vibe that apparently seeks to explain bloodsucker fear as mere peasant legend. This is a nice switcheroo from the standard stake-the-fanged-guy credulity that usually accompanies any game about Dracula. But it's also pretty disingenuous in that you know from the very beginning that Father Arno won't be discovering that vampires are just make-believe after all. That would have been a cool surprise after all of the buildup about Vlad Tepes, neck hematomas, and weird blood disorders, but it's hard to pull back from supernatural explanations when you've got Dracula rising from his coffin on the cover of the game. So the story eventually goes right where you see it heading from the beginning, despite the lame attempts to fake you out.

more...........

Space Siege - Saving the human race shouldn't be so tedious.

The idea was a good one: Take an established action RPG dungeon-crawler formula, infuse it with a multilayered story, and set it in space. Include multiple player paths that raise important philosophical questions--specifically, How much is your humanity worth? Unfortunately, the decision to focus on story in Space Siege came at the expense of an engaging combat system, interesting environments, and a rewarding upgrade system. The worst part? It didn't have to.

Space Siege is the spiritual successor to the Dungeon Siege series from designer Chris Taylor and Gas Powered Games. The game opens with a chilling cutscene as hundreds of alien warships descend upon Earth with just one goal: extermination. As our home world explodes, a lone colony ship called the Armstrong manages to slip through the enemy armada, but it's not alone. An alien pod attaches itself to the hull, and insect-like creatures called the Kerak pour into a cargo bay, hoping to destroy what remains of the human race. You jump right in as combat engineer Seth Walker, armed with only a machine gun, and begin blasting away at the Kerak menace. Watching Earth explode is powerful, and a great premise with which to begin a sci-fi adventure, but it's all downhill from there.

As you explore the bowels of the Armstrong, eliminating Kerak and restoring the ship's systems, you periodically come across cybernetic parts. In this future, these implants are used to drastically improve human abilities. Those without the ability to walk can install cybernetic legs, while those stricken with paralysis can implant a cybernetic spine. But aboard the Armstrong, these upgrades can be used instead to transform Seth into a cybernetic killing machine. The cost, however, is your humanity, as indicated by a handy humanity meter that appears every time you visit the cybernetic implant kiosk. The cybernetic eye, for example, costs you 10 percent of your humanity. When you install an implant, Seth will scream in pain, an obvious attempt to make you realize that you're losing a part of yourself with each upgrade. There are several problems with this system. Gameplay is not made significantly easier with an upgrade, and 10 bonus attack points--whatever that represents--for installing a cybernetic eye isn't a convincing argument to go through with the procedure. Finally, the few allies you have on the Armstrong barely register a response to your freakish new appearance after you install a cybernetic brain (plus 10 chance of critical strike!). Gina, the communications officer, will beg you not to install any implants; Dr. Desoto, the cybernetics specialist, will tell you that the fate of humanity depends on you installing these implants, and that's about it. Installing these parts feels inconsequential, exactly the opposite of what Gas Powered Games had hoped to accomplish. As expected, there is a special ending for those who choose to finish the game with 100 percent humanity intact, but rest assured each of the three endings is a disappointment.

But hey, none of this would be too much of a concern if Space Siege featured an explosive combat system with over-the-top futuristic power attacks, a deep crafting system, tons of customizable parts and valuable loot, and a non-linear mission system. None of this is the case. You left click to move Seth to a location, and right click on an enemy to fire. A major control issue is that Seth is forced to stop moving when he wants to fire, even though enemies can move while firing. No fair. This wouldn't have been an issue if you had WASD keyboard control or support for a game controller, but as it stands, control is imprecise and outdated. A bright spot is the addition of the Hodgson's Robotic Unit, known as HR-V. He's a loyal robot companion made up of 25 parts of scrap metal and is upgradeable with flamethrowers and laser blasters. There are some rudimentary squad commands if you want to send HR-V as bait while you attack from afar or if you want to attempt a flanking maneuver and catch the enemy in your crossfire, a very useful tactic. Should HR-V be destroyed, you can use 25 more spare parts at a Hodgson's robotic assembly station, hundreds of which are scattered about the ship, and make a new HR-V.

Spare parts are found after you destroy an enemy or in toolboxes throughout the Armstrong, and act as currency as you choose to level up Seth's weapons, armor, abilities, and HR-V. None of the upgrades are particularly appealing, however. A four-percent increase of landing a critical hit would have been more interesting had you installed new parts or made some kind of intricate modification to your weapon. But no, you simply continue to buy new upgrades, and not even the blast from a souped-up rocket launcher appears any more impressive than that of the level-one rocket launcher. Weapons in general are a major disappointment. You'll visit the armory of the Armstrong, with nary a high-tech WMD to be found. Instead, you find new variants of machine guns, assault rifles, and frag cannons at regular intervals throughout the game. The newest weapon is almost always the strongest, and there's no reason to go back to your old weapon. It's a complete surprise and disappointment that even the upgrade system was made linear, and there's little choice in where to apply your spare parts.

Leveling up is also linear and shallow. Instead of accumulating experience points, you level up at predetermined points in the game and are rewarded with two skill points. These are spread between combat and engineering trees, but to call them "trees" would be misleading. No, these are upgrade "branches." Many of the options are only available with cybernetic upgrades, and most of the engineering skills such as bomb drones and gun turrets will go unused, yet you are forced to spend points on them in order to progress down the branch.

For a colony ship meant to house thousands of people on the way to a new world, the Armstrong is a drab and boring place. Each new area that you encounter looks strikingly like the one before it, some combination of gray and metal. Occasionally you'll come across the ship's basketball court or what looks to be a lounge, but the dull color palette leaves a lot to be desired. For some reason, every room and hallway is packed with explosive barrels and canisters, which are fun to blow up but make little sense on a bridge leading to the ship's transit train. Not even the musical score will manage to pull you in, as it is mostly muted, something present in the background that you'll rarely hear or notice.

OK, so the gameplay, graphics, and sound are forgettable, but at least there's that story to keep you interested, right? Well, not really. Though the opening premise manages to grab you, the eventual plot "twists" are ripped straight out of about 20 other science-fiction movies and games, so predictable that they border on cliche. There is one major decision you'll face late in the game and, although the game still plays out exactly the same except for the dialogue, Space Siege does give you the opportunity to answer the question it's been asking during entire campaign: How will you choose to save humanity? It's a good touch, but when the final credits roll, no matter what your percentage of humanity is, you'll still be left wondering, "Is this it?"

more...........

GC 2008: Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures - some upcoming content and DirectX 10 features for Age of Conan.

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures has been live for just more than four months right now, and though it's undoubtedly a great game, its players have been very vocal as far as complaints and suggestions are concerned. Funcom has always thought of itself as a company driven by its community, and if you're a fan, it'll probably come as no surprise to you that the Age of Conan team is currently working on implementing a number of fixes and new gameplay features. There's also an expansion pack in the works, by the way, but all we know about it is that it's scheduled for release sometime in 2009. Judging by a piece of teaser art that we were shown today, the expansion pack will feature masked Asian warriors who look a lot like the immortals that the Spartans go up against in the movie 300.

One of the more damning criticisms being leveled at Age of Conan since its release is the fact that, at certain character levels, there's simply a dearth of content to play through. There are a number of new content areas in development that will be appearing in the live game soon, and today we had an opportunity to check out a few of them.

First up was Tarantia Commons, a slum district that's part of the existing Tarantia City but which players are currently kept out of by a locked gate. Given that it's home to two warring gangs, Tarantia Commons is a dangerous area to frequent at night. As a hero in the Age of Conan world, you'll be able to undertake missions for either or both of the gangs in question, and though there will undoubtedly be plenty of violence involved, we're told that Funcom is aiming to incorporate more puzzle elements in the game via future updates. Tarantia Commons is a locale designed for players of level 40 and above, which, if you've ever played a character at that level, you'll know is definitely an area in need of new content.

Another all-new area that we had an opportunity to take a look at was a mountainous zone known as The Dolmen that's designed for level 50 to 55 characters. Bandit forces are a constant threat in the area, and one of the sample quests that we were shown will task you with lighting signal fires dotted around the region in an attempt to call reinforcements to the aid of a settlement under attack. We were told that this zone will add "dozens of hours of content" on its own, and it also appears to be a great example of how Funcom is starting to incorporate Conan influences from a variety of different sources. For example, we saw the "wheel of pain" structure that appeared in the 1982 Conan movie, and later we encountered a beautiful frost giant's daughter lifted from a story by Robert E Howard. The beautiful, scantily clad girl was clearly beckoning the player to follow her up into to the mountains, and we're told that, sometimes, she'll reward those who oblige her with some kind of reward. It was a trap on this occasion, though, and within moments of reaching a spot where we could be alone with her, two angry giants (her brothers) showed up.

Still exploring the same mountains, we were surprised when the entire zone started to shake as if there was an earthquake. As it turned out, there was, but it wasn't being caused by shifting tectonic plates or anything like that. Rather, a giant named Frost Father was to blame. Currently bound in chains deep inside an evil-looking, amphitheater-themed prison, this giant is the son of a god and, as we later discovered, he's much larger than the giants that we encountered earlier.

In addition to new quest zones, Funcom is working on the construction of new dungeons as well as the revamping of existing ones. One of the new dungeons that we were afforded a brief look at is the aforementioned Frost Father's place of imprisonment, a gigantic structure populated by all manner of demons and the like that will be suitable for characters at level 65 and above. Your goal in this dungeon, other than killing bosses to collect new-and-improved loot, will be to free the Frost Father, though we should warn you that it's not yet clear if he'll be appreciative or resentful of your efforts on his behalf.


more..........

Fury - True to its title, this fantasy action game will make you furious

Fury is what Guild Wars would be like if it got fat and addicted to amphetamines. On one hand, it's got a chaotic action element that is so fast-paced you feel out of control. On the other, it's got a bloated selection of spells and skills--some useful, some imbalanced, some pointless. Add an awkward interface, a myriad of technical issues, and a glorified game lobby masquerading as a fantasy world, and you've got an online fiasco without much of a future.

Fury pretends to be a massively multiplayer role-playing game, a disguise it pulls off pretty well when you first start playing. You choose some physical characteristics for your avatar while listening to some nonsensical weirdness regarding "The Fade" (for the right effect, deepen your voice and say it melodramatically). After a useless tutorial gives you some basic clues on how the game functions, you choose one of eight archetypes and are thrust into a confusing gameworld that initially looks like any other MMO. In actuality, the "world" is a single, swollen game lobby where you spend your time shopping for equipment and purchasing abilities before heading into a player-versus-player arena.

The first problem? There are only three basic ways to experience the action. Bloodbath mode is typical deathmatch; elimination pits two teams of four players against each other in a best-of-three team deathmatch; and vortex is like capture the flag, only there are multiple flags (or crystals, in this case). To play, you can either group up in advance or join a queue on your own. Either way, you'll have to wait for the game to match you or your group up with other players. If you're playing vortex or elimination, you will usually need to wait only a few minutes. Bloodbath, on the other hand, has so few players that as of this writing, there is only a single match held every hour. And when you do manage to get into a match, you're usually facing the same group of people, many of whom will team up and work together to slaughter unsuspecting newcomers.

You can equip up to 24 different skills before heading into battle. It's an insane number of powers to handle at one time in the breakneck arenas, and proof that more is not better (more to come on this subject). Combine all the spell-juggling with superfast movement and zippy spell-recharge times, and you get an absolute mess. Battles are complete anarchy, with players scurrying around like Speedy Gonzales and casting a flurry of spells. It's apparently supposed to be fun, but it's simply too much. Fast pacing is one thing; movement speed so rapid you can't keep track of what's going on is something else entirely.

To make matters worse, targeting a player means you will automatically face him or her as you run around clicking your mouse or hitting your hotkeys like a maniac. Many of the arenas are fairly cluttered, so the automated target facing might get you stuck against walls, or at the very least cause you to lose your bearings. Now, imagine doing all of this when your screen is constantly muddled with immovable interface elements, big spell-description windows that open arbitrarily when you cast, and combat text flying everywhere. It's a disaster. Of course, you can turn off combat text, but it's everything or nothing, so if you want to see just your own results without dealing with the fluttering text of everyone else's combat results, you are out of luck.

In Fury's defense, there's a great idea behind the way skills are used. Your spells either generate or use elemental charges, rather than the typical mana you see in most fantasy games. In order to use your more powerful spells, which use charges, you must cast the ones that generate charges first. For example, if you want to cast wild impact, which uses four nature charges, you must first cast a weaker spell like defender's dart, which generates two nature charges each time it's cast. It's a neat scheme, but it's completely wasted on Fury's bizarre combat model, which gives you no time or inclination to enjoy its intricacies.

As if to make up for the chintzy number of gameplay modes, the game overloads you with what seems like a zillion different skills, separated by class, element, and school. You aren't limited to spells of your own archetype; in fact, by spending the essence you earn during battle, you can earn spells in pretty much any discipline. You can also save various character builds and switch between them easily, so if you want to be a healer in one battle and switch to a tank in the next, you can.

This is where the bloat comes in. Fury has so many skills that many of them seem obsolete. A lot of skills have almost the same effects as other ones, with minor variations (slightly more damage, slightly lower chance to hit, and so on). Furthermore, you earn them by taking on trials, which amount to nothing more than a progressive list of abilities you purchase with the essence you earn in battle. Why do the trials in a single school have to be scattered among dozens of NPCs? Why does there need to be a whole instanced area for them? It certainly doesn't help that the loading time to get to that area is so long that not only do you have time to make a sandwich, you actually have time to bake the bread you make it with.

more...........

Painkiller: Overdose - This stand-alone Painkiller expansion is pure, stupid fun, despite slow loads and an utter lack of innovation

Although more than three years have passed since Painkiller first shot up hard drives, this deeply unfashionable shooter series hasn't done any growing up since 2004. And thank the gods for that. Not too many developers are bothering with old-school shooters anymore, so it's a real pleasure to blast through such a gleefully stupid stand-alone expansion pack like Painkiller: Overdose. All of the design attributes that made the original game as subtle as blunt-force trauma are back for more, including monsters that seem to have escaped from an Iron Maiden album cover, as well as slice-and-dice weapons that wouldn't be out of place in a torture chamber. Only some technical difficulties and the nagging sense of déjà vu interfere with the bloody good time on offer here.

If you've played the original Painkiller, you already know the score. Mindware Studios' Overdose is pretty much a straight remake of People Can Fly's cult hit from the summer of 2004, with the same sledgehammer mentality. Considering this expansion started life as a free mod project before it got the attention of the bigwigs at DreamCatcher Games, it shouldn't be too surprising that little new ground has been broken. You're now playing a half-angel, half-demon named Belial in the three-chapter campaign instead of a dead guy looking for his wife, but this mystical creature tosses out wisecracks like Serious Sam. Hell, he even sounds so much like Serious Sam that you have to wonder if the developers hired the same actor to voice his lines. Regardless, there is definitely some of the sincerest form of flattery going on here. Belial constantly snorts out cheesy action-movie lines. He mutters "Tastes like chicken!" when he sucks down a soul, sings "Dum-dum-dum! Another one bites the dust!" when he wastes an enemy, and even grumbles about "sand in my crotch" when entering the Egyptian level.

All of the weapons have been replaced with new models that mirror the old ones. For instance, the crowd-pleasing stake gun, has been swapped out for a crossbow with the identical ability to staple enemies to walls. All-new ghouls have been tapped to stand in for the old ghouls, although they aren't as out-there as those that populated the original Painkiller. While the zombies, various types of skeleton, robots, flaming demons, and the rest of this creepy crew look great, they're very predictable. As soon as you get a look at the level setting, you know what's coming next.

Of course, predictability is sort of the point. As with every traditional first-person shooter dating back to Wolfenstein 3D, the game gulps down an old formula. You walk into a room, valley, or cave jazzed up with Halloween lighting effects. A door clangs shut behind you. Driving music powers up. A few dozen creepy monsters pop in with a flash of brimstone. Mayhem commences. Repeat this for a dozen hours or so. The end. The only template tweaks are holdovers from the original Painkiller. Thus, the ability to kick off a demonic freak-out by swallowing enemy souls is back, as is the tarot-card system that rewards the completion of extreme challenges (finishing a level using only a wimpy weapon, for example) with cards that can be purchased to grant the buyer kick-ass powers. Oh, there's one more change that shouldn't go unmentioned--the developers have jettisoned the spectacularly appropriate thrash-metal music for wimpy orchestral stuff and pounding techno. Somewhere out there, Beavis and Butt-Head are not amused.

All that truly separates Overdose from other old-time shooters is a horror-movie groove that's equal parts Clive Barker gruesomeness and Hammer Horror cheese. As with the first game, the levels are a jumble. You're supposed to be fighting in purgatory, which is apparently a creative code word for "maps featuring whatever the hell we think looks cool." So you get an ancient Rome burning level populated by spooky gladiators, fire elementals, and giant cyclopes; a misty Japanese village level with ninjas, kung-fu old guys with coolie hats, and murderous geishas; an asteroid space base staffed by flying robots; some sort of Egyptian desert occupied by mummies, scarab beetles, and what looks like the god Anubis flying around on a magic carpet; plus murky swampland featuring giant tentacles that erupt from the ground and squid-faced Cthulhu rip-offs. Nothing here quite approaches the twisted genius of the original game, which had electric lunatics in an insane asylum and skeletal biker dudes hanging out by the Venetian canals. Only the hopping cyclopean demon arms come close, but there aren't enough of them in the game to make an impact.

At least it all looks good. While the visuals aren't entirely up to contemporary standards (rest easy, Source nuts) and there are only a couple of really knockout sections in each level, the overall art design is incredible, save for the odd issue with messed-up lighting effects. The only problem is that the now-dated Pain engine isn't up to snuff. Particle effects, such as smoke and sand, cause it to chug, regularly dropping the game to single-digit frame rates. The developers have compensated for this by slowing the whole game down when this happens, so battles remain playable even when you seem to be trudging through quicksand. Still, even without any herky-jerky moments, the game drops into slo-mo far too often.

more.............

TimeShift - An interesting time-shifting mechanic and fun-to-shoot weapons can't make up....................

Given TimeShift's long, tumultuous development cycle that saw the game change platforms, swap publishers, and miss several release dates, it's surprising the game has made it to stores at all. So it's too bad that TimeShift isn't really worth the wait, thanks to a barely-there story, extremely rudimentary puzzles, and tired first-person shooter objectives like going through an entire level just to push a button. It does have some redeeming features, though. It's fun to pause time and whale on helpless soldiers, and some of the weapons are really satisfying to shoot.

If you need more out of a game's story than "shoot guys until the credits roll because an angry soldier and a computer voice say so," you're in trouble here. If you piece together the fragmented cutscenes, scour the manual, and read the back of the box, you'll learn that a certain Dr. Krone has stolen a special suit that lets its user travel through time. This has created an alternate reality, which is a bad thing--you'll have to trust the game on that, because it's tough to figure out just what has happened that's so bad, other than a big robot spider that shoots lasers terrorizing the city. (OK, maybe that is bad.) It's up to you to take the other, experimental beta suit (ohhhh, dangerous!), travel through time, and stop Dr. Krone from doing something sinister--which he has already done, so you want to undo whatever it is he's done...or something.

Even though the story is an incoherent mess, it's still possible to enjoy TimeShift. Why? Because you can time-shift. Your suit has the ability to pause, slow down, or even reverse time--kind of like a TiVo you can wear. This lets you pause the action, run up to a guy, and shoot him to bits. Or if you're feeling like humiliating him before you kill him, you can steal his weapon, restart time, and watch as he wonders where the heck it went, and then make him dead with a barrage of bullets. It's even possible to regenerate health by seeking cover and pausing time. You can't rewind time and prevent your own death, but if you're quick you can reverse it and unstick a grenade from yourself. You only have a limited amount of time you can manipulate before the suit's energy runs out, but it regenerates quickly. The game promises all sorts of other "exciting" uses for altering the flow of time, but it never really capitalizes on the potential of the mechanic. Rather than challenging you with complex puzzles that require you to think outside the box or use the game's quality physics engine, you're mostly limited to slowing down time so you can press two buttons in quick succession or pausing time so that you can get through a door before it closes. Thank goodness for technology.

Other than the time-shifting stuff, the rest of TimeShift plays like a linear, run-of-the mill first-person shooter--and a dated one at that. Most of the level objectives are routine tasks like finding a button that opens a door or, sometimes, locating a lever that opens a door. Heck, sometimes you have to do both! There are a few scenarios where you ride around on an ATV and some others where you man a turret on an airship, but most of the time you'll be moving from checkpoint to checkpoint on foot, taking out wave after wave of unintelligent foes. It's good, then, that the gunplay is entertaining. This is mostly due to the game's powerful weapons that are so much fun to shoot. It might not be exactly challenging, but it's fun to pause time and take the crossbow that shoots an arrow that sticks in the target and then blows up, and then unpause time and watch your foe explode into a charred, bloody mess. There are other cool weapons too, like the automatic gun that looks like it shoots bullets, but these bullets cause the target to burst into flames when they hit, and then the dude screams like a little girl as he fries. Even the basic machine gun is powerful and useful all the way through the game. There's always plenty of ammo to be found, so you never have to be conservative with your bullets.

It's too bad that these powerful weapons, combined with the ability to manipulate time, make it all too easy to fall into a rut of approaching every situation in the same way. Even on the harder difficulty settings you can be successful finding cover, pausing time, unleashing a few shots, and then retreating to cover while your suit and health recharge. Enemies won't always stay back and wait for you to cap them, but their aggressiveness actually makes things easier. You can hide, watch their dot on the radar get closer, and then shoot them as soon as they come around the corner. There are a few instances where you'll have no choice but to seek shelter behind destructible cover, but those situations are rare, and there's usually someplace safe you can scramble to once you've been flushed out.

In addition to a lengthy 10- to 12-hour single-player campaign, TimeShift offers a full-featured multiplayer component. A modified version of the single-player game's time-shifting ability is found here, too. You can slow, pause, or rewind time by throwing one of three different chrono grenades. Everyone within the blast radius of an explosion is affected. It's a neat idea, but one that people seem all too keen to rely on--they just throw them like crazy when they see another person. You can play ranked and unranked matches in a wide variety of game types. There's deathmatch and team deathmatch, one-on-one, capture the flag, and a few unique modes. King of time has you try to gain control of the time sphere, which makes the person who holds it impervious to time effects, allowing them to rack up kills with ease. Another is called meltdown madness. This is a team mode where you try to prevent the other team's machine from counting down by throwing chrono grenades at it. You can also create your own fun by using the multiplayer modifiers. These let you increase players' running and jumping abilities, reduce gravity, or play alternate game types like rockets or snipers only, vampires, or last man standing. The multiplayer mode isn't exactly amazing, but it definitely has its moments.

more...........

Battlestar Galactica - This arcade game is relatively shallow and a pale imitation of its television inspiration

Battlestar Galactica is easily one of the best shows on television right now. Of course, it always helps to have some of the prettiest and most visually poetic space battles seen in a long time. Sadly, the same can't be said of Battlestar Galactica, the Xbox Live Arcade and downloadable PC game. All the complexity of the series has been ditched for a frustrating and twitch-heavy arcade experience.

Based loosely on the first three seasons of the show (right up to the exodus from New Caprica at the beginning of season three), Battlestar Galactica lets you fly as a Colonial fighter pilot in a variety of craft. These include the Viper Mark II (the "classic" Battlestar fighter), the more modern Viper Mark VII, the Raptor multirole vehicle, the Blackbird stealth fighter, and even a Cylon Raider. While the handling characteristics vary a bit among craft, the basic premise of the game remains the same: You fly in a 2D space combat arena, using missiles and guns to shoot down enemy craft.

Granted, it's an arcade game, but Battlestar fans were probably looking for a bit more depth than what is here. It doesn't help that much of the gameplay feels frustrating and unforgiving. When you get in a dogfight, it feels like every enemy craft is gunning for you, even if there are a half dozen other Colonial aircraft in the immediate vicinity. Battles involve usually flying straight toward an enemy craft then firing missiles and guns before you overshoot. Then you turn around and repeat the process all over again. You take damage quickly, though there are health power-ups that literally bounce around the level until someone flies over and picks them up. When you die (and you'll die a lot), you'll respawn, so there's no penalty there. What it does cost you though is precious time. Many of the missions have timed objectives: If you die three or four times, the 30 or 40 seconds you lose waiting to respawn and then get back into the fight will cost you dearly. All you can do is grit your teeth and try again or dumb it down to the easiest difficulty level because the medium setting is fairly unforgiving.

The space arenas are entirely 2D and designed more like mazes rather than outer space. There's plenty of floating debris that can block your path, such as wreckage and asteroids, but you can't hurt yourself by flying into it. You'll just slam against an invisible barrier that prevents you from entering debris fields. The camera is also close in, so you can't pull it back that far, which means you have to rely on a minimap and radar to see what's coming at you.

The 10 missions in the game are based loosely on various episodes. There's a mission where you have to shoot down Scar, an extremely resilient Cylon Raider, in five minutes. Or there's another one where you have to fly a Raptor to rescue Colonial pilots who have ejected and are floating in space. There's also one where you get to fly the Blackbird as you try to cripple the Resurrection Ship, though the Blackbird is hardly stealthy because Cylon Raiders have no problem detecting you. When that's done, there's an instant action mode that allows deathmatch and team deathmatch against 15 computer-controlled opponents, though these end up feeling more like just generic dogfights. Then there's multiplayer, which is the same thing, though with the difficulty of finding matches online.

more.........

Clive Barker's Jericho - Poor level design poisons Jericho's awesome but unrealized potential

Clive Barker's Jericho is an inconsistent first-person shooter, alternating between moments of pure, atmospheric greatness and irritating design paradoxes that suck the fun out of the gameplay. For every incredible set piece--a battle in a Roman gladiator arena, fearful attacks by ghostly children--there is a frustrating sequence that puts every shortcoming in the game proudly on display. There's a lot going on, and sometimes it comes together exquisitely. More often, Jericho's various elements get in the way of one another, creating a game you'll love one moment and hate the next.

Horror writer Clive Barker's touch is most evident in Jericho's overall sense of impending doom. The time-traveling narrative takes you to a number of eras--World War II, ancient Sumeria--and all of them are wrapped in a demonic haze of darkness and dread. The architecture is brooding and imposing, shadowed corners look like they could harbor something truly sinister, and soft ambient lighting brings it all together to make for a cohesive look. The sound design is equally sinister, with the quiet, pulsing soundtrack and the sound of dripping water making you wonder what you might be encountering ahead. That isn't to say that Jericho is a truly scary game. It's incredibly dark (you'll get good use of your flashlight), often intense, and always a little eerie, but you'll never jump out of your seat. It's a Gothic paradise, and as a study in pure atmosphere, it succeeds in spades.

The story itself never really takes advantage of all this thick, fearful ambience. The setup is pretty awesome on its own, though. In the beginning, God didn't create Adam and Eve--He created a sexless being known as the firstborn. Turns out that whole experiment didn't work out too well, and the thing got locked away in an alternate reality, where it occasionally gets too bored and tries to escape. The secretive Jericho squad exists to shove the firstborn back where it belongs. Too bad the script itself is just a thin slice of nonsense, featuring far too many hokey one-liners ("praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!") than good taste allows. And just when you are finally getting into it, the game ends with a lame boss fight without answering any of the main questions it raised. Leaving room for a sequel is one thing; creating a story that literally goes nowhere is something else entirely.

Your own character, Ross, can jump from one member of Jericho squad to another, which sets up the game's most intriguing--and successful--mechanic. At any point, you can take control of any of the remaining six members of the squad, and each of them handle quite differently from the others. First of all, they come equipped with different weaponry. More importantly, most of them have two special skills at their disposal, from Cole's ability to slow down time, to Delgado's knack for setting foes on fire, to Church's enemy-paralyzing cloud of blood. At first, it's tough to remember which squadmate possesses which weapons and which skills, but the game does a good job of introducing you to the powers one by one, and eventually it becomes second nature.

That isn't to say that every character is particularly useful. Church's rooting skill and Cole's time-slowing ability are possibly the most useful powers, since they give you time to act. Jones, on the other hand, only gets an astral projection skill, and it's rarely helpful outside of some of the game's puzzles. You'd think with six different unique characters to control that Jericho might be spreading itself too thin, but while that is true with other elements in Jericho, the different skills give you a lot of variety without making things feel schizophrenic. The characters you aren't in control of at any given time are governed by the game's semiadequate artificial intelligence, and you can give them rudimentary orders to stay behind, fall back, or move to a specified location. But this is where Jericho begins to stumble--big-time.

As the game progresses, you will at first be ready to deplore the teammate AI for dying so easily. You can revive downed teammates, but there are times when you spend more time reviving than you spend shooting guns and performing awesome powers. Yet on its own, the AI isn't half bad. Teammates run for cover when possible and use their special abilities on their own. But what good does it do to program the AI to take cover and flank when the level design features almost nothing but narrow corridors and confined rooms? The reason that your teammates look like they are bullet fodder is because they simply have nowhere to go. You'll watch as teammates go down over and over again, simply because they are all stuck in the same tiny space.

Then, add to the mix the game's most annoying (and annoyingly common) foes: demons that explode upon death. The things lumber along quickly and take down any nearby character when they fall. And, like most of Jericho's supersturdy enemies, they absorb a good number of bullets before they die. On its own, it's a perfectly legitimate enemy design. But in a game with six squad members and the most claustrophobic levels ever devised, it's the opposite of fun. You'll watch in horror as your entire squad goes down at once and you are powerless to stop the violence. Why would you create an enemy that needs to be taken down from a distance, in a game that doesn't let you distance yourself? Maybe it's meant to be a challenge, but in reality, it's just imbalanced and cheap. We suspect it's all done under the guise of being "tactical," but this is no tactical shooter. Enemies just mindlessly traipse toward you, so the extent of your tactics is switching between characters to use their abilities in tandem.

And that's the way of Jericho: design elements that are fine on their own, and a disaster when combined together. Slow strafing speed doesn't have to be bad. Slow strafing speed in a level when the exploding monsters continually respawn, and you are only playing as Delgado, is murder. Then you have the pretty animations and special effects. They look neat, but some effects, like the 10-second fiasco you have to experience when you revive someone as Rawlings from afar, get in the way. The action leaves you vulnerable for so long that it's better to just run up and use the standard revival skill, letting the AI handle Rawlings (though unsurprisingly, he is almost always the first character to bite the dust). There are a number of effects like this that take their good old time, which would be fine if you could get yourself out of the way to perform your powers and enjoy the corresponding visual display.

When the levels open up, you can see how great Jericho could have been if it had just been given room to breathe. A spectacular Crusades era boss battle and a series of battles in a Roman arena are perfect examples, and had the entire game followed suit, it could have approached greatness. There aren't enough of these moments in Jericho's eight hours of gameplay, but when they arrive, they hint at loads of unrealized potential. In fact, it is your ability to see the potential behind the missteps that will determine how much you like Jericho. This is, without a doubt, a love-it-or-hate-it kind of game: easy to love for the occasionally awesome and intense firefight, easy to hate for its wide array of frustrating design contradictions.

more...........

Blazing Angels 2: Secret - Blazing Angels 2 is a clear improvement over the previous game, though history buffs will probably hate its fictional......

Blazing Angels 2 is a fairly straightforward mission-based flight game set against the backdrop of World War II, much like its predecessor was. But instead of sticking to the facts like the first game tried to do, the sequel heads off into that not-so-lofty "what if?" territory that World War II-themed games eventually seem to get to, where Nazis are either resurrecting dead humans and making horrific zombies, or building huge Tesla coils and prototypical laser cannons and other then-impossible technology. This game goes for the latter, giving you a bunch of prototype technology to fly and fight against, some of which was just out of reach back in the 1940s. At the same time, a handful of improvements make Blazing Angels 2 a better game than the previous release, though some spotty difficulty progression makes the single-player a little uneven.

The story and characters from the first game have been tossed out, though the basics are the same. You play as Captain Robinson, and you quickly hook up with some wingmen to form an elite squadron that gets into the places that other, lesser pilots couldn't touch. Your team gets involved in some hairy scenarios as you track down a German special weapons division that's turning out a bunch of new technology vital to the fight. So along with protecting key civilian targets in major American cities and bombing bases, you'll also have missions where you have to take out airfields, then land to steal prototype planes and escape. You'll also guard escaping trains, shoot missiles out of the sky, and even take on huge bosslike crafts, like plane-spewing zeppelins, big cannons aimed at Red Square, large Tesla installations, and so on. The game does a good job of moving you around from place to place, which keeps you from getting bored of any one area and constantly has you doing different things in different planes.

As this game also appears on consoles, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that it works well on a dual-analog gamepad, but you should definitely know that it practically requires some sort of additional controller or flight stick, because the mouse-and-keyboard controls aren't any good. While the game does have support for Xbox 360 controllers and will start specifically mentioning the Xbox 360 controller's buttons in menus and the like, it doesn't seem to auto-configure for that controller, so you'll still have to go through the process of assigning all your buttons, which you can't actually do from the pause menu, so trying out different configurations is a hassle.

Of course, it all eventually comes back to you dogfighting enemy planes. Not too far into the game's 18-mission campaign, you start getting secondary weapons like rockets. You get a lot of rockets and it's a snap to replenish your supplies, so at this point, your machine guns become almost totally useless. You later get homing rockets that make blowing up enemy planes a trivial, meaningless task. This means that most of the game is so easy that you'll finish missions on the first try, though that feeling of extreme air superiority fits with the spirit of your elite squad. The lone exception is the eighth mission, which has you guarding Moscow's Red Square against German attackers. The game isn't particularly clear about what you need to do to protect the square from being destroyed, which makes this one mission a little harder than the rest. But for the most part, it's smooth sailing. A little too smooth, perhaps.

You'll upgrade your planes as you play using points earned in each mission, and you should have more than enough to buy everything by the end of the game. Different upgrades include better gun sights, faster-firing machine guns, armor and maneuverability enhancements, and so on. One upgrade makes your missiles explode if they get close to a target, which means you don't even have to score a direct hit to take out most planes. In combat, you'll be able to order your wingmen around a bit, and each guy has a special ability, just like in the previous game. One wingman will come back and taunt enemies to give you some breathing room, a skill you'll probably never actually need. Another will go on an aggressive attack and take out a handful of enemies, which is much more useful. The third is a mechanic that will occasionally repair your plane, though unlike in the first game, you don't have to hit a sequence of onscreen buttons to perform the repairs--he just fixes it automatically at checkpoints.

The single-player campaign is pretty satisfying, though it won't take too long for players to bust through it. That's not automatically bad, as flying around and blowing up everything in sight using a variety of destructive tools is actually quite fun. There's also a multiplayer side to the game, and it offers a lot of different modes and options for solo flights, team games, and cooperative play. The catch is that there seem to be very few people playing the game online, and aside from a solo dogfight here and there, it seems impossible to find anyone playing in any of the other modes. For what it's worth, the multiplayer matches we were able to actually get into weren't very exciting. Many matches take place in skies filled with little power-up icons that you can collect to reload your weapons, repair your plane, get double damage, and so on. The power-ups just don't really fit with the vibe of the rest of the game and make the whole thing seem a little hokey. On top of that, if you have a laggy connection to other players, they'll skip around so badly that no one will be able to hit each other. Being able to play cooperatively through the campaign missions is an attractive offer, though, so it might be worth convincing a handful of your friends to get a copy so you can all play together.

more......

Great Battles of Rome - Recycled edutainment and terrible production values make this RTS survey of Roman history stale and simple

Slitherine Software is getting a lot of mileage out of Legion. It's now been five years since the British developer launched this real-time strategy game, yet the company continues to recycle its engine to retell the story of how the Roman Empire conquered the world. This time around, the game is a derivative little number from Black Bean Games called The History Channel: Great Battles of the Roman Empire. The theme, such as it is, is a tactical real-time strategy survey course of battles with the Carthaginians, Greeks, Persians, and loads of pesky barbarians. Although the content adeptly highlights the struggles of the veni, vidi, vici boys through nearly a thousand years of history, the advanced age of the engine and the stale, simplistic battles make this game feel as fresh as Caesar's toga after he was finished with the Gauls.


Lack of depth is the biggest problem. The Roman campaign is a shallow collection of battles rounded up by historical period and introduced by video-clip cutscenes presumably borrowed from History Channel documentaries. You steadily work your way through virtually all of Roman history, moving from the early years when Rome needed to subdue the Italian peninsula, to the wars against regional powers that characterize the glory days of the Republic and the Empire. However, battles generally seem to be approximations of what actually happened, which means that many engagements are presented without dates or much in the way of historical background. Every now and then you take on a battle rooted in history, such as the betrayal and murder of Coriolanus, but you wage a ton of generic assaults against the Latins, Etruscans, Volsci, Greeks, Gauls, Persians, and the like.

When you finish the Roman scenarios, a second campaign is unlocked in which you guide the Celts, but by that point the anonymous nature of most of the battles will have likely worn you out. Even if you ignore the lack of dates and real context, look-alike enemy troops drawn from only a few basic archetypes such as skirmishers and cavalry make most of the engagements appear exactly the same. Are you fighting the Samnites or the Hernici? Who knows, and better yet, who cares?

Battles themselves are so simplistic and vary so little that it doesn't really matter who you're fighting. This is a basic tactical RTS, where you simply hop from one battle to the other, arranging troops and issuing most commands before entering the fray. Scraps are mainly prearranged, in that most orders are set prior to entering the battlefield. Units can be bossed around after the fighting starts, although this is limited by the need to replenish the order-point bar of your in-game general each time you direct a unit. At any rate, the lack of command options both during the deployment phase and during the action makes the whole order thing sort of a moot point. Battles all play out roughly the same, given that there is only so much you can do when your tactical options are limited to a handful of variations on holding, rushing, as well as holding for a bit and then rushing. Strategizing is also a waste of time during many battles because you can often simply charge enemy lines mindlessly and still wind up shouting "Roma victa!" at the end of the day. At least most of the engagements fly by. You can wrap up an average battle in a couple of minutes (a pace that makes the one-on-one LAN multiplayer mode of play something of a joke), so at least you're not sitting around waiting very long for outcomes.

Army management between battles is at least a little more involved. Although there is no resource management or any need to construct buildings, you do earn denari after successful battles and use this cash to purchase new units needed to bolster your army. Buying smartly is a must because the scenarios get progressively tougher (albeit in a pretty leisurely fashion) as you move through the campaign, which requires you to field a strong selection of soldiers. Troops also gain experience during battles and can be trained in various skills as they increase in level. So you can trick out militia with the swordsman ability to buff attacks, give skirmishers the junior NCO attribute to boost morale during battles, and enhance generals with the leadership option that lets them issue more orders during the fray. There is a good selection of these abilities on offer across all of the different unit types, which gives the game something of an RPG feel. However, units share many of these characteristics, so it's not as if there's a laundry list of enhancements from which to choose. Also, these options are generally passive stat boosts that work behind the scenes to aid attacking and defending, which means that you don't have to actually choose to employ them. Consequently, these skills don't have any readily discernible effect on how things play out once the swords start crashing and the javelins are launched skyward.

more...........