TOP PC GAMES

Preview: The new design of the Xbox 360 dashboard

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 03:55:00 -0700

The current Xbox 360 dashboard is kind of a clusterf*ck. Netflix, Hulu, and ESPN integration are great (as I use them pretty much daily), but a redesign is clearly needed. You can point the finger at Microsoft for its state of disarray, but really the madness can be attributed simply to the rules of Chaos Theory: the belief that everything constantly moves from order to disorder.

When the last Xbox 360 dashboard makeover (NXE) arrived, everything was peaches n' cream. Avatars were populating like rabbits, and Facebook, Zune, and Netflix found a nice balance among the Xbox Live marketplace. Everything was in order.

Then Twitter, Last.fm, and Hulu joined the mix, the XBL marketplace exploded with content, Kinect finally launched, and thus the chaos began. Longtime 360 owners have learned to deal with how all these crazy things work. But for those unfortunate to have just stumbled into the dash, finding the latest and greatest through a sea of tabs and ads can be a chore. Oh, and for the 10+ million Kinect users out there who were promised voice and gesture connectivity innovation -- the kind the world has never seen -- well, don't get me started.

Performance, discoverability, and voice. These three simple things were etched into my brain as Albert Penello, Sr. Director of product management and planning at Microsoft, walked me through me the new dashboard last week. After meeting with Penello to check out this fall's dashboard refresh, I have to say Microsoft might finally have all the entropy they’ve created under control.

With the new dash fired up, speed and performance improvements were instantly noticeable. Whatever your navigation tool of choice is -- be it controller or gestures/voice for Kinect users -- getting from one end of the dash to the other is lightning-quick. Everything has a home under a much-better-structured tab system. Friends now fall under the social tab, and all the apps you’ve come to love or hate are under an appropriate app tab that “potentially opens up the possibility to do non-gaming apps," Penello said. It's not in the plans as of now, he added, but is definitely something Microsoft has thought about or is open to, at the very least.

Along with performance, Kinect integration is another aspect of the new dash I was taken back by. While the NXE eventually shoehorned in some functionality, support was very limited outside of starting and stopping videos with voice or pantomiming to pop up a separate interface. With the latest update, everything on the dash is Kinect-enabled. I watched Penello slide tabs over with his hands while sitting down as effortlessly as he would have with a controller.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the Kinect support is just how well voice commands work. Like the gesture support, everything on the dash is accessible via speech. "The voice stuff is getting better and better all the time," Penello said. "A lot of the learning for voice is in the service; it's up in the cloud." And speaking of the cloud, it's still coming along with roaming profiles and some other unnamed gaming features.

While the new look is quite sexy, it would be a complete waste if Microsoft couldn’t deliver on discoverability with the new dash. For starters, the new layout -- which is very similar to their Windows Phone 7 "Metro" setup -- is extremely easy on the eyes. No longer do ads clutter up the navigation experience, nor are you required to scroll endlessly though sections to find the latest deal of the week. Everything is organized, and thanks to Bing Search, can be discovered in a matter of seconds.

As the cornerstone of this for the new dash, Bing Search makes finding content quick and reliable via voice or text. If it exists on XBLA, Zune, Netflix, or any other service on the network, Bing will find it. At the moment, Bing is limited to title search -- it can't handle in-depth searches on categories such as actors, directors, and genres -- but the possibility wasn’t ruled out. One thing that is cool about the search results is being able to have it display only movies, music or games via Kinect, simply by saying “Xbox show movies” or “Xbox show games.”

My only concern with Bing, right now, is how it delivers its results. The user interface isn't final, and thus there is currently no way of telling which service content is being selected from. For example, the show 30 Rock exists on both Netflix and Hulu, but how Bing will separate the search in case of multiples is still undecided. However, it’s still quite amazing to be able to find content without having to enter any applications.

Outside of design and functionality aesthetics, the biggest addition for gamers is the new “beacons” feature. Essentially, beacons are game invites that don’t expire. Want to play Halo or watch Netflix with friends, but don’t want to wait for them to get online to invite them? Set a beacon. Your friends will get an alert -- called a “toast” -- anywhere they are signed into Live (Windows Phone 7, Internet, and Facebook). They’re a great way to organize all online activities.
For the Achievement whore, Gamerscore will now be tied to Facebook without the help of a third-party program. Don't worry about being bombarded with updates, though, as the process is completely manual. Get a rare Achievement and want to rub it in your friends’ faces? The choice is yours. One interesting thing about Facebook that Penello did discuss -- more as a vision than an actual feature -- would be the ability of sharing thoughts about a movie you just watched, straight from the dashboard, rather than logging onto Facebook afterwards and typing it up.

Unfortunately, the much-anticipated Live TV, On Demand, UFC, and YouTube features weren’t ready to be shown. Microsoft is absolutely committed to delivering live TV and promised to have great announcements this fall. If they are as equally executed as the rest of the new dashboard, then Xbox 360 users have a lot to be excited for later this year.
What do you think of this redesign? Order achieved?

Source : http://www.destructoid.com/preview-the-new-design-of-the-xbox-360-dashboard-211133.phtml

Review: BloodRayne: Betrayal

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 03:53:00 -0700

Very few people can claim to love BloodRayne as a franchise, and there's a reason for that. The original titles were critically derided, the series of Uwe Boll movies are particularly grotesque, and the comic books are obscure as Hell. However, when someone's looking for fans of BloodRayne, they need look no further than myself.

So, when news of a new BloodRayne game dropped, I was beyond excited. The fact that it appeared to be taking its cues from Castlevania was an added bonus, and the stage was set for a game that would finally make BloodRayne a respectable series as opposed to an eternally guilty pleasure.
However, this game's name -- Betrayal -- is stunningly appropriate, because I feel like I've been stabbed in the back.
BloodRayne: Betrayal is a sidescrolling platform/beat 'em up game that aims to take the old school approach to difficulty in games. Unfortunately, the "old school approach" means taking gameplay from a time when challenge wasn't about tight design and strategy, but about using broken mechanics to artificially inflate the danger, while lazily throwing as much crap at the player as possible. If that was WayForward's goal, then it passed with flying colors.
The biggest problem with Betrayal is that its controls are entirely too sloppy for a game that requires very precise commands. A big part of this problem lies in the art style. Games that take a hand-drawn visual style often feel "floaty" due to the indulgently animated characters and lack of distinct attack boundaries. There's a lacking sense of tactility to the fighting when compared to something that uses sprites or polygons, and if Betrayal's combat was insistent on being such a chaotic mess, it really ought to have sacrificed the pretty comic book aesthetic in order to take a graphical approach that complimented, rather than directly hindered, the gameplay.
This problem is exacerbated due to the fact that Rayne controls like garbage. For a start, she can't simply walk, instead breaking into a full sprint the moment you nudge the D-Pad (and you have to use the D-Pad, because analog sticks confuse her). She also cannot stop running without a lengthy "skid" animation, which makes her utterly useless for the game's myriad, ridiculously punishing platform sections. To give us a character that can't move without sprinting and can't stop without skidding, then throwing her into platform sections where moving ledges are thinner than she is, seems almost to satirize the problems inherent in games that put style over substance.

Betrayal's awful lack of appreciable control is carried over into the combat, which can quite accurately be described as a cluster of the purest fuck. There's a fairly predictable formula to the game, with each level splitting itself evenly between platform sections and miniature "arena" areas where a pre-set number of enemies spawn. I'm having a hard time deciding which section is the least fun.
As stated earlier, WayForward took the Battletoads approach to game design, where a developer feels it can just throw a ton of enemies around and exploit broken design elements in order to call itself tough. For starters, Rayne can't block attacks, and her only means of defense is a worthless dash move that propels her a pathetically short distance and usually just throws her into fresh trouble. Whenever Rayne gets knocked down, she takes too long to get back up, allowing the half-dozen enemies on-screen to ready a new attack. It's not uncommon to get knocked down, then get knocked down again as soon as Rayne recovers. In fact, this can happen repeatedly, all because WayForward thought a lengthy recovery animation was more important than creating a protagonist that was halfway useful.
Rayne is laggy due to the extra hand-drawn animations, unresponsive for reasons unknown to me, and seems willing to fight the player's commands to her own detriment. Even something as simple as turning around to face an enemy behind you seems impossible to do in a swift and efficient manner. She has some contextual attacks that usually just get her hurt -- for instance, she'll stomp on a downed enemy, which is rather useless when you want to attack the opponent that's still standing up and happens to be stood next to the grounded one. Rayne can hit an enemy, then hold a button to suck its blood for health, but if the potential victim is stood next to a creature that cannot be drained, Rayne invariably attempts to grab the one that blocks her attacks, which opens her up to a counter-move from the foe player's really wanted. Don't even get me started on the random attacks that have forward moment even when Rayne's stood still, which is great for sending her off ledges and toward her doom.

There's not even a lot of depth to the game. Combat is only slightly more advanced than Streets of Rage (and half as tight), and despite taking some cues from Castlevania, it lacks anything that made Konami's games so great. There are no real upgrades or level gains (outside of the option to boost your gun ammo or health with every five hidden skulls collected), the expertly designed maps are replaced by dull left-to-right levels, and the precise controls are replaced by something far too watery to deserve a place among the sidescrolling greats.
The only things that Betrayal copies verbatim from Castlevania are a range of small, annoying enemies that bob up and down while traveling across the screen. Yes, of all the things to steal from Castlevania, BloodRayne: Betrayal decided to steal Medusa Head enemies -- universally considered among the worst enemies in gaming history. The fact that WayForward had such a rich variety of excellent games to draw from, and came away with only Medusa Heads under its arm, confirms to me that the developers were far more eager to create an unfair, frustrating trainwreck of a game above all else.
I will at least say that some of the boss fights, as hard as they are, actually approach something resembling conscious gameplay design. They're pretty tough, and often just as chaotic as regular combat, but the addition of appreciable patterns and worthwhile tactics make for a brief respite from the absolute garbage circus that makes up the rest of the game. Defeating the boss monsters actually manages to feel satisfying, which is about the only time BloodRayne ever deigns to encourage positive emotions.

The final straw came for me in Chapter 13 of 15, a level already considered by many to be the point where Betrayal crosses a very real line. Rayne has to fight ghosts while head-stomping on a bunch of respawning flies. One false move and she falls to her death. These ghosts can apparently attack without requiring attack animations, and the laggy controls means that it's incredibly difficult to transition from attacking the ghosts to stomping on the flies. Not to mention, you get hit just once and you'll die. Add that to the already worthless control scheme and it becomes the point where I decided Betrayal had thieved enough of my time, and I bid adieu to what is, without a doubt, one of the most deeply unpleasant and miserable experiences of my gaming life.
I have no regrets. I'm sure there'd be some twisted, prurient sense of pride in completing the game, but it's not worth it, especially with the brutal scoring system that docks points for everything and delights in slapping an "F" grade on anybody but the most practiced and perfect of players. It's quite fitting that an already mean spirited game would go out of its way to discourage players and tell them that, even though they just finally beat a difficult level and should rejoice, they still technically failed because they didn't beat it quick enough. Some gamers will celebrate such a harsh and punishing game, but the less perverse among us do not believe that fun is measured by how much of your time and energy is thoroughly wasted on busted, lazy gameplay.
All of this is punctuated by the complete lack of personality that BloodRayne features. The game certainly looks gorgeous and there's plenty of blood, but the gore seems a cynical and shallow mockery of the sassy silliness that made the series what it was. Rayne's original personality is completely gone, replaced by a flat and featureless character. The story barely exists and tells a rather boring story about a man who turns into a bird, and there's just no raunchy, ridiculous humor to any of it. It's a po-faced, bland affair, and the beautiful graphics only serve to contrast the ugliness apparent in everything else.

I've had my ass kicked by many games over the years. Sometimes, such as with Demon's Souls or Metal Arms: Glitch in the System, I loved it. Other times, as with many of those crippled "old school" games, I've not been a fan. However, BloodRayne: Betrayal is the only game I've played where I've actively been put in a lasting bad mood. Betrayal is a game that actively alters my disposition, to the point where I don't feel happy for quite some time afterwards. It's an obnoxious experience that goes out of its way to make players feel bad, proudly reveling in the kind of gameplay that's considered old fashioned for a very good reason.
There are those out there that will join Betrayal in its revelry -- the kind of people who claim Battletoads isn't difficult and expect adoration for their gaming prowess. The kind of people who think that members of their preferred gender will find them intensely attractive because they find Ninja Gaiden to be so easy. Those people are a dying breed, and BloodRayne: Betrayal is a vestigial relic from an ignorant age, despite its graphics attempting to make one think otherwise. Its gameplay is ripped straight from the NES era, and it's high time everybody recognized that 95% of the NES' games were shit. If Betrayal was released in the eighties, it would not be in the rarer 5%.
Awful design, a counter-intuitive art style, and an obscenely cheap approach to difficulty makes BloodRayne: Betrayal a game that should be avoided by all but the most masochistic and deranged of gamers. The deep revulsion that this game inspires within me cannot accurately be described, but it is measured only by the intense, burning disappointment I feel as a fan of the series. WayForward can do so much better, and better is what BloodRayne needed.

Source : http://www.destructoid.com/review-bloodrayne-betrayal-210976.phtml

Review: Dead or Alive Dimensions

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 03:47:00 -0700

The Dead or Alive series has never quite made it to the top tier of world-favorite fighting games. Despite having a large, dedicated fanbase, it's always hovered somewhere below Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Tekken, though well above other great, lesser-appreciated series like Darkstalkers, Fatal Fury, and Guilty Gear, in terms of sheer popularity.

That's why I can't help but feel doubly sad for Dead or Alive Dimensions. Once again, the series has been shown up by a "bigger" series. Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition was a 3DS launch title, is one of the most beloved fighting games ever, and it looks nearly as good on the handheld as it did on the PS3/360.
On the other hand, Dead of Alive Dimensions has been released during the 3DS' first official lull in sales, is from a franchise that few Nintendo-loyalists (and therefore, current 3DS owners) have ever played before, and it looks much more like an O.G. Xbox title than a PS3/360 game.
With all that going against it, is Dead or Alive Dimensions doomed to fail, or is this the start of the series' ascension to top-tier status?

Dead of Alive Dimensions (3DS)
Developer: Team Ninja
Publisher: Koei Tecmo
Released: May 14, 2011
MSRP: $39.99
There is so much going on with Dead or Alive Dimensions, I scarcely know where to begin. Normally when in doubt, I start with a game's story. In this case, that might just confuse me (and you) even more, but I guess I'll give it a go.
Dead or Alive Dimensions' storyline (which is a retelling of the story of Dead or Alive 1-4) is so incomprehensible that it makes Xavier: Renegade Angel look like Blue's Clues. Fourteen-year-old ninja girls get possessed (and promptly un-possessed) by forces that are never explained; a guy named Fame Douglas makes a speech about how fighting tournaments can change the world (right before he is assassinated); little sisters get smacked in the face by their older brothers after absolutely no provocation; evil clones explode; good clones suddenly try to kill their best friends with psychic fireballs; and a white-haired lady in a skin-tight leather one-piece tells a man she just met that it's time for "Madness or death! The choice is yours!" before slapping him into unconsciousness.
These are some of the more comprehensible high points of the game's narrative. Nearly every single line of the game's story mode is Barry Burton-level ridiculous. As long as you know that going in, you may have a good time with it. I sure did.
Another plus for the game's story mode is that it does well to slowly teach you the ins-and-outs of Dead or Alive's signature fighting style. The game works on the rock-paper-scissors principle, but with hundreds of different kinds of rocks, papers, and cutting apparatus.
Like most fighting games, normal strikes (both punches and kicks) are nullified from blocking. What makes Dead or Alive different is that all characters can perform a type of offensive blocking called a "hold," which will counter a punch or kick and dish out damage to the aggressor. Likewise, blocking and holds are vulnerable to throws, while throws are easily crushed by punches and kicks.
That's just the basics. Mix in the standard high-medium-low guessing games found in most 3D fighters, along with throw reversals, throw combos, juggle combos, special moves like teleports and projectiles, environmental hazards, and tag-team mode, and you've just scratched the surface of what Dead or Alive's fast-paced, risk-reward fighting system has to offer.

So that's what Dead or Alive is in a nutshell. When it comes to specifics, Dead or Alive Dimensions is an amalgamation of the four prior games in the series, with the addition of bosses that were previously unplayable, a bunch of 3DS-specific features, and online play.
Every feature of the 3DS gets used at some point, including the gyroscopic camera control (for viewing backgrounds and collectible in-game figurines), motions sensor (for making said figurines jiggle), StreetPass (for downloading ghost battles against opponents you pass on the street), SpotPass (which allows you to download new costumes and unannounced content), the 3DS microphone (used to call in Samus from the Metroid series for an assist while on a special Other M-themed stage), and of course, the signature, glasses-free 3D display.
I'm usually all for making full use of the 3DS' special display, but with this game, I kept it off most of the time. With the 3D on, things tend to look a tad ghostly -- more so than they do with Super Street Fighter IV 3D -- and the frame rate is cut in half. With the 3D off, everything looks firm and solid, and the game runs at a constant 60 frames per second. 3D is fun to leave on during the bizarre cut scenes, but during gameplay, frame rate trumps the third dimension.

I'm also a big fan of how the game controls on the 3DS. I know not all of you will be, but I found the system's tight, tiny button and d-pad layout to be perfect for four-button fighters such as this. That might have something to do with the fact that I've been playing Super Street Fighter IV 3D on a daily basis since the 3DS launched, so I'm really comfortable with the 3DS by now.
With fighting games, I've always said that people will prefer whatever they're used to, be it a stick or a control pad, and that's not different with this title. As for 3DS-specific controls, you can perform any combo by selecting it from your character's move list, which is always present on the bottom screen. I think it's taking things a little too far, to make even the most complex combos in the game available at the touch of a button, but if that helps non-fighting fans to enjoy the game, I'm not going to hate on them for it.
As for the game's online mode, so far I've only played with people from my 3DS friends list, and I've barely experienced any lag. As for the online combat itself, it comes in two forms: one-to-one combat against an online opponent, or co-op tag team missions against CPU-controlled challengers.
As much as I enjoy fighting other people, I think I enjoyed teaming up with a friend against the CPU even more. It's a nice design decision that completing these tag team missions unlocks additional content in the game, like costumes and figurines. Some of the later missions are really challenging, and I think it will be a long time before my friends and I beat them all.

Speaking of which, I think it will be an even longer time before I unlock all of the content in Dead or Alive Dimensions. There are 1000 figurines to unlock, god knows how many costumes, and 25 characters (with a 26th rumored that I still haven't found yet). It's sort of irritating that upon first booting up the game, so few of those 25 or 26 playable characters are available, but it only takes a few hours of the game's story mode to unlock most of them.
The problem with that is, once you unlock some of those previously unplayable boss characters, it really throws off the balance. Though high-level players will likely have no problem taking out human opponents utilizing some of the heavy projectile-dependent boss characters, newcomers and relatively casual Dead or Alive players are likely to become annoyed with getting spammed by blue lasers fired off by lazy online opponents.
I have a few other niggling complaints about the games, like the lack of animation in a lot of story mode's cut scenes, the lack of instant rematch against strangers in online combat, and a pervading sense of corny, tacky, yuckiness that pervades throughout this (and every other) Dead or Alive title. For the most part, I can laugh off the impossible boob physics, the ridiculous cultural stereotyping, and general sense of idiocy here for the unintentionally amusing kitsch that it is, but too much of that stuff in one sitting will make you feel like your brain is shrinking.

Bottom line: Dead or Alive Dimensions is a really fun fighting game, one that this old Street Fighter loyalist has really grown to love. It doesn't have quite the same level of variety among the playable characters as my favorite fighting game on the 3DS, but it makes up with that with loads of unique content, single-player, versus, and co-op re-playability. Plus, a seemingly endless amount of unlockables and modes.
With the promise of tons of free DLC on the way, and the relatively lag-free online combat, it will be a while before I put down Dead or Alive Dimensions.

Source : http://www.destructoid.com/review-dead-or-alive-dimensions-201864.phtml

Review: The Gunstringer

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 03:44:00 -0700

A skeleton cowboy marionette driven by revenge. Troma's Lloyd Kaufman driving dangerously. A beautiful, unlockable picture of our own Hamza Aziz. A gator that has sex with a lumberjack. Wait, hold on... what now?

Yup, this is definitely a Twisted Pixel game. Welcome to The Gunstringer, easily one of the most fun and original titles for Kinect.

With The Gunstringer, Twisted Pixel have woven together story and gameplay in a way no Kinect game developer has been able to do to date. It's a clever setup: you control The Gunstringer’s marionette with one hand, moving him through a stageplay as an audience -- hilariously captured as live-action video -- watches on. Using your other hand, you'll control an on-screen six-shooter reticule, taking aim to "paint" up to six targets. Pulling your arm up to your shoulder (the motion it would make in response to firearm recoil) lets loose a barrage of bullets.

Being an “on-rails shooter,” you won’t have to move The Gunstringer in a 3D space. Instead, Twisted Pixel guides you forward through the experience, and you’re tasked with moving moving The Gunstringer left and right, and in some cases up, down, and jerking your hand upwards to make him jump. Between articulating The Gunstringer's movements with one hand, and aiming and firing with another, things can surely get tricky. During some of the more demanding sections of the game, it gets a bit like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time.

Fortunately, the Kinect sensor does a good job of keeping up with your actions, which makes playing The Gunstringer both fun and satisfying. The gimmick of moving a puppet back and forth with your hand clicks quickly, as your brain is fast to make sense of the natural action. The “paint and shoot” mechanic also works extremely well, not entirely dissimilar to Q-Entertainment’s shot at Kinect, Child of Eden. Really, it’s not a control scheme that couldn’t have been mapped to a controller; The Gunstringer often feels like parts of Twisted Pixel’s controller-based Comic Jumper. Admittedly, though, the controller-free experience gives the game an entirely different, fun, and welcome feel. That rubbing-your-belly-and-patting-your-head feeling I mentioned earlier goes a long way towards adding a layer of depth and challenge to the experience that you might not get with traditional controls.

It doesn’t come without a trade-off, though. While I’m still surprised by the accuracy of the Kinect sensor, and its tracking is mostly on point, it’s certainly not perfect. The “floaty” feel and small disconnect between your hands and on-screen actions is present, as it is with many Kinect games that try to match one-to-one tracking. This becomes really obvious when you’re required to quickly move The Gunstringer away from an obstacle, or gently guide him through a maze of booby traps with minor motions. It never becomes frustrating to the point of completely eliminating fun from the equation, but I ran into more than a few situations than I would have liked where I was blaming my failures on the hardware.

Great news about The Gunstringer is that it has an “Activity level” of “sitting-standing.” What this means is that compared to something like Ubisoft’s Your Shape: Fitness Evolved (which has an activity level of “bust your fat ass”), don’t expect to break a sweat playing The Gunstringer. While keeping your arms raised to move the puppet and fire your guns can get exhausting during a marathon session (e.g., when you have to review it and meet a deadline), any human gameplay session shouldn’t leave you wanting to take a nap. Unfortunately, while the game advertises “sitting” gameplay, I didn’t have much luck in that department. It worked, with the game recognizing that I was in front of the television and trying to play, but I found that the accuracy took a hit. Your mileage may vary depending on your setup (and maybe your height, how tall your seat is, etc.), but I ended up playing the entire game on my feet.

As with most Twisted Pixel games, there’s a ton of content here, including a handful of story-based chapters and the developer’s usual heap of unlockable content. The content is generally unlocked using cash earned for your in-game performance, so you’re encouraged to head back into levels you’ve previously completed to beef up your performance. (Bonus: there’s a photo of Destructoid’s own Hamza Aziz to purchase; sorry, he’s wearing clothes.) While you could probably blow through all of the main content in a few hours, these extras (as well as a tough-as-nails “hardcore” mode) kept me invested for quite a bit longer. You can even play the game cooperatively, which could add another set of playthroughs if you’re lucky enough to have friends who like being with you.

One glance at any of the game’s key art would probably be a dead giveaway that Twisted Pixel’s trademark sense of irreverent humor marks The Gunstringer’s writing, visuals, and sound. The game’s tutorial level features a skeleton cowboy puppet who shoots up an inflatable wavy tube man. Later, you face off against a creature that’s a result of sexual relations between a lumberjack and an alligator. I’m going to stop there, but you get where I’m going. Once again, Twisted Pixel manges to create a completely fresh set of likable, original characters, which is refreshing in a medium where gruff voices, wide shoulders, and fist-bumping machismo is the norm. Admittedly, some of the humor in The Gunstringer misses its mark, but all will be forgiven when you lay eyes on the game’s jaw-dropping live-action conclusion.

The Gunstringer is a great example of what talented developers can do with Microsoft’s Kinect technology when they think creatively. Sure, it’s easy enough to mimic what others have been doing with motion controls for years. And to be fair, The Gunstringer doesn’t do all that much that couldn’t have been done with the Wii’s or PlayStation 3’s motion controls. But Twisted Pixel’s original characters and oddball sense of humor -- married with enjoyable gameplay -- add up to a special gameplay experience that’s worth your time if you own a Kinect.

Source : http://www.destructoid.com/review-the-gunstringer-211161.phtml

Break everything you own with Hulk Hogan on Kinect

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 03:39:00 -0700

Panic Button Games will soon unleash Hulkamania via Hulk Hogan's Main Event, and those of you whom reserve at GameStop will be given a pre-order t-shirt. The game will be exclusive to the Kinect, which of course means it intends to be a full-body, motion controlled wrestling game. The con
cept is actually kind of neat. You create your own wrestler via a character creator (like many wrestling games,) but you will receive training from Hulk Hogan himself in the ways of showmanship and crowd pleasing.

The game will feature 50+ moves, head-to-head multi-player and online leaderboards. Most of this isn't entirely new information, but we do have a release date now. Prepare yourself, for Hulkamania will be upon us October 11th.

Source : http://www.destructoid.com/break-everything-you-own-with-hulk-hogan-on-kinect-211508.phtml

Review: Hard Reset

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 03:36:00 -0700

What happens when former Bulletstorm and The Witcher 2 developers club together to make a first-person shooter about insane robots? Well, if Hard Reset is anything to go by, you get something very promising indeed.

Hard Reset has gained attention for its bold visual style and hardcore gameplay, but being a brand new IP in the PC indie market, it was always going to be a hit-or-miss risk. Fortunately, it's a risk that has most certainly paid off.
Those who have played Hard Reset will talk about its difficulty, but by far the hardest aspect of the game is working out what on Earth it's supposed to be about. Fully voiced comic book cutscenes open each level to present the narrative, but it's rather impregnable stuff. There's something about a "company" and artificial intelligence, with the robotic enemies that make up the entire game seeming to factor very little into the actual plot. I found the cutscenes annoying after a while, as they didn't really add anything to the game, and served only to waste time between cybernetic killing sprees.
In all truth, any narrative element can be quite safely skipped and nothing will be missed. It is but a distraction from the real point of the game -- intense combat against hundreds of violent robots. In this endeavor, Flying Wild Hog has most assuredly delivered. As is quite fitting for former members of People Can Fly, Hard Reset bears many similarities to the classic PC shooter Painkiller, presenting as it does hordes of swarming enemies with little else getting in the way of its over-the-top, adrenaline-pumping combat.
Hard Reset brings back the ideal of the "old school" shooter. Cover, regenerating health, and the fancy gimmicks of the modern shooter have been cast aside in favor of a game that focuses exclusively on the very fundamentals that made first-person-shooters what they are. It also resurrects the tough gameplay that such an era was known for. Hard Reset's robots are among the most vicious, aggressive enemies I've ever fought in a game, as they unrelentingly chase players through entire levels, swarm in droves, and deal plenty of damage to boot. Playing on Normal will offer some hefty resistance.

The challenge is a fair one, however. Despite the brutality of the game's enemies, no fight feels truly unreasonable. So long as players prioritize their targets, keep moving, and make the most of their weapon variety, even the stiffest competition can be put down. That doesn't mean it's not hectic, however. The ferocity of the enemies cannot be underestimated, and many of the huge arena-like conflicts will end with players breathing a sigh of relief and taking a moment to recollect their thoughts.
The player gets two weapons for the duration of the game -- the bullet-spewing CLN gun and the electricity-based NRG weapon. Despite the apparently limited arsenal, both weapons can be upgraded to house different modes, making each of the two firearms far more versatile. For instance, the CLN can be upgraded to become a shotgun, grenade and rocket launcher, or deposit mines -- with players able to make the gun transform between each mode on a whim. Meanwhile, the NRG gun can fire electric mortar shells, spray lightning, or be used as a railgun. Each of these modifications can be further upgraded with new properties, and the player can also boost his own health, ammo capacity and shield strength.
These upgrades are paid for at upgrade stations using NANO earned via kills and found littered throughout the levels. Each stage features multiple secret areas where large NANO caches are available, and some of these positions are quite fiendishly hidden. That said, there's enough in-game cash within easy reach for players to piece together a worthy selection of upgrades, some of which are damn-near essential for facing the game's most difficult battles.

Hard Reset's strength comes from its undiluted purity of gameplay. It commits to presenting a certain style of shooter and never deviates from that course, only evolving in terms of how big its combat sequences grow and how much the increasingly devastating robots up their ante. Those with fond memories of older FPS games will feel right at home with what Hard Reset offers and ought to revel in the consistent level of high octane carnage it delivers. There's an unquestionable satisfaction in each fight, especially when the final bot has exploded and the player stands among various steel limbs and burnt-out hulls, surprised to somehow be alive.
That said, Hard Reset isn't without its frustrations. The biggest issue stems from the fact that the player character moves a touch too slowly for the fast pace of the game. Sidestepping charges from large enemies or avoiding projectiles become near-impossible tasks considering how swift everything is in comparison. One boss' attacks are literally unavoidable due to the player being logistically unable to clear the splash damage of its missiles. Fortunately, the game presents just enough health pickups to balance the disadvantage, but it's still quite annoying to absorb so many inevitable hits while feeling helpless.
Another issue is that Hard Reset is a particularly short affair. It can be cleared in around four hours, with an ending that doesn't feel like an ending at all. In fact, the game's conclusion feels more akin to just getting rudely thrown out of the game without any sense of closure. It's a shame that such a consistently engrossing game is so jarringly cut short.

That said, for thirty bucks it's not much worse than your average retail product, and the sheer fun of the combat ought to encourage a second play. Simply for what it provides, Hard Reset deserves one's attention and only those who are thoroughly obsessed with game length and their mutated idea of "replay value" should feel completely repulsed by the notion of a short campaign.
Hard Reset looks gorgeous and has an incredibly hard, loud aural presentation. Featuring bold environments with Blade Runner influences and a range of robots that all look cold and threatening, it's quite an aesthetically impressive effort, especially for the studio's first outing. I love the bright, colorful lighting effects, and how they contrast against the gritty backdrops. It has a very derivative look, but it's worn so confidently that it might as well be of the game's own invention.

Hard Reset is truly a great experience, especially for fans of titles such as Painkiller and Serious Sam. Its devotion to distilled, pure, videogame violence is something that deserves respect, and the fact it's performed so sleekly and satisfyingly is a fantastic surprise. With Hard Reset, an excellent sense of level design and game balance has been married to a ruthless difficulty and voraciously furious combat to create something that tests the nerves and addicts the mind.

If you're sick of all the military shooters vying for your attention but still want an honest, straightforward FPS experience, Hard Reset has the cure for your fever.

Source : http://www.destructoid.com/review-hard-reset-211149.phtml

Information and Technology of Samsung Galaxy Ace S5830

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Tue, 6 Sep 2011 01:02:00 -0700

The Samsung Galaxy Ace can get far with a name like this but it isn’t going any further than its comfortable midrange spot. You know, if you want the best seat in the house you need to move the cat. The Samsung Galaxy Ace S5830 is a feline droid – the black cat in Samsung’s Android portfolio. And it spells bad luck for the competition – mid-range droids are a force to be reckoned with in the smartphone world.

With the kind of specs, the Galaxy Ace could have passed for a high-end phone a while back. So, if your processing power and screen estate needs haven’t risen sharply during the past year or so, the Ace will serve you well.

Samsung Galaxy Ace S5830 prices :
IDR : 2.950.000
EUR : 245
USD : 350

Samsung Galaxy Ace S5830 specifications :

General	2G Network	GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
	3G Network	HSDPA 900 / 2100
	Announced	2011, January
	Status	Available. Released 2011, February

Size	Dimensions	112.4 x 59.9 x 11.5 mm
	Weight	113 g

Display	Type	TFT capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
	Size	320 x 480 pixels, 3.5 inches
		- Multi-touch input method
		- Accelerometer sensor for UI auto-rotate
		- Touch-sensitive controls
		- TouchWiz v3.0 UI
		- Swype text input method

Sound	Alert types	Vibration; MP3, WAV ringtones
	Loudspeaker	Yes
	3.5mm jack	Yes
		- DNSe sound enhancement

Memory	Phonebook	Practically unlimited entries and fields
	Call records	Practically unlimited
	Internal	158 MB storage
	Card slot	microSD, up to 32GB, 2GB included

Data	GPRS	Yes
	EDGE	Yes
	3G	HSDPA, 7.2 Mbps
	WLAN	Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, DLNA
	Bluetooth	Yes, v2.1 with A2DP
	Infrared port	No
	USB	Yes, v2.0 microUSB

Camera	Primary	5 MP, 2592x1944 pixels, autofocus, LED flash
	Features	Geo-tagging, face and smile detection
	Video	Yes, QVGA@15fps
	Secondary	No

Features	OS	Android OS, v2.2 (Froyo)
	CPU	800 MHz ARM 11 processor, Adreno 200 GPU
		Qualcomm MSM7227 chipset
	Messaging	SMS(threaded view), MMS, Email
	Browser	HTML
	Radio	Stereo FM radio with RDS
	Games	Yes
	Colors	Black
	GPS	Yes, with A-GPS support
	Java	Via third party application
		- MP4/H.264/H.263 player
		- MP3/WAV/eAAC+ player
		- Organizer
		- Document editor
		- Image editor
		- Google Search, Maps, Gmail,
		- Voice memo/dial
		- Predictive text input

Battery		Standard battery, Li-Ion 1350 mAh
	Stand-by	Up to 640 h (2G) / Up to 420 h (3G)
	Talk time	Up to 11 h (2G) / Up to 6 h 30 min (3G)

Source : http://informasicellular.blogspot.com/2011/03/samsung-galaxy-ace-s5830.html

Review: Dead Island

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Tue, 6 Sep 2011 00:58:00 -0700

With its debut trailer, Techland set itself the impossible goal of living up to self-generated hype on a massive scale. The video, which showed a family beset by zombies while a hauntingly beautiful refrain played, led one to believe that Dead Island would be an emotional roller coaster that touched on the human side of undead apocalypse. Well, it's not.

Those with even a small degree of cynicism could have guessed Techland would fall short of its conceptually ambitious opening gambit. Instead, Dead Island almost completely abandons narrative in favor of unadulterated violence, co-operative combat, and roleplaying elements. Whether or not this was a wise decision depends on one thing ... how awesome you think poisoned katanas and exploding knives are.

Dead Island gives players control over one of four characters -- Xian Mei, a Chinese ex-cop who specializes in bladed weapons, Purna, a bodyguard with a predilection for firearms, Sam B, a rapper who uses blunt objects, and Logan, a former football star who's deadly with throwing weapons. The cast represents a vague collection of "classes" with their own unique skills and upgrades. Which character you pick depends more on your playstyle as opposed to whether or not you're interested in the rather flat personalities.

In stark contrast to the game's marketing, Dead Island isn't much for exposition. Although there's a somewhat basic story, punctuated with occasional cutscenes, the vast majority of time revolves around a single motivation -- you're trapped on a resort island full of zombies, and you have to kill them all, while completing inane quests and looking for a way off the rock. Every now and then, Dead Island will try to tug at the heartstrings with an "emotional" moment, but the characters are so one-dimensional and the dialog so forced that these serious sequences are laughable at best. Those looking for a decent story will have to go elsewhere because Dead Island's writers make only the most token of efforts.
What we're left with is a game that is, essentially, Borderlands with zombies. The class-based leveling system, implementation of upgrades, mission structure and level exploration are ripped wholesale from Gearbox's critically acclaimed game. It's a strange experience that attempts to blend realism and roleplaying together. On the one hand, your characters have low defense and are forced to fight with weapons that easily break. On the other, you're ransacking treasure chests for loot and creating axes wreathed in flame or rifles that shoot toxic bullets.

Combat in Dead Island is similarly two-faced, since it's both fun and frustrating at once. There's a very real joy to be had in taking zombified opponents apart with increasingly powerful maces, swords, and molotov cocktails, but at the same time, this enjoyment is undermined by severe player weaknesses and unfair advantages given to the zombies. For instance, while your attacks are easily broken, most zombies shrug off blows and cannot be stopped once they start their assault animations. Later levels also spawn endless amounts of fast "runner" zombies that can demolish a player within seconds. If you're playing solo, expect to die a lot, because Dead Island is fond of spawning fast-moving enemies in groups of five, which are impossible odds for all but a four-man group. There's a reason why death in this game is punished only with a percentage of cash loss -- it would be impossible if you had to restart at checkpoints.

Player attacks frequently miss as well, sometimes due to the unwieldy attack animations, other times thanks to the inherent difficulty of melee combat in a first-person perspective. Other times, your attacks will harmlessly pass through zombies as they happily pummel you into paste. The "kick" move, for example, is meant to push enemies back, but sometimes they'll run through your leg to get their hits in. The lack of transitional animation also works in the undead's favor -- many is the time I've tried to sneak up on a zombie, only to have it instantly face me with no animation in between its two positions, allowing it to score a cheap hit first.

Zombies are prone to grabbing players, resulting in a brief quick-time-event that surrounding enemies will gleefully exploit to score more irresistible hits. Even things beneficial to the player indirectly help the enemy -- poisoning, electrocuting or burning opponents, for example, make them more dangerous to fight due to their ability to transfer the damage. While it's useful to electrify a zombie, if it dies at your feet, you'll be the one to take damage. Don't even get me started on the bizarre spawn points -- several times I've respawned right back in the middle of the same group of enemies that killed me, giving them a chance to do it again and again. The name Dead Island is very, very honest -- this place belongs to the living dead, and they're damned if you're going to get one over on them.
This all sounds rather negative, but I must stress that Dead Island is a fun game -- it's just fun in the most frustrating way possible. The focus on loot and acquiring power is most compelling, especially once you acquire modifications that can be added to weapons at upgrade tables. These mods, which turn ordinary weaponry into devastating electrified blades or spiked torture implements, are insanely satisfying to use. Modded weapons will also inflict special status effects when a critical hit is scored -- for instance, a toxic sword can cause zombies to bend over and violently vomit, rendering them immobile and doing intense damage. These are the moments that keep one playing, and they always deliver.

Weapons take damage as they're used and require constant repairs at upgrade tables. This can be quite galling, but the weapon degradation can prove tense and it encourages players to keep a healthy range of equipment on hand. Weapons can also be upgraded to deal more damage, although quite why players need cash to do this is anybody's guess. Money is already easy to lose with frequent deaths and expensive weapon purchases, so it's rather annoying to need to spend it on repairs and modifications, especially as mods also demand players to salvage various ingredients from around the world. Despite these hangups, however, the weapon system is still enthralling, and once the really powerful weapons are discovered, the effort feels truly rewarded.

Once you get used to the combat system's intentional and unintentional quirks, there's a lot of sadistic glee to be found. Caving in skulls with sledgehammers or lopping off arms with cleavers never stops being devilishly amusing, and the brutal animations coupled with deliciously squicky sound effects seals the deal. So long as one is prepared to buy a lot of medkits and die often, jumping into the combat can be intense and rewarding -- even more so once the "boss" grade zombies start showing up, such as the towering, straitjacketed "Ram" that charges like a bull, or the horrifying "Butcher" that lacks hands and attacks with sharpened forearm bones. These creatures are intimidating, often scary, but so very rewarding to beat.

Interestingly, the most engaging battles aren't against zombies, but humans. Once players get through the opening act, they encounter looters and soldiers who will attack anything that moves. These ranged battles are of a slower pace and feel far more tactical, especially due to the high damage that enemy gunfire can deal. These battles switch up the gameplay a considerable amount, and are frequently among the standout moments of the whole experience.
Each character has three skill trees, with useful abilities that are unlocked and upgraded with each level gained. The first skill tree is for the character's unique "Rage" power. Rage is a lethal, temporary character state that allows one to attack quicker, deal heavy damage, and see enemies rendered in red for easy targeting. The second skill tree governs combat ability, conferring bonuses on the character's weapon-type of choice, increasing critical hit chances, and buffing status effect damage. The final skill tree concerns itself with survival, offering abilities that make medkits more effective, or weapons more durable. Entirely copied from Borderlands, it's nonetheless an adequate skill system that encourages players to rack up their XP and gain evermore crucial powers.

Dead Island is at its most fun when played in co-op. Mitigating some of the frustration and cheapness of solo combat, having three friends to join in on the action makes the game feel far more playable and the combat a lot more action-laden. The drop-in/drop-out co-op works rather well, especially thanks to the fact that it tracks players who are at the same point in the game as you. An icon tells you when a player is "nearby" and allows you to join their game at the press of a button.

There are some downsides to co-op, though. Firstly, you can only join players who are on the same chapter as you, or on a chapter you've already cleared (unless invited by a friend). Secondly, progression in co-op is rather broken, as missions and world travel requires all players to be near each other in order for things to proceed. Already, I've been in several games that had to be stopped because one player was still in the session but seemingly abandoned their console, meaning nobody else could continue a mission or travel to a new map. It would be very easy for trolls to exploit this, and it requires that all players agree to do the same course of action. Anybody who tries to just do their own thing will likely stop the rest of the team from doing anything. It's a shame that such an open co-op experience would have such limitations, and it's rather annoying for my progress to be interrupted by a player who has no interest in whatever I'm trying to accomplish, and causes me to drop out of my own game.

Dead Island's biggest problem, however, is that it's just not a finished game. No matter how fun it can be, there are so many irritations caused by poorly implemented features, or features that weren't implemented at all. Some instances involve zombies using what are clearly stand-in animations, the kind of stuff you'd see in a game's alpha build -- just watch zombies in any level with windows, and watch as they walk toward the glass and it stutteringly shatters upon the briefest of contact. One character, Xian, has the ability to pick locks, but throughout my playthrough, I found only two locked chests, right at the beginning. It's almost as if the developers simply forgot to include more, and thus I feel like I wasted three skill points in leveling what I thought would be a crucial ability (edit: I've since found out that locked chest just show up as unlocked when skill is active. I was given no indication of this). Dead Island's getting a day-one patch with a staggering thirty-seven fixes, but the issues that really stood out for me aren't listed among them. This is a game that's likely going to get patched a lot, because it just isn't complete.

Ultimately, this is a Techland game that looks just like a Techland game. The glitches, the low quality graphics, and the bizarre gameplay issues that are hampered by broken animation and temperamental collission detection scream of a game that needed at least a few more months of development. To say Dead Island is rough is to be diplomatic. It is, in many ways, a severely broken mess.
Yet ... it's a fun broken mess, at its most ultimate conclusion. So much about Dead Island doesn't work, but its ambitious concept is so earnestly presented and its loot-heavy character progression so addictive, that it somehow manages to get away with a laundry list of problems that ought not to be forgiven. I hate Dead Island, yet I adore it at the same time. Its combat irritates the shit out of me, yet I created a knife that has a 75% chance of making heads explode with one stab! Co-op is obnoxiously restrictive, yet I can't help jumping into games because taking out zombies in groups is so cool. Its story is inane and pointless, yet I found a bonus enemy in the jungle with a hockey mask -- called Jason -- who had a secret chainsaw in his cabin. Dead Island is the kind of game that mercilessly punches you in the gut with one hand and gives you a slice of birthday cake with the other.

They say the bumblebee is a creature that shouldn't fly, due to its body mass and wing span making it a physical impossibility. The same can be said of Dead Island. It's something that shouldn't succeed, and often doesn't, yet it does something to make it all click together. This is a game I foresee playing extensively beyond completion, because it has an inherent magnetism and a vicious charm that cannot be denied, even in the face of so much aggravating game design and buggy roadblocks.

There's a lot of content to be found, as well. With at least thirty hours of gameplay and a lot of secrets to uncover, Dead Island is a huge title. Depending on your mileage, that means a lot of entertainment to make up for the exasperation, or a huge amount of unhappiness interspersed with moments of gratification. Whatever your disposition, Dead Island throws enough crap at the wall to ensure some of it sticks.

Is Dead Island good? Yes it is ... but it isn't at the same time. It's inspired, but turgid. Brilliant, but flawed. Fun, but infuriating. Like the living dead itself, Dead Island is a contradiction from beginning to end. However, I feel you need to play it, because despite copying so much from infinitely smoother games, there's nothing quite like it on the market. That, itself, is yet another contradiction in the confused, conflicted, often completely beautiful mess that is Dead Island.

Source : http://www.destructoid.com/review-dead-island-210611.phtml

Review: Razer BlackWidow Mechanical Gaming Keyboard

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Tue, 6 Sep 2011 00:54:00 -0700

Everyone thinks of taking their game to the next level, and many times, the brain goes straight to replacing the video card or some other internal computer part. However, one of the easiest improvements you might be able to make is upgrading your keyboard.

I present to you the Razer BlackWidow Mechanical Gaming Keyboard. With a sleek design, high quality mechanical keys, and easily programmable macros, this keyboard will be the your front line in getting in front of and demolishing the competition.
In case you don't know how a mechanical keyboard is different from a typical keyboard, I'll give you the key differences in a nutshell.
There are three main types of keyboards: membrane, scissor switch, and mechanical. Membrane keyboards are the most commonly used, with each key positioned over a rubber dome, one for each key. However, every single one of these domes aren't always uniform thickness, which changes the endurance and springiness of each key. Because of that, the feel of each key will not be uniform across the entire board. These are the cheapest keyboards, and you can expect them to last for about ten million keystrokes.
The second type of key, which is commonly used in laptop keyboards, is the scissor switch key. These are a little pricier than membrane keyboards, but are a slightly more springy to facilitate faster typing. In addition to having that extra pop, these keyboards also have faster response times, are quieter, and have double the life expectancy of a membrane keyboard, rated at about twenty million keystrokes.
As good as scissor switch keyboards may sound, mechanical keyboards really hit it out of the ballpark. Each of the keys on these boards have their own mechanical switch that quickly snap back into position after being actuated, which allows for even faster typing than a scissor switch keyboard. In addition to this, the mechanical switches make a very distinct clicking when pressed, and have a very solid feel to them because of their weight. However, because each key is its own individual part, it really jacks up the price. On the other hand, the price is more or less negligible when you consider the massive 50 million keystroke life expectancy; over double a scissor switch, and five times greater than a membrane keyboard. Do the math and you'll see you save a ton of money by investing in one of these instead of buying multiple of the other types.

Today, we're going to focus on one mechanical keyboard in particular: the Razer BlackWidow Mechanical gaming keyboard. While this review is about the regular edition of the keyboard, the Ultimate edition is more or less the same, just with a back light for the keys, and a USB and audio jack on the keyboard (also note that the Ultimate edition takes up two USB jacks instead of the one that the regular edition requires).
I have pictures from the unboxing that I will post in the gallery, but I think it's kind of silly and a waste of time to talk about it, so I'll just skip straight to what I think about the keyboard itself.
Razer BlackWidow Mechanical Gaming Keyboard specs

Keyboard type: Gaming
Connection type: USB 2.0
Colors: Black
Operating Systems supported: Windows XP, Vista, 7 (Though there is a mac version)
Full mechanical keys with 50g actuation force
Response time: 1ms
Programmable keys with on the fly macro recording
Ten separate macro profiles with on the fly switching
Five dedicated macro keys
Multimedia controls (requires use of the function key)
Braided cord

What I noticed immediately is the really bright gloss they used to coat the keyboard. It looks nice, but it's a real finger print magnet. Honestly, I would have much preferred it if they left the gloss out. I'm getting tired of wiping my keyboard off to keep it looking nice.
The first thing I had to try out, of course, were the keys. Because it's a mechanical keyboard, the keys actually register mid way through the actuation, which can be both a good and a bad thing. Good because it allows for faster typing, but bad if you are switching between several keys (WASD movement) because that means you have to go a little farther up than you would with a scissor switch key, or both keys will end up being pressed. It was also very loud! Compared to the scissor switch keyboard I had been using before, it was almost imposingly loud, and almost unbearable. However, after a few days of use, I came to get used to the noise, and it's nice to hear that you pressed the key instead of maybe not being so sure.
As a side note, the font they used for the keys is laser engraved, giving it a nice permanent feeling to it. You won't have any issues with the letters wearing off after a while. However, they used a non-conventional font, which is a little more difficult to read at a glance compared to most keyboards. Honestly, I would have preferred if they had just used the regular font, even though the font they used looks sleek and cool.
Another thing I noticed early on was that it was heavy! Much heavier than any keyboard I had owned before, weighing around five pounds. When you pick it up, you can feel that the keyboard is durable and made of some quality stuff. A combination of the weight and rubber track on the bottom makes sure it won't slide around on your desk.

The macro program that the keyboard utilizes is pretty easy to use once you get used to where things are, and the on-the-fly macros are extremely handy. It should be noted that the keyboard itself does not have any on-board memory, so any macros you make will not be carried with the keyboard. It's a little annoying, but I don't move around much, so this isn't a huge deal to me.
Another thing that kind of bugs me a little is the altered key placement, the first being the placement of the F keys. There's a seemingly huge gap between the esc key and the f1 key, which really throws me off, because I use all of the F keys pretty frequently, and I often miss both the esc and f1 keys with this keyboard. I think this is more of a "me getting used to this keyboard" situation instead of it being a flaw, though the schizophrenic side me of me says that while there's nothing wrong with breaking the mold, there are some things you just have to conform to.
As well as the esc and f1 key issue, I often find myself pressing the m5 key instead of ctrl, because I glance down to look for the corner key, and hit the wrong key by accident. Again, I believe this is something I just need to get used to rather than a flaw.
There is an issue that I've heard of many people having with this keyboard, but I have yet to experience it myself. Several customers have reported that the space bar will sometimes somehow shift and end up touching the alt key, which makes the space bar (and the alt key I assume) extremely hard to press. I don't really know if this is a common manufacturing defect, or if these people are just throwing their keyboards against a wall; all I know is that for the majority of keyboards sold, this is not a problem. If it is a problem, however, the keyboard does come with a one-year warranty that should clear that right up.

In addition to this, I think the shift key is a little more difficult to press than the rest of the keys. It's pretty subtle for me, but it makes capitalizing a bit of a pain sometimes. I believe this has to do with the angle I press the shift key, and it is only slightly noticeable, just thought it should at least be mentioned.
All in all, this is a great keyboard. The design is sleek and smooth, the key presses are sharp and accurate, the macros are fairly fast and simple to use, and it's priced relatively cheaply at $79.99. Also keep in mind that if you would like the back lighting and USB/Audio jack plug ins, you can pay $30 more for the Ultimate edition, but I don't think it's worth the money. Turn on the lights and plug your stuff into the front of your tower; save your hard earned money for something more worthwhile.
Despite the drawbacks I talked about in this article, I still think the pros outweigh the cons, and the keyboard is worth every penny. I really enjoy the keys, macros, and the ungodly 50 million keystroke life. If you're looking into getting a keyboard that will last you a long time, I highly recommend you add the Razer BlackWidow Mechanical Gaming Keyboard to your gaming arsenal.

Source : http://www.destructoid.com/review-razer-blackwidow-mechanical-gaming-keyboard-209664.phtml

Review: No Time To Explain

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Tue, 6 Sep 2011 00:51:00 -0700

A small indie team by the name of tiny Build GAMES was able to rather successfully fund a hardcore platformer using Kickstarter. In fact, they did such a good job at bringing in funds that they are now able to work on No Time To Explain post-launch and create a story-concluding second season.

At ten bucks, you get the game, and come this December, season two at no additional charge. Feedback from users will be used to better this continuation, according to tiny Build. I sure hope so.

With its silliness and promise of time-travel-related shenanigans, No Time To Explain immediately caught my attention. I like platformers that aren't afraid to kick my ass, as I'm sure many of you do. But -- and this is incredibly important -- only when it feels like I'm the one making mistakes, not the game. Too many deaths perceived as "cheap," and I'll stop enjoying myself.
That is, unfortunately, the trap this game falls into. The premise is that you're traveling through time to save different versions of yourself. You are always armed with this jetpack-gun hybrid, which is good, because you'll need to get through a bunch of dangerous universes to see your quest through.
Left clicking fires off your jetpack, and when used in conjunction with your character's regular jump, you can get past otherwise unnavigable obstacles. Problem is, No Time To Explain doesn't "capture" your cursor, so you have to move your on-screen, totally visible mouse pointer around your character very precisely. It's amazingly easy to click off screen, usually resulting in death. I wager at least half of my deaths stemmed from issues with the controls. (At the time of writing, gamepads were not supported.)

The good news is that the majority of checkpoints are quite generous. You will often respawn immediately at your character's last safe location prior to him dying. If movement felt more precise and consistent, then I would've had a vastly superior experience. The game is intended to challenge you, just not like this.
No Time To Explain does a few things to mix up the action. At one point, your laser-firing jetpack-gun thing is swapped out for one that behaves more like a shotgun. I found it to be pretty fun, partially because I had fewer control problems when using it.
tiny Build has also included a few bosses, all of which are completely ridiculous, and a one-off side-scrolling shooter level. Most of these were not particularly tough to beat or deep, but even still, I am glad they were implemented. The full game can be completed in a few hours, which is relatively fair for the price; additionally, there are bonus and user-made levels.

And now we get to the really disappointing stuff. No Time To Explain suffers from a number of bugs, some of which are game-breaking. The first patch fixed enough to allow me to see the game through, but it sounds like certain users are still having major issues, especially on the non-Windows versions.
After enough in-game deaths, your character will eventually make this extremely angry face like he's about to give up. The first time I saw it, I soon realized I had been making a similar face myself for who knows how long. It was at this point I had to ask myself, "Why are you still spending your time on this?"
Looking over the forums, it seems as if the developers are actively paying attention, and seemingly working on follow-up patches. That's good. But in its current state, No Time To Explain is in serious need of polish. One day, this might be a solid platformer, because the concept is fun and worth iterating upon. For now, though, the annoyances aren't worth putting up with.

Review: Rock of Ages

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Tue, 6 Sep 2011 00:37:00 -0700

Chilean independent studio ACE Team made a name for itself with Zeno Clash, an oddball game that continues to freak me out to this day. (Do not Google "Father-Mother." Don't.) These guys have garnered a reputation for producing unusual, stylish titles that aren't quite like anything else on the market.
This trend continues with Rock of Ages, I'm happy to report. Once again, ACE Team has partnered with publisher Atlus, which means its latest release will be hitting up the usual three digital distribution platforms. Cherish the moment, because it's not every week we get such well-crafted originality.

I'm not entirely sure how the developers reached this conclusion, but essentially, Rock of Ages is an artistic journey through time and space, as seen through the eyes of a boulder ... which, strangely enough, has a literal face. Told you these guys were creative!
The adventure begins with the Greek mythological figure Sisyphus. As the legends say, he is forced to push a boulder up a hill by hand -- only to see it roll back down again and repeat the process -- for eternity. He decides that the best way to escape this fate is to use the giant rock against, well, everyone.
Fittingly, Rock of Ages begins with an aesthetic inspired by Ancient Greek pottery. In fact, Sisyphus -- and all other famous historical (or artistic) figures shown throughout the game -- appear almost exactly as they originally did in their given medium and style.
It's an absurdly cool effect, both in the hilarious cut scenes that introduce each fictitious fight, and in the levels themselves where non-playable characters appear as cutouts in a 3D world.

Most levels in Rock of Ages are broken up into two main components: an offensive stage, where you navigate your boulder into an opposing castle gate, and a defensive stage, where you attempt to stop your enemy's mineral-based counterpart from doing the same.
You're given a surprising amount of control over your boulder, given its size, and can even perform jumps. Think Super Monkey Ball, only ... chunkier. The goal is to ultimately get to the end of a stage in one piece. Hitting enemy towers and other defensive structures will earn you money, but doing so also cracks away at your character, eventually causing him to lose a layer or even completely crumble, if it gets to that point.
Interestingly, there seems to be no real punishment for falling out of bounds other than losing the time it takes to respawn back on solid ground.
Hitting your rival's castle gate knocks off some health (usually about one third). When it hits zero, the door will be breached and all that's left is to roll over the person or thing hiding inside. Money earned can be spent on one-time-use upgrades for your boulder, like spikes, or wings which give you a double jump.
Did I mention the collectible keys? Yeah, there are hidden keys to find in every mission. Enjoy, completionists! You'll need a handful to gain access to every single-player level, but the vast majority of keys can be skipped.

Upon losing your boulder or hitting the gate, you aren't allowed to immediately jump back into the action. Rather, you enter the strategy phase. Any money you have built up can be put toward defenses that are placed on the enemy's side of the map from an overhead view.
At any point during this time, you can bring up a selection wheel to choose different unit types, all of which come in a few different upgraded (and therefore more expensive) forms. While all of this is going on, a timer of sorts is counting down until your next boulder is ready to go.
If it so happens that you are in this defensive phase and your opponent is controlling their boulder already, you can manually drop down attacks from the sky, but this requires some exceptional timing-based skill for the most part. Rock of Ages is played in real time, so both players (AI-controller or otherwise) aren't always going to be lined up.
Scattered throughout the game are a few boss levels. None of these are particularly challenging, involved, or noteworthy -- you are just trying to hit a weak point a few times -- but they do help break up the repetition somewhat. I will say that they are all visually interesting, and the final boss was a fun twist.

Your opponents, for the most part, put up a good fight. That said, Rock of Ages tends to devolve into a race to see who can hit the other guy's castle three times first. Defenses rarely, if ever, are good enough to completely wipe out a boulder. My go-to tended to be this one structure type which produces wind that can easily knock the AI off course.
There are around twenty story missions in all, most of which go down as described above. You'll travel through a number of different artistic periods, resulting in rather drastic changes to the environment art, so it's still engaging even if much of the game does play out similarly. These titular ages are probably the biggest draw to Rock of Ages.
On the whole, there's a great sense of humor as well. The base multiplayer mode functions exactly like the levels in story mode, so I won't really get into it. In my experience, the netcode was where it needed to be. I guess the issue here would be that of how long the community remains active.
Rounding out the content is SkeeBoulder mode. It's basically Skee ball with point multipliers, except you don't have to worry about throwing the ball too hard and getting yelled at by Chuck E. Cheese's staff. I didn't care for this so much, but its inclusion is appreciated. Same goes for the time trials, which let you go through the same levels again, only this time you're merely trying to earn medals based on how long it takes to reach the finish line.

Even though Rock of Ages can safely be completed in an afternoon, it's a largely well-executed game unlike any other I've played on XBLA/PSN/Steam. While the core mechanics may result in similar outcomes on a level-by-level basis, they are enjoyable mechanics nonetheless.
Rock of Ages is good for a few deep laughs, has tremendous art design, and is worth experiencing by most everyone given the price and ridiculous premise. Anyone on the fence need only demo the game to immediately see whether or not the full version is for them.

Source :http://www.destructoid.com/review-rock-of-ages-210495.phtml

Review: Tropico 4

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Tue, 6 Sep 2011 00:27:00 -0700

Hola El Presidente! I see you have returned to rule Tropico once more, after having done so in Tropico 3 and maybe even after extending your rule in Tropico 3: Absolute Power. Because life as El Presidente is hard enough, you will be happy to know that the island nation will take more or less the exact same skills to govern as it did before.

Or perhaps the similarity will disappoint you.

The Tropico series has carved itself a nice little niche in the city building genre dominated by different iterations of The Settlers and Anno games in recent years. Whereas the latter series focused on creating intricate economies riddled with multiple processing buildings, Tropico has always been more about managing a "light" economy and the socio-political factors required to keep everything running.
Tropico 3 refined the first game's core and took it to the current age, even adding an Xbox 360 version that actually controlled remarkably well. The PC-only expansion Absolute Power added a bunch of buildings, and now Tropico 4 takes all of that and puts it in the wrapper of a brand new game. As a result, veterans may feel it plays like yet another expansion with key changes here and there. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

For those new to Tropico, you star as a Caribbean dictator who can choose to create his own banana republic, a lavish tourist resort, or a vast industrial empire on different island maps -- or all of the above provided the map is large enough. Mines have to be built on top of resource locations, farms belong in areas where different crops benefit from natural conditions, and tourist buildings need to be in beautiful locations to yield the highest profit. Aside from a few natural restrictions, how you actually build and lay out your island city-state is entirely up to you.
Your Tropicans will need to stay happy enough to keep them from starting an uprising or a military coup, however, so building up your economy is often secondary to creating a proper functional society. The inhabitants' needs are grouped by the factions they belong to, who now give you more feedback on what they actually want than in the previous title.
Quality housing, farms, and healthcare keeps the Communists happy, while Capitalists want a good industry and large class differences. Failing to provide enough churches and cathedrals will annoy the religious faction, having an open immigration policy to boost your workforce annoys the Nationalists, and so on.

In Tropico 4, each faction representative now has its own caricature face to help you better identify with them and it's a bit easier to see what each faction wants or what is causing them to be discontented, due to a rearranged almanac that displays all necessary information.
Tsunamis, oil spills, and volcano eruptions have been added to the disaster roster, and damage from natural disasters can now be mitigated by building and upgrading a weather station. Plenty of campaign missions will make you deal with these disasters and they make for a nice challenge and a change of pace. Despite being set in the Cold War era, you'll even get some missions that joke about contemporary events such as a volcano eruption's ash cloud disrupting air traffic. At its core, the Tropico brand of humor and charm is still ever-present in Tropico 4.
Other changes are more minute. Hotels now have an entrance to fit onto a road, so you can't bundle them all together anymore. All tourism buildings now works slightly different, in fact. More attractions and luxury attractions like a luxury liner or a rollercoaster will keep the tourists entertained, but income from hotels -- and especially beach villas -- is now a lot less reliable than in Tropico 3. You can no longer just build 20 beach villas and never worry about money ever again.
A new building, the Ministry, requires you to hire or appoint members to a cabinet. This doesn't actually do much other than adding more prerequisites for your presidential edicts, although your ministers will sometimes screw up and cause a negative effect if you don't fire them immediately, or they might provide you with unsuspected bonuses.
If Juanito, the infamous and annoying radio DJ from Tropico 3, was causing you minor strokes you'll be glad to hear he is entirely absent here. There is an achievement for killing any Tropican named Juanito, so feel free to kill all of them and claim your sweet revenge.

Because most new buildings simply serve as a slightly different or slightly more powerful version of existing buildings, veterans of Tropico 3 will find that very little has been changed in the core formula. If your old strategy for an early game economy worked in the past, it will most likely work in Tropico 4 as well. You'll still stick with tenements, farms and mines at first, and gradually work your way to a high school for churches and industry. Once your economy is built up, you'll have little trouble winning any scenario just like in the previous game.
The new 20-mission campaign does have a lot more to offer than before. Instead of semi-randomly going through a bunch of unrelated missions, there is now a somewhat consistent storyline that takes you from the '50s to the end of the Cold War. The U.S. and USSR still play a large role in managing foreign relations and staving off invasion, but the EU, Middle East, and China now play minor roles as well. Each foreign faction will be influenced by the type of goods you export, and they offer plentiful optional objectives to improve relations and earn some more cash in the short or long run -- occasionally forcing you to choose between antagonizing one of them for a benefit.
The trademark humor and tongue-in-cheek missions are back in force, and they are better than ever. Whether you have to prototype the USSR's version of Perestroika by building a stock exchange or need to appease a group of killer mimes until they can fly to Las Vegas for a tour, each mission offers enough variety to keep you from remembering you are basically only adding minor variations to your perfected planning system from island to island.
Sidequests can pop up on the map to keep yourself occupied, which helps a great deal in keeping the repetition at bay. Whether you have to increase exports of a specific good for a specific foreign power, or are asked to institute same-sex marriage to improve relations with the intellectuals -- at the cost of your relationship with the religious faction -- there are very little instances where you have nothing to do.

On the PC version at least, you'll have access to as many user created challenges as people are willing to make. When creating your own challenge you still need to start with one of ten pre-created maps, but you can edit them in terms of landscape or resources to your heart's content. It's a shame these maps still don't tell you anything about their layout when you select them, though. Another annoyance is that you have to alt-tab out of the game to actually enter a mission description -- probably the main reason why practically none of the user-created challenges have any description whatsoever.
Creating your perfect custom template to build the island of your dreams will probably take you upwards of an hour (if not more), but the sandbox and challenge offerings extend the gameplay well beyond the campaign's missions -- which will easily take you more than 20 hours to start with.
Tropico is and remains the type of game that is infinitely replayable as long as you are willing to play it. Those players who focus on the most efficient economy may stick with their working strategies from games past, never even touching a third of the buildings you can build or the mechanics on offer. But whatever kind of island nation you want to build in your image, Tropico 4 offers enough tools to do so in great detail.

Tropico 4 is without a doubt a better game than Tropico 3 -- which was easily one of my favorite games of 2009. Having said that, Haemimont has taken a conservative approach with this full-fledged sequel. While some parts like the expanded foreign relations, sidequest system, and slight UI overhaul are worthy of a sequel, the core gameplay feels practically identical to Tropico 3; if you never build shanties or mansions before, you're not going to build them now.
Whether this sequel is worth your money comes down to a few simple questions. Did you like Tropico 3? Then you'll like Tropico 4 just as much and you'll appreciate the small changes, as long as you don't expect a revolution in design compared to the previous game. If you are not in a hurry, it's a no-brainer to pick up during a Steam sale. Have you never played a Tropico game before? Then Tropico 4 is the one to get, and once you understand what you're supposed to do you'll likely have a blast with it.
Regardless of whether or not you desire innovation in Tropico 4, it remains one of the most enjoyable and charming city building games of current times. Best of all, it's one of the few games that you can just as easily play lazily from your couch with a controller as you can play it hunched over your keyboard. It would've been nice if there had been more to Tropico 4 than just "more of the same," but criticisms of little actual change aside it's still one of the most relaxing of its kind you're likely to play all year.
I only hope Haemimont will eventually overhaul the now aging core gameplay to make it worth using all of the options at hand, rather than letting players stick with what worked before. Most of all, we really need a revamp of Tropico 2: Pirate Cove, because everything is better with pirates.

Source : http://www.destructoid.com/review-tropico-4-210633.phtml

Review: Pirates of Black Cove

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 07:28:00 -0700

As one of three different characters that each have their own attributes (balanced, melee, ranged), you set out on your quest to work your way through scallywags and become the Pirate King of legend. Pirates of Black Cove centers around one part ship-to-ship combat and exploration in the Caribbean region, one part land-based missions, and one part managing your land army of scurvy dogs and handing in quests.

The naval combat is solid and accessible, if perhaps too arcade-y in nature for the hardcore naval fan. While you start out with little more than a horrifyingly slow floating wreck with a handful of broadside cannons, sinking ships and doing quests for the three different Pirate factions that vie for control nets you the necessary money (pieces of eight) to buy and upgrade ships. Through exploration around the map, you'll also find "blueprints" that work as a ship and upgrade unlock currency.
Soon enough, you will have found enough blueprints and liberated enough pieces of eight to afford yourself a decent ship. Contary to the more open gameplay found in the bug-ridden yet quite enjoyable Pirates of the Caribbean from 2003, all progression in Pirates of Black Cove is done through quests. There is no trading of any kind, because this is not a merchant simulator; it's the pirate's life for you.

Progression is a semi-linear affair, with completed quests occasionally leading to a batch of new quests that you can complete in any order. Once you have completed enough quests for one faction, the resulting gained reputation allows you to start doing missions for the next faction, and so on. It's not so much a game where you have to choose sides, as much as you simply go through all available missions to gain the highest reputation for all factions and unlock the final storyline mission.
Between the missions at sea that involve sinking ships, capturing them with a human catapult special ability -- which catapults an unfortunate pirate -- or escort duties, these missions stay fun throughout the lengthy campaign. Combat is fast, though once you upgrade to one of the heavier Buccaneer faction vessels it's pretty hard to ever get sunk. Occasional maritime distractions will see you battling a Kraken or navigating a rotating maze that protects Sirens in special separate seafaring sections.
In line with its accessible nature, you won't be seeing much ship customization beyond upgrades and special weapons. What you buy is what you get, without having to worry too much about ship statistics or crew maintenance, and there's no chained cannonball shots to wipe out masts or any option to build a fleet beyond the ship you control directly.
The land-based combat is a different story altogether. Each pirate hero can have up to three squads of a wide variety of units under his or her command, and new pirate heroes will join you as you complete all missions for a faction. Every pirate faction has its own island base where you can construct barracks to recruit land units and accept or hand in quests. Although the units are varied enough to give you a range of melee, ranged, and special attacks in theory, the land combat doesn't work quite as well in practice.

Part of the problem lies with the controls and mission structure. Practically every land mission simply requires you to walk from your landing point to a mission objective, killing enemies along the way, and walking back. Your units will usually attack whatever is next to them if they are standing still, but there is no attack-move option. You need to manually right click on enemies to attack them, but if they are melee units and start to swashbuckle with your units, it can be quite hard to click to attack them.
If you misclick and move units to the ground next to an enemy, they will sometimes just stand there and take damage until you finally click on the right spot. The controls need a lot of precision on your part, which isn't always possible when you have a mess of units brawling about. A default attack-move option would solve all these issues, but without it the land missions range from frustrating to eliciting the feel that you are simply going through the motions to get back to sea.
It doesn't help that the land mission areas are either too large or your units walk too slowly, which results in a long wait while all your units walk back to the landing area -- something they need to do in almost every mission. Thankfully there is a "return to ship" button that automatically directs all units to return to the landing spot, but it's still a jarring experience from the fun you are otherwise likely to have with Pirates of Black Cove.
As you progress, an inventory system will fill itself with items you can activate for things like invulnerability or taunting nearby ships, yet it's hidden away in a menu that discourages you from remembering to use it. Having these items in a toolbar, World of Warcraft style, would've been highly beneficial.

This is most certainly a game for patient PC gamers who just like to kick back and mess around with pirates. A unique "wind charm" item lets you instantly teleport to a faction base to save time, although it only works only if you are at sea. Whenever you use one, you had better remember to pick it up again inside the faction base in question or you'll be manually sailing all the way back. It's a bit mindboggling why there is not simply a teleport button instead of this system, as the wind charms can sometimes be hard to spot inside the base until you've learned its possible spawn locations.
Occasional game-crashing bugs also mean you have to be patient, although Nitro Games has been pretty quick with releasing patches already and future support seems like a safe bet. Which is great, because Pirates of Black Cove does a lot right whereas it falls short in other areas.
The dialogue is fully voiced and funny enough, the story keeps progressing at a decent pace to keep playing, and you can collect all manner of collectables -- including 1000 "joke bottles" with jokes that range from hearthy chuckles to cringeworthy puns. These jokes are echoed on the faction bases by NPCs and as someone who is not averse to terrible puns, these jokes actually made me smile more than I can remember doing in any other recent game.
Most importantly, the entire game has a certain charm to it. Pirate tropes abound everywhere you look, and it's obvious that Nitro Games is a huge fan of everything pirate; something further evidenced by the mention of swashbuckler classics like The Sea Hawk and Captain Blood on the game's Facebook page.

Even though the land mission structure in Pirates of Black Cove tends to be a bit bland, these missions do help to keep the gameplay varied. Essentially the game suffers from the same problem Star Wars: Empire at War had: space battles were fun, while ground missions were a bit of a mess. Other than this structural aspect, every other issue with the game -- from the land-based controls to certain interface oddities and a game-crashing bug here and there -- concerns things that could easily be fixed through updates.
Pirates of Black Cove has some rough edges, to be sure, yet it is still the most enjoyable and simply fun pirate game I've played in years. The foundations the game is built upon are strong enough to support a sequel that improves on the existing formula and does away with its flaws, whether they are issues grounded in design or controls, and I'd probably buy any future iteration set in the Oriental in a heartbeat.
If you are a big enough pirate fan and willing to overlook Pirates of Black Cove's faults in favor of its charm, there is enough fun to be had to make its budget price a barrrrgain. Should such pirate puns lead to haemorrhaging in your brain's language centers, however, then this might not be the game for you.

Review: Air Conflicts: Secret Wars

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 07:26:00 -0700

As DeeDee Derbec, a young and dashing female smuggler pilot who gets swept up into the events of World War II, you travel around the European theater doing what you're supposed to be doing: shooting down Nazis, bombing Nazis, and occasionally doing supply drops or flying basic stealth missions from point A to B.

The game starts out rather dodgy, throwing "cutscenes" in your face that are just a single image which the camera pans over a couple of times -- focusing on different aspects of the image to fit the voice-over narration, if you're lucky. The first campaign or so sees you partaking in some truly awful missions that involve flying to a checkpoint or shooting down a few fighters or bombers, and strangely enough these missions can sometimes only take a few minutes to complete.
If you stick with it and keep on playing, however, it actually becomes quite an enjoyable little game. Missions become slightly more varied, the story picks up, and you start to unlock more and more planes that each have their own statistics and weapon loadouts.

The planes are sadly not very distinctive in the way they feel. Bombers are slow and handle even slower, with the option to use a turret and shoot backwards or sideways using the d-pad. Unfortunately, since the turret's power is pretty useless, you are unlikely to ever down more than 20 planes this way throughout the game.
Fighters handle much better and are a lot faster, and later in the game you'll unlock the Me-262 jet fighter and Hortha-Gothen Flying Wing to mess around in. All the planes in the same class handle almost identically though, and you'll be hard pressed to notice the handling difference between a Mosquito and a Stuka. What's worse, all the planes lack a sense of speed. Only after flying all of them do you notice the difference, and even then it's hard to notice whether you are flying at 33% throttle or a maximum speed.
Where the difference between planes does come in is in the weapon loadout, if you can call it that. Each plane has a set amount of rockets and bombs it can fire, which reload automatically at different speeds depending on the plane. It's an arcade game, so there's no resupplying or refueling or anything like that. Aircraft can be shot down with rockets if you're lucky, if you happen to get the time to line them up to an enemy that flies in a straight line, or if you shoot them right before smashing into a plane. The latter is the easiest option, as there is no collision model for planes in place.
Planes do have some graphical damage modeling but it doesn't impact how the plane flies, making a Spitfire with half its wing shot off look pretty comical. To make up for that, you'll have little Nazi soldiers running for their lives on the ground and screaming in an explosion of blood when you bomb them to smithereens, and a mission in which you need to shoot down over a hundred Nazi paratroopers who go "Aaaah" when their parachutes collapse.

It's a shame that the missions are pretty drab. You'll go through the standard WWII scenarios under the guise of helping out resistance fighters throughout Eurasia, but at no point will you be surprised with the mission design. Compared to Ace Combat 6, IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey and H.A.W.X., Air Conflicts: Secret Wars disappoints in this regard. It's a good thing the missions are at least pretty varied, as far as shooting down aircraft and bombing ground targets during WWII can provide variety.
The controls work well enough, with only the left stick used for controlling your plane and the X and Y buttons for decelerating and accelerating. You're notified that decelerating will help you turn faster, but that's only an effective tactic for a handful of very slow or very fast planes. For the most part, it won't matter at all how fast you are going in a turn.
If you try to fly in a loop, you will suddenly face downwards upside down without the option to roll around and escape a crash -- at least when using the arcade control scheme. Because the simulation control scheme is just no fun to use at all in this game, you are simply stuck with making normal turns and sometimes braking because you're used to doing so in a flight sim whether it actually does anything or not.
Landing is a matter of flying through four loops after which you are instantly on the ground, and usually you can take off directly afterwards with the cargo or person of interest on board. You'll earn "Stars" for completing objectives and destroying enemies, which unlock new planes, but there's little feedback on how you can earn more of them. Likewise, you sometimes level up and get a skill point to spend on handling, endurance, critical hits ("You shot a pilot through the head!") and wingmen effectiveness. But there's no hint on how to earn these points or if they are just allotted for certain missions.

So far Air Conflicts: Secret Wars might sound like a truly terrible game and at times it can be. But for the most part, it can offer some stupid budget fun despite its faults. Enemy planes will dodge out of the way if you shoot at them, turning dogfights into an affair that will always keep you busy without taking minutes to down a single plane in a dogfight. Depending on the difficulty, there is a very generous lock-on reticule that makes shooting down enemy planes pretty easy. Only on the highest difficulty will the target reticule lock-on less often, and even then it's never hard to complete a mission.
It's a very arcade experience that may feel dumbed down to the hardcore flight sim enthusiast, but this game doesn't try to satisfy that audience. If you can look past the game's faults, the gameplay has plenty of fun to offer. Surprisingly enough, the story is not terrible either.
Penned by the writers at International Hobo, the story is in fact pretty depressing. Throughout the seven campaigns that make up DeeDee Derbec's story, she is always on the lookout to find out what happened to the father she never knew. All she knows is that he never returned from World War I. In each campaign, you will play a fighter who was on her father's squadron and fight a single mission alongside Guillaume Derbec.
These missions are hard to fail, and merely serve to provide a backstory for her father's experience and character during the war. While a voice-over from one of DeeDee's father's old squadron mates tells her what had happened, you act out these events flying a biplane and make some simple bombing runs. Again, these missions offer nothing groundbreaking but a nice change of pace.

As the story progresses, you will lose friends along the way and DeeDee turns from a simple happy-go-lucky alcoholic smuggler into one of the most depressing characters you are likely to find in any video game. Even right up to the finale, everything about DeeDee's adventures is a tale of atrocities, mass murder, the bombing of field hospitals, the loss of friends, and her descend into a war-torn woman who is slowly stripped of a soul.
Sadly, while the story and script might surprise you at times given the budget nature and the genre of the game, the voice acting ruins almost all of it. Only four actors do the voices of around 12 characters, and when DeeDee is talking with her awful French accent to a Russian resistance fighter who has the exact same voice, it can become hilarious at times.
Despite the title mentioning Secret Wars, there is not really any secret war to speak of. The story about helping out the resistance in various regions is a nice break from the standard RAF superhero pilot story, but don't expect anything as grand as Secret Weapons Over Normandy.

Air Conflicts: Secret Wars is a weird game. Everything from the graphics to the music and sound is passable, and it doesn't hold up to the best this genre has to offer on the consoles. But strangely enough, it can be a damn enjoyable little game to play.
Even though it's stitched together from pieces of varying quality and even though the writing cannot save the boring cutscenes or the mission designs that never rise above mediocrity, it's still a lot more fun than most other budget simulator games on the consoles. Hell, it's more fun than the awfully disappointing H.A.W.X. 2.
Make no mistake, this is game that no one but the most avid of console flight sim fans should ever play. If you can look past its budget production values and design, there's about 7-8 hours of missions and multiplayer that practically nobody but the Achievement whores seem to be playing online -- though there is system-link multiplayer that will also give you Achievements if you are into that.
Air Conflicts: Secret Wars might be a budget title in price, looks, and polish. But it's a simple and surprisingly enjoyable game that hardcore fans of the genre will enjoy if they can go in with low expectations. It doesn't do anything new or anything special but if you see it discounted (it already dropped to half price in Europe within two weeks of release), or if you can rent it, you might have more fun with it than you might expect.

Review: Call of Juarez: The Cartel

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 07:25:00 -0700

The Cartel abandons the series' original Wild West premise, featuring only the most shallow of nods to its cowboy legacy in a tale of Los Angeles gang warfare, dangerous drug dealers, organized crime rings and private military companies. The story is, to put it bluntly, a convoluted cluttering of concepts that come together like a particularly nasty car crash.

You get a general idea of who everybody is and what they're going to do, but you'll struggle to find out why anything is happening, and there are so many attempts at creating plot twists and 24-like moments of secret agent action that you'll drown in the contrived mystery of it all. It's quite clearly trying to be an action thriller full of political intrigue, but the production is so forced that the entire narrative comes across as tawdry and desperate.
The co-op campaign revolves around three characters, all of whom can be controlled by players online. The ethnically diverse crowd consists of a grumpy white L.A. cop who is also inexplicably a cowboy, a stereotypically shady Mexican DEA agent who might be crooked, and a tough-talking female sniper who is black, but not too black that she'd offend the white middle classes.

Each character has their own specialty -- Cowby McGruff is best with pistols and close-range combat, El Shady is a mid-range rifle expert, and Ms. Forcibly Sassy gets a bonus with sniper rifles. Despite this, however, it quickly becomes apparent that pistols aren't very good, and no matter how many rifles you unlock, the majority of the game is best played with the first assault rifle you find, no matter which character you pick.
This reliance on a single gun represents the biggest gameplay problem apparent in Juarez -- the fact that every mission is almost entirely the same. There are flashes of promising originality -- especially in the locations -- but for the most part, almost every level consists of walking/driving to a destination, doing some talking, getting into a series of pitched battles in arena-like areas, then getting into a car chase. This formula repeats itself with only slight variations throughout the course of the entire game.
Juarez tries to spice things up a bit with an idea that is genuinely brilliant, but simply isn't capitalized on. Each character will receive phone calls from NPCs that only they can hear, and they'll be given their own secret missions and agendas that run parallel to the main objective. The aim is to create an air of subtle competition and persistent mistrust, but unfortunately this is almost solely done by having players collect miscellaneous items without being seen by their teammates, which inspires about as much "mistrust" as a friendly hug. It's also not uncommon to get phone calls in the middle of fights (don't worry, enemies are polite enough to stop fighting), or be forced into multiple unskippable conversations in a row.
What could have been a unique and clever manipulation of the co-op format is instead both overbearingly shoved down one's throat and lazily implemented. By the time the game reaches its conclusion and it tries to pull a Double Dragon, nobody will really care.

The lack of drop in/drop out co-op also hampers the experience. In order to engage in co-op, players have to set their game to online mode in an interactive lobby that appears at the beginning of each level. Even if you've no intention of playing co-op, you have to load and sit in this lobby area before manually starting your separately loaded mission. If you would like co-op help during a mission, you'll have to quit, restart the whole level, and wait patiently for someone to appear. If anyone shows up -- they frequently do not.
The Cartel features an obligatory competitive multiplayer mode with obligatory game types and an obligatory rank system in which one can unlock new guns, new perks, and new character skins. The main bulk of the experience is waiting around in an interactive lobby room for no other players to appear, while the game consistently fails to connect you to anybody else's rooms.
For the most part, Call of Juarez: The Cartel is a by-the-numbers first-person-shooter with only half-hearted attempts to stand out from the pack. Car chases are thrown into the mix but they're incredibly repetitive and fail to be exciting by the third, identical sequence. Players can temporarily activate bullet time, but if you don't want to hear a contemporary cowboy say, "I bring not peace, but a motherfucking sword" every three minutes, it's not much fun. With these consistently regurgitated, half-baked gimmicks removed, you're left with a mediocre, underachieving, relatively inoffensive shooter.

Or rather, that's what you have before one factors in the sheer mess that is The Cartel's retail code. With muddy graphics, objects that shiver uncontrollably, and sound that will cut out every few minutes, Call of Juarez looks and sounds like a school project that hadn't been started until Thursday night and needed handing in on Friday morning. Cutscenes have the kind of framerate one expects from stop-motion animation and there was even an occasion where I had to restart a checkpoint because enemies that I were obligated to kill were spawning behind fences that I couldn't reach.
These are not minor problems that go away. Sound cuts out throughout and the game occasionally freezes for split-second intervals that completely throw the player's aim off. Character animations are awkward at best, and the overall game is presented in such dark browns and grays that enemies are often difficult to distinguish from the scenery. The only good thing I have to say about the presentation is that the soundtrack is surprisingly decent, but its high quality only serves to highlight how poor the rest of Juarez is, contrasted as it is against an ugly, slipshod little waste of time.
The Cartel's lack of polish is offensive for a $60 retail game. I'd expect this lack of attention from an obscure self-published PC game by a studio nobody's ever heard of from a country nobody's ever visited, but not in a game with Ubisoft's financial patronage and Techland's experience. The fact that this isn't being sold as a budget game is, quite frankly, disingenuous and shameful. Nobody should have the right to charge a full $60 for a game this badly stitched together.

Call of Juarez: The Cartel could have gotten away with being an unremarkable yet playable shooter, but the galling lack of presentation and legitimately uncomfortable audio/visual problems make it an unpleasant experience overall. Unfinished, buggy, and barely fun to play, Call of Juarez: The Cartel is a sloppy serving from people who should know better, and ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Preview: Scivelation

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 07:23:00 -0700

In a dystopian post-apocalyptic world, a Judeo-Christian fanatic group called The Regime has taken control of the entire world. Meanwhile, a global organization of resistance cells called the GRN (guess what it stands for) tries to fight The Regime and its army of genetically enhanced super soliders that have crosses imprinted on their armor.

Previously known as a Source-powered game called Salvation, the Unreal-powered Scivelation (science+revelation) puts you in control of two characters who will shoot, climb, stealth, and stab their way through a third-person action adventure.
You play through Scivelation as two characters in the GRN. A Japanese assassin hottie named Elisha who, if you saw her, can obviously be identified as a former scientist just by looking at her, and a Russian soldier named Mikhail. Throughout the game you'll play as one of the two characters, but there will be some levels where the characters meet, allowing you to choose which one you want to control.
The demo at gamescom only featured Elisha who can snipe people, activate an invisibility cloak system that still allows you to identify her womanly curves, and do her sneaky-sneaky thing while mostly evading direct conflict where possible.
It looked a bit like a mix between Metal Gear Solid 4 with the stealth mechanics, and Uncharted in terms of combat and being able to scale walls and shimmy ledges.

Everything about Scivelation did look a bit generic, though. Some of the game's innovative features include being able to pick up enemy weapons or "unique stealth moves, including stealth kills." If you've played third-person stealth games and action adventures, you can probably jump right into Scivelation and bypass any tutorial as long as you know which button does what.
Where the game does show potential is in its storyline and world. Inspired by books like 1984 and Brave New World, as well as movies like V for Vendetta, there is an opportunity here to craft a really interesting world that delves into themes like the corruption of institutions, religious zealotry, and the eternal question of why female scientists in videogames always wear skimpy outfits.
Scivelation hasn't been in production for very long, so we'll have to wait and see if Black Wing Foundation can turn it into something interesting.

Review of Dead Block

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 07:21:00 -0700

If you have ever played any Call of Duty Zombies mode you'll find some surface similarities in Dead Block. Waves of zombies try to enter a building and shamble around to your location through windows and doorways that you can barricade. The twist in Dead Block is that you can also put traps in these locations for different effects.

A freeze trap lets you kill a zombie with one hit, a toilet trap rots their meat over time until they die, a cardbox trap makes them attack other zombies, and so on. The idea behind these traps is that instead of manually killing the zombies for points, you are managing their approach and keep them occupied with anything that is not your characters.
By doing so you buy yourself time to gather resources to construct wooden barricades and traps, and to find items and upgrades. Items like coins can be used to buy health or to turn on a jukebox to make all zombies dance, and other items can be used to to kill or distract zombies in various ways.

While the idea of managing the flow of zombies and keeping them occupied could've worked really well in this kind of game, Dead Block doesn't utilize this in a way that makes the game actually fun to play. The biggest problem is that to complete a level you need to scour all the rooms to find three specific items, so you can put on a rock show that kills all the zombies through the power of rock & roll, and the process of finding these items is terribly tedious.
Every room is filled with objects you can search for items or upgrades by mashing the left and right triggers, moving a cursor around with the triggers to highlight an object, or using the triggers to do a lockpicking rotation minigame. These distractions get old fast enough, but rooms are also filled with furniture you can destroy to provide you with both wood for barricades and more objects to search.
Since you don't know inside which objects the key items to clear the level are located and because destroying furniture can spawn objects that might contain these items, you just have to destroy nearly all of the furniture to make sure you didn't miss anything. Destroying furniture is done by mashing the B button over and over again, and as there is a lot of furniture to destroy in a level you'll be doing a lot of this. Dead Block has more button-mashing than any Dynasty Warriors game I've played.

The game's three different characters are specialized in different skills to complement this design. The construction worker is a good at destroying furniture and constructing barricades, the overweight boyscout can search faster and builds specialty traps, and the '50s blaxsploitation female cop is good at killing zombies and traps that kill zombies.
You can switch between these characters at will to utilize their respective strengths, or summon them to the room you are in to let the AI do the furniture demolishing, item searching, and defending. However, you can't get through a level without some manual combat (mapped to the right bumper for some reason) and the combat is loose and clunky. Of course you're not supposed to do too much manual combat as that's not what the game is about, but since it's an inescapable part of the game it can be a pain when you have to.
Even though you can stick to a character that is best suited to manually perform your room-to-room search so you minimize the amount of button mashing, you just end up doing the same thing over and over from room to room and from level to level. Destroy furniture, keep the zombies at bay, search items, and destroy more furniture. Two levels make you kill a set amount of zombies to clear them, but you end up doing the same room searching regardless since you can't rely on combat alone.

Dead Block is not a very long game and it's best played a few levels at a time so the repetition doesn't become too big of an issue, but in the end it's just a boring game to play. It makes you feel like you are apethetically going through the motions rather than having fun.
It doesn't help that the game's aesthetic and trap-building gameplay evokes some of the cartoony style reminiscent of Evil Genius, which was one of the reasons I was initially interested in the game. And it's this that makes me wonder if Candygun made a wise choice to make Dead Block a game in which you control characters directly.
If the twist to zombie defense had been to make it a top-down management game with a different method of resource gathering and with larger and more complex level designs to encourage different strategies, this could've been a really fun and interesting game that would've worked on any platform. Alas, it is not.

To make things worse, the one redeeming feature that would've made it a more intriguing experience is absent. This is a game made for co-op but there is no online multiplayer mode, just a local multiplayer one. Which is fine if you only ever play with friends locally, but a game like really would have benefitted from online co-op play.
The need to communicate with your team mates may have changed the gameplay dynamic to make it rise above mediocrity, but now the majority of players will simply never know if it does. Some levels only give you one character to control and manage zombies from every angle, and these levels can be pretty annoying. With co-op it probably still wouldn't have been a truly fun game, but I'll take some fun over frustration and boredom any day.
The '50s setting is initially interesting, but ridiculous voice-overs and the same damn rock & roll songs in every single level quickly removes any novelty it may have at first. It's not bad in the way a bad horror movie can be so bad that it becomes good, or over the top like House of the Dead: Overkill, just regular bad. Which is not good at all.

In a mindless way some players may find some enjoyment here, especially if they have local friends to play with. It's not an insultingly bad game in any way, just a very boring one in which you slowly but steadily remove the lifespan of one of your controller's buttons. And without any Musou attacks, there's just no way to recommend that kind of gameplay.
Dead Block takes a popular genre that thrives on increasingly manic gameplay meant to evoke higher and higher tension levels, and turns it into something dull. It may have had the beginnings of a genuiningly fun game at some concept stage, but the end result is a repetitive game that you'll likely get tired of before it ends.

Review: Bleach: Soul Resurreccion

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 07:03:00 -0700

To be fair, I know a small bit about the Bleach anime. I watched about a season of this hugely popular manga-turned-anime, which aired on Cartoon Network. But I lost track some time ago. I know just enough to know who the game characters are and I know just enough to appreciate the game's high-end graphics.

The rest of the story? I was totally lost from the very first story section in Story Mode. This game assumes that you're current on the anime. If you're not you're going to get blasted with several paragraphs of Spanish-tinged proper nouns that will leave you scratching your head. Bleach: Soul Resurreccion makes no apologies and pushes further ahead in each Story Mode section, hitting you with text and narration each time. It only took about 5 or 6 missions before I was mashing the button to skip the narration to get to the gameplay.

The gameplay is something that feels a lot like a Dynasty Warriors game, and that's a good thing. You'll jam on face buttons to perform weapon attacks and combos, and work up meters to blast out special attacks. Mowing through countless masses of enemies is just as fun in this game as it is in any other of its type. At first. This title is packed with several playable characters straight out of the anime. Some of them have varied types of attacks, like Ichigo's sword, or Ishida's bow and arrow, but that wasn't enough to keep things fresh with all of the enemy mowing. I quickly fell into a rut of starting a new stage with a new character, mashing attack buttons to progress, fighting a boss, and then repeating. Slashing baddies looks and feels great at first, but when that's all you do, it starts to wear on you.
There are a few things to break up the slashing, though. The boss battles provided a stiff challenge. Bosses of varying sizes, shapes and backgrounds come straight out of the anime to mix up the action for you. Unfortunately many of the smaller bosses are weak to the same exploit -- simply mash your standard attacks when they're down, timing them so that they'll hit at the exact time they stand. Too easy.

The game's character leveling system is also nicely structured. While fighting normal enemies in the stages of story mode you'll earn soul points that you can spend in character maps. In these maps you'll add to stats, unlock abilities and add enhancements for the character that you choose. It's too bad that these characters are overpowered to start with. Because they're too powerful there's almost no incentive to even bother leveling up for anything outside of being curious.
It all looks nice, though. Bleach: Soul Resurreccion is a very pretty game, packed with cel-shaded graphics that look so much like the anime that if you squint, you'll swear you're watching an episode. Even the most minor of enemies sported top-notch cel-shading and slick animation. Some of the bosses, especially the bigger ones, were very impressive in scale, design and animation. Cutscenes also looked very nice. Fans of the anime will definitely love how this game looks, that's for sure.

All this said, I had a fairly good time with Bleach: Soul Resurreccion. I never really knew what was going on in the story, and the button mashing destroyed my hands, but it was an enjoyable, mindless romp in a really pretty anime world. If you approach this game as a fun couple of afternoons of slashing through baddies and trying out special moves, you'll likely enjoy it, but don't expect much more than that from this title. Fans of the anime might want to give this a spin. If nothing else, they can see all the series characters cel-shaded in glorious HD. Beyond that there's not much here.

Sale Now : Red Faction : Armageddon

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Tue, 5 Jul 2011 00:37:00 -0700

Price : Rp 45.000,-

Number of Disc : 2 DVD

Armageddon will feature no competitive multiplayer modes. Instead it will focus on a Horde-mode style of game called Infestation. However, the game will carry over many other elements from its predecessor, Red Faction: Guerrilla, such as the focus on fully destructible environments. Unlike its predecessor which had the player liberating settlements from the totalitarian control of the corrupt Earth Defense Force, players must now reclaim cultist fortifications on the disaster-ravaged surface of the planet and defend colonists from hostile

Martian creatures in the ancient mines and chasms beneath it, cleansing infestations from all structures and freeing humans from imprisonment in alien cocoons. Guerrilla's open-world approach has been done away with, in exchange for more linear and directed gameplay, a better progression of the narrative, and a sense of suspense and tension when traversing the sometimes claustrophobic interiors in the game.

System Requirments of This Game :

Minimum System Requirements:
Operating System: Windows XP
CPU: 2GHz Dual Core Processor (Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Athlon X2) or higher
Memory: 2GB System RAM or more
Graphics Card: 320MB Video RAM, GPU w/ Shader Model 3.0 support, NVIDIA GeForce 88xx series or better, ATI Radeon HD30xx series or better
DirectX: 9.0c
Hard Drive: 7.5 GB
Sound: 100% DirectX 9.0C compliant sound card or equivalent onboard sound
Recommended System Requirements:
Operating System: Windows 7
CPU: Any Quad Core Processor(Intel Core i5 or AMD Phenom II X4) or 3.0+ Dual Core CPU
Memory: 4GB System RAM or more
Video Card: 1GB Video RAM, GPU w/ Shader Model 4.0 support, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 400 series or better, ATI Radeon HD5000 series or better
DirectX 11
Hard Drive: 7.5 GB
Sound: 100% DirectX 9.0C compliant sound card or equivalent onboard sound

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Sale Now : Brink

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Tue, 5 Jul 2011 00:28:00 -0700

Price : Rp 45.000,-

Number of disc : 2 DVD

When it comes to meat'n'potatoes gameplay, Splash Damage sticks to what it knows best. The majority of Brink's core conceits will be second-nature to those that have spent time with any of the previous Enemy Territories games and at least familiar enough to be approachable for anyone with a little experience with an objective-based or class based shooter. The action is largely reliant on players working together to complete specific objectives that are usually pre-determined according to the map.

Brink's overall gameplay experience is built on four pillars: primary objectives, secondary objectives, buffs and S.M.A.R.T. The latter (smooth movement over random terrain) is a method of movement that provides a freedom that we're almost trained not to expect in first-person shooters.

S.M.A.R.T is essentially parkour; however the beauty of the system lies in its simplicity. Tap the run button and the character will break into a sprint. From there all that's required from the player is guidance - S.M.A.R.T takes care of the rest by vaulting, climbing and jumping anything that gets in between you and your stopping point. It's an intuitive system that will require players to re-think how they approach combat, and Splash Damage deserves applause for having both the talent and the bottle to innovate in a genre fast exhausting every possible gameplay quirk.

Brink gives player's access to manoeuvres like a baseball slide and wall jump that exhibit the kind of agility more ordinarily characteristic of platform games. Once the growing pains have subsided, S.M.A.R.T becomes an indispensably vital tool in survival and when used properly can be used to add both flair and creativity to a firefight.

The game features light, medium and heavy body types, each of which have different movement capabilities - so maps are smartly designed to offer shortcut, vantage points and entry point opportunities for each build. Map furnishings that are habitually ignored in shooters can be used to gain a tactical advantage in Brink. A stack of crates may only serve to block or funnel players in another game, but in Brink, all you need is a a tap of the button, to scale it - leaving you free to shower bullets down from above on an enemy caught with its pants down.

Articles Source : http://www.computerandvideogames.com/300618/reviews/brink-review/

System Requirments of this game :

Minimum Specs

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz or equivalent
Memory: 2GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA 8800GS / ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro or equivalent
OS: Windows XP (SP3)/Vista/Windows 7*
Hard Drive: 8GB of free space

* Bootcamp for Apple products is not supported

Recommended Specs

Processor: Intel Quad Core i5
Memory: 3GB RAM
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 / ATI Radeon™ HD 5850
OS: Windows XP (SP3)/Vista/Windows 7*
Hard Drive: 8GB of free space

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Sale Now : Dirt 3

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Tue, 5 Jul 2011 00:18:00 -0700

Price : Rp 45.000

Number of Disc : 2 DVD

Eurogamer gives it a 9/10, IGN gives it a 8.5/10, and OXM gives it a 9/10.
The acclaimed off-road racing franchise returns in this third series entry. DiRT 3 delivers mud, sweat and gears the world over: from the intense weather-beaten rally stages of Europe, Africa and the US, to executing performance driving showcases and career challenges where car control is pushed to spectacular limits. The game boasts more cars, more locations, more routes and more events than any other game in the series, including over 50 rally cars representing the very best from five decades of the sport.

System Requirments of this game :

Minimum System Requirements
OS: WinXP, Vista or Win7
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 2,8 GHz, Intel Pentium D 2.8 GHz
RAM: 2 GB
HDD: 15 GByte
Gfx Card: AMD Radeon HD 2000 256 MB, Geforce 8000 Series 256 MB
Recommended System Requirements
DirectX 11
OS: Vista or Win7
CPU: AMD Phenom II or Intel Core i7
RAM: 3 GB
Gfx Card: AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series

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Sale Now : Duke Nukem Forever

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Tue, 5 Jul 2011 00:09:00 -0700

Price : Rp 45.000,-

Number of Disc : 2 DVD

The good news is that Duke Nukem Forever's status as the joke of the game industry remains intact. The bad news is the joke's now on you. Duke Nukem Forever is a terrible game colored with flashes of mediocrity sparsely interlaced with rare filaments of greatness.

One example of the latter is the sublime monster truck levels in which Duke alternately powers over obstacles and foes alike in the jubilantly bouncy vehicle, and must run and gun on foot through some of the game's best-designed levels in search of gas to feed the guzzling beast after it peters to a stop, its gas tank empty. It's somewhat of a shame (if poetically appropriate) that these levels occur so late in the game, as many players will be likely to skip them, having been battered by the levels of far lesser quality non-sensibly stacked further toward the front.

The monster truck levels aside, most of the game is an exercise in tedium peppered with frequent, boorish attempts at humor that rarely elicit a chuckle. In Duke Nukem Forever, you play as Duke Nukem, the larger-than-life parody of 1980s action movie heroes who, after having saved the world from an alien menace 12 years prior, must again be pressed into action when the aliens return in search of "our chicks" and on a mission to exact revenge against the overly-muscled ego maniac, Duke. The game's attempts at self-awareness are frequent (such as the first level of the game turning out to be an in-game videogame Duke is playing while receiving oral sex from two school-girl outfitted blondes named "The Holsom Twins"), yet the shtick wears thin in mere minutes. With many of the levels taking place in Duke-themed attractions in and around the Las Vegas Duke Nukem-themed casino, the combined effect merely compounds the ennui of being in the presence of a cliché that has outstayed its welcome.

Even the basic mechanics of gameplay are not immune from ham-handed self pleasuring. The health bar, for instance, a staple of first-person gaming, has been replaced with an "Ego" bar, a play on the theme that for a hero like Duke, ego is everything. Unfortunately this opens the door for the game's most obvious WTF since, in a nod to modern gaming trends, this Ego bar will automatically replenish when Duke is injured, providing he can avoid taking any more damage. In order to replenish the Ego bar, the player must hide behind cover or run away from the enemy. Meaning that, functionally, Duke's Ego is restored by behaving cowardly. This discord alone could serve as the banner theme for the evolution of modern shooters, and why a game like Duke, having been almost cryo-frozen for more than a decade, then awoken and peppered with modern touches, feels so out of place.

In an interesting touch, the Ego bar can be permanently lengthened by interacting with various items within the game, such as Duke-themed pinball machines and mirrors, which makes a lot more sense than replenishing it by running away. This, combined with fun nods to Duke's "click and see" past (interacting with toilets, writing on whiteboards, using vending machines, etc.) could have added up to more than the whole had they been pinned to a game worthy of supporting such gimmicks. Unfortunately, Duke Nukem Forever is not that game. In truth, it's often hard to tell what game it is. So many of its levels are seemingly mis-matched, and the variety of mechanics introduced by other games over the more than decade since intermingling in a confusing and altogether unpleasant way.

System Requirments of this game :

Minimum System Requirements
OS: Windows XP/Vista/7
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.0 Ghz / AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+
Memory: 1 Gb
Hard Drive: 10 Gb free
Video Memory: 256 Mb
Video Card: nVidia GeForce 8600 / ATI Radeon HD 2600
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 9.0c
Keyboard
Mouse
DVD Rom Drive
Recommended System Requirements
OS: Windows XP/Vista/7
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.6 GHz / AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+
Memory: 2 Gb
Hard Drive: 10 Gb free
Video Memory: 512 Mb
Video Card: nVidia GeForce 8800 GTS / ATI Radeon HD 3850
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 9.0c
Keyboard
Mouse
DVD Rom Drive

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Sale Now : Fear 3

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Mon, 4 Jul 2011 23:45:00 -0700

Price : Rp 45.000,-

Number of Disc : 2 DVD

Nine months after the events of both games, the Point Man was captured by Armacham Security and interrogated in an asylum. Paxton Fettel interrupts the interrogation and helps free the Point Man. The two form an uneasy alliance and escape the Asylum through the slums.

Commandeering a helicopter, the Point Man and Fettel return to Fairport to regroup with F.E.A.R. operative Jin Sun-Kwon. During their return, the civilian population that survived were either driven insane by the paranormal activity or were executed by Armachan personnel. Fighting their way through, the brothers successfully meet up with Jin. Jin plays back recorded video footage of Michael Becket, who revealed his rape and is slated by Armacham for transport.

Using an automated transport, the Point Man and Fettel assault the local airport to intercept Becket, killing the remnants of the Armacham personnel. In order to gain more intel from Becket, Fettel possesses him and reveals Becket's past life to the Point Man while Becket realizes the Point Man's identity. Fettel's release of Becket proves fatal, causing a gory explosion. The Point Man and Fettel head to a training facility made for them by Harlan Wade, destroying items associated with memories of their training. Shortly after destroying a monstrous apparition of Wade, one of two endings are possible, depending on multiple factors. For single-player, a good and evil ending occurs depending on whether the player has controlled the Point Man or Fettel. Alternatively, if played during co-op, the player with the higher score determines the ending. The good ending will show Point Man overpowering Fettel and vice-versa, with the ending depending on whether Point Man or Fettel had survived their final struggle.

The Point Man ending has him shooting Paxton in the head three times and watching his body spontaneously burn itself up. Then, as he walks over to Alma, ready to finish the job, he notices that her baby has been successfully born. Even as she dies and her body burns itself up, Point Man receives a transmission from Jin that everything is finally over. With the baby in the crook of his left arm, he leaves the room.

The Paxton Fettel ending has Paxton possessing Point Man's body and somehow extracting the baby from Alma's swollen body. He promises to raise the child like it was his own, but sets it aside as he notices Alma. Then he pounces on her, and the final scene implies that he eats her body amidst a growing pool of blood.

System Requirments of This Game :

Minimum Spec Requirement:
Operating System: Windows XP
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz, AMD Athlon X2 4800+ processor
RAM: 2GB
Video Card: NVIDIA 8800 GT 512MB RAM, ATI 3850HD 512Mb RAM or better
HDD: 10GB Free Hard Drive Space
DirectX: 9.0c

Recommended Spec Requirement
Operating System: Windows 7
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.93Ghz+, Intel quad core 2.66Ghz+, AMD Phenom II X2 550, 3.1Ghz+ Processor
RAM: 4GB
Memory: 10GB Free Hard Drive Space
Video Card: NVIDIA 9800 GTX+ 512MB RAM, ATI 5750HD 512Mb RAM or better
DirectX: 11

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Sale Now : Alice madness return

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Mon, 4 Jul 2011 23:28:00 -0700

Price : Rp 25.000,-

Number of Disc : 1 DVD

American McGee’s Alice is a PC game that came out in 2000 to mostly positive reviews. It was a little bit too straightforward in terms of its gameplay, but McGee’s dark vision of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland was immediately captivating and ended up serving as an inspiration for thousands upon thousands of tattoo wearers. The game attracted a sizable number of die-hard fans who have been clamoring for a sequel ever since. That sequel is finally here, Alice: Madness Returns.

Through the Looking Glass… Again

The sequel picks up with Alice living in a sort of halfway house, where a headshrink gives her counsel while attempting to extract and put to rest the young girl’s memories of the fire that claimed the lives of her entire family. All of these recollections do frail Alice no good, and it’s not long before she’s down the proverbial rabbit hole — proverbial because there isn’t actually a rabbit hole in this game — and back in Wonderland.
Only it’s not the Wonderland she remembers. A foul corruption has spread across the land, and it apparently has a thing for creepy doll heads. Throughout the game you’ll encounter puddles of black ooze that slither their way into the shapes of your most frequently recurring enemies, many of which sport one or more stark white-faced doll heads amidst the goo. McGee has always had a knack for creepy visuals, and this new enemy definitely has that going on.

Alice’s new adventures through Wonderland take her to a number of locales–some familiar and some not–to meet a variety of the fantasy world’s denizens. Everyone seems a little “off” though, and finding out why is at the heart of the game’s mystery. As your time in each environment comes to an end, there is inevitably a familiar face waiting there to feed you a line that is essentially the equivalent of “Your princess is in another castle.” Between, and sometimes during, each chapter, Alice makes trips back to London that serve to further flesh out the story while stripping away the combat and puzzle-solving, almost playing out like extended interactive cutscenes.

Articles Source : http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/alice-madness-returns-review/

System Requirements :

Minimum System Requirements:
Operating System Microsoft ® Windows ® Vista ® SP2 / XP ® SP3
Processor 2.0 GHz Intel ® Pentium ® 4 class or AMD Athlon ™ or equivalent processor
Memory 1 GB RAM (Windows Vista ®) / 512 MB RAM (Windows XP ®)
The remaining 7 GB or more hard disk space
Graphics 128 MB DirectX ® 9.0c-compatible, 3D graphics, support Shaders 2.0 (NVIDIA ® GeForce ® FX or more, ATI Radeon ™ 9500 or more)
Sound card 16-bit DirectX ® 9.0c-compatible sound card
CD-ROM 8x DVD-ROM drive
DirectX ® 9.0c (included)

Recommended System Requirements:
Operating System Microsoft ® Windows ® Vista ® SP2 / XP ® SP3
Processor 3.0 GHz Intel Pentium 4, 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2, 3500 + AMD Athlon or equivalent processor
Memory 1 GB RAM (Windows Vista ®) / 512 MB RAM (Windows XP ®)
The remaining 7 GB or more hard disk space
256MB DirectX 9.0c compatible graphics card, 3D video card Hardware T & L (NVIDIA GeForce or ATI Radeon or equivalent)
Shegan the card 16-bit DirectX ® 9.0c-compatible sound card
8x DVD-ROM drive
DirectX ® 9.0c (included)

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Top 10 Best Gaming Laptops in 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Kenap) — Fri, 1 Jul 2011 19:54:00 -0700

Nowadays the leading companies in laptop’s market are developing certain types of laptops which will be used for a certain purpose such as Business, gaming, multimedia and other. So for all the gamers who wants the best laptop for gaming purpose that will allow them to play the games with high graphics and breath taking sequences, here is the list of world’s 10 best gaming laptops in 2011 that contains all the power packed configurations and specifications.

10. Dell Studio XPS 1640:

Dell is one of the best companies in the whole world. Dell Studio XPS 1640 is gaming laptop manufactured by Dell with well equipped feature which is perfect for gaming purpose. It has 16″ LCD display with a hard drive of 500 GB.
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo(Dual core)
System Memory: 4GB to 8GB DDR3
Video Memory: 1GB DDR3 VRAM

9. Xplorer X7-8500:

Here is another uniquely designed gaming laptop with very beautiful outlooks and awesome specs. With a hard drive of 500 GB and a LCD display of 17.3″, this is an extremely cool laptop for gaming purpose.
CPU: 1.73 GHz Intel® Core™ i7-740QM Processor
System Memory: 4(2GBx2) DDR3
Video Memory: 1.5GB GDDR5 VRAM

8. Acer Aspire AS8943G – 6782:

A cool gaming laptop with a decent design, Acer Aspire AS8943G – 6782 has rocked the market due its highly powered configuration. It has a 18.4″ LCD display and has a hard drive of 500 GB which very big.
CPU: 1.60 GHz Intel Core i7-720QM Processor
System Memory: 4/8GB DDR3
Video Memory: 1GB DDR3

7. MSI GX740 – 235US:

MSI is one of the main competitors in laptop’s market, and there is no doubt that they are currently leading the market of gaming laptops. Here is another awesome gaming laptop by MSI with all the specification that will fulfill the desire of the user. MSI GX740 – 235US is one hell of a gaming laptop and currently it stands in no 7 position.
CPU: 2.4 GHz Intel® Core™ i5-450M Processor
System Memory: 4GB (2GBx2) DDR3
Video Memory: 1GB GDDR5

6. Asus Republic of Gamers G53JW-A1:

This laptop here is one of the coolest gaming laptop and my personal favorite. It has 15.6 “LCD display with enormous memory of 750 GB along with all the new and basic specs.
CPU: 1.7GHz Intel Core i7 740QM
System Memory: 6GB Expandable to 16GB
Video Memory: 1.5 GDDR5 VRAM

5. Clevo X7200:

Clevo X7200 currently stands 5th in this list because of its marvelous configurations. It has 17.3″ glossy LCD display and has a huge hard drive of 500 GB. I personally feel that this machine is one of the best in the market.
CPU: 1.7GHz Intel Core i7-980X six-core desktop processor
System Memory: 12 GB DDR3-1333 triple-channel RAM (3x 4GB)
Video Memory: 2GB GDDR5

4. Alienware M17x:

It is one of the hottest laptops in the market and comes in the variety of specifications. Alienware series is the most successful laptop series in gaming genre because of rocking features and awesome specs. The main specs of this gaming laptop are as follows.
CPU: 2.13 GHz Intel® CoreTM i7 940XM, 1.86 GHz Intel® CoreTM i7 840QM, 1.73 GHz Intel® CoreTM i7 740QM
System Memory: 4GB Dual Channel Memory (2x 2GB DDR3), 6GB Memory (1x 2GB, 1x 4GB DDR3), 8GB Dual Channel Memory (2x 4GB DDR3)
Video Memory: 1024 (MB) ATI HD5870 Mobility RadeonTM

3. Qosmio X505 – Q896:

This gaming laptop is beautifully designed and highly equipped which enables the user to play all sort of games. It has 18.4 inch wide screen LCD display with 500 GB hard drive along with other configurations.
CPU: 1.73 GHZ Intel® Core™ i7-740QM processor
System Memory: 4GB DDR3 1066MHz memory
Video Memory: 1.5GB GDDR5 discrete graphics memory

2. iBuypower Battalion 101 X8100-U3:

2nd in the race, iBuypower Battalion 101 X8100-U3 is also one of the most wanted gaming laptop of this year. It has a big 18.4 inches LCD display with full HD resolution. In addition to this it also contains a massive hard drive of 640 GB expandable to 1 TB.
CPU: 1.73 GHz Intel® Core™ i7-740QM Mobile Processor
System Memory: 4GB [2GB x 2] 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM
Video Memory: 1GB [X8100]

1. MSI GT660R – 004US:

MSI GT660R – 004US is the most powerful laptop that has outlasted all the competitors. This fully equipped machine has all the specs which will allow you to play all the games with high graphics. It has a 16″ glossy LCD display and other basic specs include:
Specification
CPU: 1.73 GHz Intel® Core™ i7-740QM Processor
Systemy: 6GB (2G*3) DDR3
Video Memory: 1GB DDR3 VRAM

Source : http://www.tiptoptens.com/2011/05/06/10-best-gaming-laptops-in-2011/