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Friday, October 31, 2008

Playstation 3 "Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution"

One of the finest game strategy games on PC s are produced by Sid Meier. They make one of the most engaging civilization simulation video games around. Popular titles like Railroad Tycoon and Civilization have always continue to deliver the most heralded game play. Thus it no surprise that the company move their popular titles from the PCs genre toward PlayStation 3 platform. And a good job they did, 2K and Firaxis together manage to translate that PC experience successfully towards the Playstation 3 Platform.

In Sid Meier Civilization revolution game play, the idea is to take a civilization in the stone ages and through strategic planning built it up to the Space Age. When you choose which civilization will be your base, the leader of that civilization also have added bonus for your game play. For example if you chose Cleopatra, you might get additional interest on gold reserves, at the medieval age, population growth is increased by two additional percentages. There five difficulties level in this game. Use the first level as a guide. As you get more proficient, try the more difficulty level.

To play this video game, you can choose multiplayer mode using LAN or Single player mode. For those who had played this game under PCs, you will know the game can take several weeks to complete. But under Playstation 3, it doesn't last as long but not in the least as unsatisfying. In the Playstation 3 version. Micro managing of the game has also been removed. The graphics are good, bright, colorful and engaging with animation to the characters. The sound track are satisfying as well. Overall the transition form PCs based to the Next Gen game console like the Playstation 3 is well executed.

The controls of the game are also simple. You don't need to be a computer engineer to understand how they work. Though the game didn't have the depth of the Pcs platform, the game play in the Playstation 3 version is as satisfying and as well as entertaining.

Mercenaries 2 World in Flames - Great Game

Mercenaries 2 World in Flames is a new third person shooter from EA which was developed by Pandemic Studios. The game is the sequel to the 2005 hit: Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction.

Set in an open world environment in modern day Venezuela during a war broken out as a result of an oil dispute in the South American country. As a mercenary, the hospitable climate creates a great many opportunities.

The in-game story follows the main character, hired by a guy named Solano to rescue the top Venezuelan Army General, Carmona. However, once rescued, the person who hired you makes an attempt on your life to avoid payment.

You manage to escape, taking a bullet to the behind in doing so. The games focus then shifts to you planning revenge on Solano.

Taking control of a great many vehicles (thought to be around 170) and weapons, your character has the chance to build a private military company, recruiting your own mercenaries to help fight your cause.

The game is absolutely fantastic, but the them to the game, which came out of the media campaign is truly fantastic. Reminiscent of a hip hop style musical, the song talks about how sweet revenge will finally be. Performed by the Wojahn Brothers, the song is available on the Mercs 2 website and is called Oh No You Didn't.

Interestingly, on release of the game, EA took over the Last Stop petrol station in Finsbury Park London, where they transformed the station into a military bunker and gave away £20,000 worth of petrol.

Fable 2 Review

Introduction:

Fable 2, the long awaited sequel for the massively popular RPG 'Fable,' on the original Xbox. Massively denounced for its promised features and ridiculed developers, Peter has publicly stated that he has learned his mistakes and will offer a fully dynamic world this time around. Unfortunately, the only aspects of this game that are dynamic is the economy. There are a few things that might change the world depending on your alignment and reputation, but these subtle changes do not make a huge impact on the game environment. For example, you have a choice later in the game to destroy 'Oakvale,' if you decide to slaughter the town, you will eliminate the 'Temple of Light,' which almost ruins your chances to become good later in the game if you are fully evil. However, if you go with the good decisions, the 'Temple of Shadows' will be destroyed. This is predictable later in the game and there are very few moments where events like this occur. Unlike the first fable, this game offers two different schemes for alignment, corrupt or pure, and evil or good. Fortunately for these schemes, they do factor in neutrality and change your looks throughout the game in 9 unique appearances. Some of these look amazingly cool and you will either feel like a hero in the game, or an evil warrior that slaughters innocent children like no tomorrow.

Story:

You start out in the streets as a poor boy with your sister, looking to make money for this special device that grants a wish. Once you have received this item, your one wish is to live in a castle, due to the oncoming winter that you may not survive being homeless. You are awoken from your sleep as Lucien "the evil dictator" orders you to stand in a magic circle in his castle. Lucien shoots your sister and you because you are one of the four heroes of Albion. Your whole mission is to stop Lucien from resurrecting the spire and exacting revenge for killing your sister.

Gameplay:

Boy with a sword

The Game-Play aspect is much improved over its predecessor. It's fluent and simple to switch styles of combat, between ranged, magic, and combat. The targeting in the game is amazingly simple to use, and very accessible later in the game. Once you upgrade your characters styles, it is possible to auto-aim and sub target specific points on your enemy. The melee combat is deep and hard to master, but simple to use and efficient. The game allows you to button mash if necessary. Will combat was somewhat annoying to me; you must charge your spell up which takes around 5 seconds minimum. This process only allows you to use one spell at maximum capacity during a battle. Spells in this game do not offer enough variety, only taking back a few from the first game, some of the fan favorites are lost and offer no buffs whatsoever. After a battle is over you are rated on how well you dispatched your enemies and receive bonus experience, if you did well and used advanced techniques. You are able to create a combat style unique to your own character, by either ranged (skill), magic (will), or melee (strength). These three attributes encompass your characters abilities and create your hero in Albion. However these abilities can be maxed-out within a few days and do not offer variance or limits when playing, so your character cannot become specialized when playing with a buddy or various people over Xbox Live. This was the same with Fable 1, but it wasn't a co-op experience back then. The multi-player portion of the game is a huge let down. You are unable to use your unique character you've built in other people's games. This will promote players to stay in their world and play alone. Furthermore the camera of the online portion is ridiculous, you are unable to move it and both of the players must stay on one screen. I have played multiple games with friends and this camera has ruined the entire experience for me. Sometimes you are unable to move due to the camera, so they have integrated a teleport button just incase this happens. Fortunately the online experience has a few good things going for it. You are able to change the settings of how the experience and gold are distributed between the two players and the innovative way to the games lobby. The whole lobby is the world; you are able to chat to players in almost an MMORPG like experience. This is refreshing and a letdown due to how the games online component could possibly be great.

Fortunately you are able to do practically everything in the game with your buddy, If you are able to get someone to join your world. Unlockables in this game are difficult and unrewarding. I had spent over 4 hours looking for 50 silver keys around the game and received 50,000 gold for it. All of which is useless because the games economy is extremely easy to take advantage of. If you buy out every house in the game you will make 20,000 gold every 5 minutes. You are also able to cheat the game by changing your Xbox system clock and receiving billions. This ruins the whole experience of the game and is aggravating due to the crappy reward for all of the hard work. Most of the rewards earned can either be bought from the shop, or are inferior to equipment that you have already earned by doing a simple quest. Silver keys are easily found throughout the game and more than 75% of the chests only require 20 keys at most, and all of these chests have junk in them. Unfortunately the game is also cheated in other areas, such as experience. You do not have to fight one bit in the game to max out all of your abilities. All you have to do is become rich and buy your way to the top, due to the unbelievable experience potions that offer nearly 70,000 exp for only 4,000 gold. Once you have bought up the stock, you are able to sleep a week and re-purchase the potions again. This ruins the whole game because players who cheat the game with the system-clock can also just glitch their characters to the top. The dog in this game is fairly smart but sometimes has trouble navigating over obstacles and you will find yourself running in circles trying to find its dig spot. This will become painfully obvious when you follow it and all of a sudden the icon stating, "dig spot" disappears and you are 100 yards off the beaten path. There is no mini-map in the game, instead a breadcrumb trail was added that leads you to your current quest. This is accommodating, but the trail sometimes doesn't know where its going and you will find yourself running the wrong way multiple times and asking yourself "WTF Q+A?" The environment has its ups and downs; you are able to explore 90% of what you see in the world. I sometimes get lost in it and I've spent around 30 hours in the game.

However, you are able to fast-travel, and not that it's a bad thing, but players who do so are missing out on the great game world. All of the buildings and shops are purchasable, even little cottages you find throughout the game-world can be bought out. The civilians of Albion are at the mercy of your doing, you are able to set rent, and evict npcs if you will. It's great watching bewildered citizens roam the streets, asking themselves why and where they will get their next paycheck. Surprisingly one thing that I thought would be in bulk in this game was the amount of clothing and appearance options. Unfortunately this isn't the case, it actually has less options than the original Fable. This is horrible due to it being an online experience this time around. I for 1 would love to have a unique looking character with rare loot received from a dungeon. However fable isn't that type of game, and appearance options are secondary to the actual game, it would be nice to actually have something others would have a hard time getting though. Not be a pessimist, but the only accomplishment this game offers game play wise is the innovative world lobby that is almost like an "MMORPG," and the lush free-roaming landscape. This game is far better than the current RPGS on the 360, but the game is just riddled with bugs and could be so much better than it is in its current form.

Graphics:

Graphically the game is great, very smooth, and the environment only extends to that fantasy immersion. It's no Elder Scrolls IV, but it is up there in the graphics department. The textures through the world look amazing and the art direction is top notch. Every square foot of the world feels like a piece of art. I couldn't have asked for a better world than what was given in this installment of the fable franchise.

Sound Design:

Sound design in the game is horrible; there will be delayed sounds and expressions. This will make the game feel like it's skipping on your 360. It's because it is, the game skips like no other, sometimes actually freezing the game for a few moments when trying to navigate to your start menu. Personally this game made my Xbox sound like a generator with a fan and a few rocks inside. Although the voice actors are done quite well, every person in the game sounds like they're from Great Britain for some reason. Sound effects in the game are perfect, it's almost hard to tell like sounds and it doesn't sound repetitive.

Man with dog

Final Thoughts:

This game has many flaws that would scare away most gamers if they knew them, but it also provides great entertainment. It is fun, but not necessarily worth a buy unless you enjoy replaying games. The replayability for this game is great due to the astounding amount of ways you can play it. This is not a game that you play by yourself for hundreds of hours, it is a game that you get on once in a while, do a side mission, and hopefully it doesn't get boring. The game doesn't reward you enough to keep playing once you have unlocked everything the game. I regret buying it just because of these reasons. I have completed the game 100% and I don't see myself playing it anytime in the near future. Once and if 'Lion Head' fixes the online play, it is definitely a buy.

Is Guitar Hero really good?

What could be better than living the life of a rock star? Who cares if your fans are all in your living room, you are the man, or woman! Into the world of video games has come the latest interactive game. Guitar hero takes you from the role of interested observer to full rock and roll participant. In other video games, you have a controller and varying views that draw you into game play but with the invention of the guitar controller, you get a full-on experience tough to find in other games.

Guitar Hero has come out with six different games so far for a plethora of platforms. It was made available for Playstation 2 & 3, Xbox 360, and PC and more recently for the Nintendo DS. With the exception of the DS, game play and peripherals have been much the same on all platforms. Of course, due to the size of the DS a full size guitar controller was not practical so the creators came up with a guitar grip that plugs into the second slot of the console. One major difference between platforms is that Guitar Hero 3 can be played online with the Xbox 360 console only.

Overall, the impact of this game has been phenomenal no matter which console it is played on. Game play includes different levels of difficulty, tour and arcade mode, cooperative play as well as competitive.

Guitar Hero was challenged last year with the release of Rock Band, a similar game idea but one that incorporated the whole band. You could play guitar, bass, drums or sing with Harmonix answer to Guitar Hero. The challenge would be short lived, as the equipment did not quite measure up.

Soon, RedOctane and Activision will follow up this challenge with Guitar Hero World Tour. Kids and parents alike have been waiting with baited breath for the latest release in the Guitar Hero family. The play promises to be intense as drums and vocals are added. Another plus is that though the new guitar is awesome you do not have to purchase it to play. If you have the earlier version of the game, the guitar will be compatible. They have also announced that for Xbox 360 the Rock Band instruments will also work. This is not the case for Playstation 3, though Sony says they are working on making the units compatible.

Guitar Hero World Tour may very well be on the Christmas list of all little girls and boys. If past performance is any indication that is, in 2008 Activision released that total sales from the Guitar Hero franchise has exceeded one billion dollars. The craze has led some bar and grills to have a Guitar Hero night instead of karaoke. One in New York reported that business triples on those nights.

It is obvious that Guitar Hero has just begun to make an impact on the kids that play and sounds like their parents as well. A terrific idea that has so far been perfectly executed. Look for the new release soon and expect that all the kids are going to want one.

Far Cry 2 Versus Fable 2

The first question that I had to face this week is: Far Cry 2, or Fable 2? Well I'm getting both, but if your a little tight on cash, this post should give you insight on the games strengths and weaknesses.

Similarities: These games are slightly similar, they aren't linear, they both have an open world, and an involving story line. Both of these games contain multiplayer and gives you the choice to change the way the game plays. Meaning doing one thing in the story, can directly affect what your character does later in the game.

Far Cry 2 Comparisons : This game contains a much larger world than Fable 2. It puts you in a 7x7 km area to do what you will. The online multiplayer allows up to 16 players in multiple game modes. There is a powerful map editor system that could consume hundreds of hours, guaranteed to make every map unique. The game can be re-played many more times than fable, due to the way it's an open world and the online competitions. This game is a first person shooter that provides more realism and better online play than Fable 2. However, the first two installments of the xbox-far-cry series were relatively mediocre and linear, nothing like the first installment on the PC. This game looks like a landmark in open world gameplay.

Fable 2 Comparisons : This game shines in innovation, it gives a 2 player online co-op mode. Each player is supposedly unique and the story is very intriguing. The game is a third person action adventure role-playing game that provides innovative controls, and gameplay. The depth of the first game shined through to many users on fan boards, creating a wholesome community. That same community still co-exists with this next installment of the franchise, offering responsible and mature players over Xbox Live.

My thoughts: I believe if you are an fps junkie, Far Cry 2 is your game. If you prefer rpg's and innovative gameplay, go for Fable 2. Both of these will be great games, do not worry about your purchases. You are guaranteed to get your moneys worth with these games.