Game Revolution

Tomb Raider - Underworld

2009-05-26T08:12:00.003+07:00

When it comes to game icons, Lara Croft ranks as one of the most well known in the world. Eidos' popular heroine has explored the ruins of various cultures, fought human and supernatural threats, and solved countless puzzles on her way to becoming one of the greatest archeologists (or treasure hunters) in gaming. Two years ago, Eidos and Crystal Dynamics rebooted the franchise with Tomb Raider: Legend, a title that revamped the combat, control scheme and brain teasing puzzles that the series was known for. The follow-up to this adventure, Tomb Raider: Underworld, was recently released with hopes to expand on this formula. But has Lara learned some new tricks, or is this an old journey in disguise?

Underworld is a continuation of the storyline established within Legend, and even presents a quick summary in the form of a recap video for players that are new to the storyline or want a quick refresher. Covering both the mystery surrounding her mother as well as the last research that her father did before he died, Underworld starts as Lara explores coordinates that lead her to an ancient ruin on the Mediterranean Sea floor. As she investigates, she uncovers a rather surprising find: a site dedicated to both Norse mythology and evidence that indicates that Thor's hammer, the mythical weapon wielded by the God of Thunder, actually exists. While I won't give facets of the story away, I can comfortably say that for the most part, the story is pretty good; it manages to present the kind of adventure that you typically expect from a Tomb Raider title and while there are some moments of predictability (particularly if you've played Legend), the game's mix of
cutscenes and exploration keeps the action moving just as you'd want it to.

The pacing that you see is slightly due to the expansion and refinement of the some of the gameplay mechanics. For example, in Legend, players were given the largest amount of flexibility yet in a Tomb Raider game, with a lot of freedom provided to your agility, the speed at which you climbed or moved around ledges, and other control elements. That is pretty much retained within Underworld, so you still are able to easily manipulate Lara's acrobatics when it comes to swinging on poles, scaling walls and other moves. Underworld attempts to build on these basics within a few adjusted gameplay systems. One of the first refinements is the removal of the quick time events from Legend in favor of Situational Adrenaline. Instead of having a button prompt that pops up onscreen that tells you what you need to do to survive a particular moment, the developers tried to give you a feeling that you simply need to react by moving and avoiding that particular threat.

Another adjustment that has been made within the gameplay is some minor adjustments to combat. Lara still retains the agility that allows her to perform actions like tumbling and firing weapons at the same time or aiming at targets from ledges or other perches. In Underworld, Lara now gains the ability to aim at and fire at two separate enemies that happen to be targeting her at the same time. This is particularly useful if you're trying to take out swarms of bats or other creatures, but can also be used to hamper the progress of other enemies that attempt to close in on you and perform melee attacks. What's more, Underworld provides Lara with sticky grenades that she can throw, ensuring that an explosive that you want to go off in a specific location will detonate at the desired place and cutting down on the frustration that frequently occurred in Legend.

While Legend allowed players to bounce behind an enemy and shoot them in a bullet time enhanced motion, the flip has simply been included into her normal repertoire. The focus system from Legend has been somewhat replaced by the inclusion of an adrenaline system, which is built up after each successful melee attack or bullet that hits its mark. Players can trigger the adrenaline at any time, which instantly slows down the actions of your enemies and makes your shots much stronger. Alternatively, you can store your adrenaline until you've maxed out your holdings, at which point you can get close to an enemy and bounce off of them, lining up a reticule into a highlighted area to potentially perform a one-shot kill. It's not guaranteed, but if you can get in place, it does allow you to get satisfying takedowns that are worthy of Lara's athleticism.However, while the adjustments for combat do help to make the fights you go through a bit more accessible, it does wind up raising a few other problems. For one thing, the adrenaline system manages to make a large number of the battles a bit too easy. Because you're always replenishing your adrenaline, you are frequently able to continually move in and out of gunfights or other combat situations with an edge over your opponents. Even though you can manipulate the game's difficulty thanks to the player-tailoring system (making it harder to kill enemies), hits with your firearms still wind up adding to your meter, allowing a player with an accurate flick of the analog stick to effectively combo his or her slow motion attacks, giving him or her an advantage in battle. Another issue comes in the fact that while you are asked to select a weapon at the start of a stage, you still have access to all of the weapons within the game thanks to your PDA, and between quick swapping and accessing these weapons with your pause menu, you're more than equipped to take out any enemies that you face. In fact, thanks to the unlimited bullets that you have with your basic pistols and the lack of penalties for carrying this arsenal, battles are relatively easy to get through regardless of who you're up against. While combat still isn't the primary focus of the game, it occurs frequently enough in a level to stand out as a weakness.

One of the last adjustments that Crystal Dynamics made is something it lovingly termed "What Could Lara Do?" What that essentially means is that if a player believes or expects that Lara should be able to perform a specific action, she most likely is capable of doing that within the game. For example, if you want to pick up an object and fight off opponents with your free hand, or want to bounce from one wall to the other to climb a narrow vertical shaft, you can do that as well. In many ways, this was designed to help unshackle the player from constantly focusing on the older platforming and "leap from Pillar A to Ledge B" mechanics that the Tomb Raider series had become known for. It also added a bit of realism to Lara's movements, as you'd expect her to brush plants aside or naturally prep for a jump before leaping forward, much more than any animation would ever convey.

This system also extends to more than basic controls, because it winds up affecting the exploratory nature of the game as well. For instance, if you can see a ledge that's just out of reach, chances are that you can scale a nearby wall to reach it or swing from a pole and grab it with your fingertips. This verticality plays into the expansive feel of the stages, which seem to be much larger than any previous Tomb Raider level thanks to the non-linear approach paid to many of the game's puzzles. Players will frequently move from one direct hallway or corridor into an open area dominated by one or more complex puzzles, and they'll be able to pick and choose which side or way they want to attempt to solve problems from and move forward. This makes traversing many of these larger areas much more interesting, because you'll have at least two or more ways that you can choose to accomplish a task as you go through each level. While this can also add to potential confusion that you might face thanks to the size of each area, Lara fortunately comes with a sonar map that works on both land and underwater, allowing players to continually get a three dimensional sense of where they happen to be at all times.What's more, Crystal Dynamics decided to throw players a bone by including something known as Field Assistance if you find yourself completely confused or stuck. By accessing this feature from your PDA, players can get a hint as to what you need to do for a particular action or get a more detailed explanation to help you through a trouble spot. The inclusion of this feature will definitely be a welcome addition for those players who wind up having trouble visualizing where they need to go as they explore the vast locations or just want a little nudge as they try to move through each environment without having to rely on a guide, FAQ or other hints from the Internet. It also allows people to determine just how much handholding they want, because they can completely avoid this system and charge ahead, making the challenge of exploring the locations of the game as easy or difficult as they want.

While Underworld may be more open and accessible to players, as well being more non-linear than ever before, it does seem as though this has come with some technical downsides, which happen to be some of the largest detractors to the gameplay. For one thing, slowdown and framerate drops happen quite a bit within the game. It's not nearly as bad as it's presented on the consoles, but when it does happen, it is distracting enough to break you out of the immersive nature of the visuals and aural presentation, which is generally very good, and the striking scale of the levels themselves. However, another thing that will stand out will be texture pop-in, which will snap into place before your eyes even if you're not moving through the environment. Odd shadows and flicker will also crop up, which doesn't look nearly as good as the rest of the title. Spiders and bats, while much better than the console version, still look pretty bad, particularly from a distance. While that can be overlooked for the overall strength of the visuals and the presentation of each environment, as a minor aside, what's with some of the treasures and health packs blending into the background? It can be hard to tell what the treasures and the health packs are because they don't stand out, particularly if you have icon prompts turned off or you're in a darker section of a level.

However, these are no match for the two biggest technical issues for the game. The first is that there are a number of clipping and object detection issues that frequently plague the game regardless of the console you play it on. Lara will frequently move into or through walls or blocks, sometimes forcing her into an animation loop as the game tries to reconcile her movement with her location in the game world and an object she shouldn't be in. Coworkers and I have also seen instances where Lara has jumped onto a pillar and landed inside of the column up to her waist, or tried to grab a ledge and phased into a wall – not onto, into. This makes it much harder to gauge your next jump, or even be sure that you're on the part of the game environment you think you are. I've also seen segments where Lara has leapt onto invisible platforms as she's tried to make jumps to other areas, which makes it rather hard to determine whether or not you've got your timing down when you accidentally wind up exploiting a technical hiccup. Similarly, I've also seen sections where enemies have moved cleanly through Lara without any damage caused or explanation as to why

The other serious problem comes with the camera, which is perhaps as infuriating, if not more so, than previous Tomb Raider games. As you move through the environment, the camera will perform zooms, pans and tilts of its own accord, without any instruction or direction from you. Technically, this would be fine if there was a particular thing that it was trying to frame while not hampering the gameplay. But frequently the camera will either lock onto a specific perspective, making it nigh impossible to figure out the right jump angle or location to move to. Other times, the camera will fight you for things that you want to look at, making the screen visibly shake as it tries to reconcile what you are seeing and what it would prefer to show you. The camera can also throw you and Lara off with your jumps, because it can push her away from specific jumps or turn her head at the last second, making it harder to lean and jump in the right direction. This is infuriating, and I hurled many an invective, as well as a controller and furniture, as I fought with the game. Even with using the mouse to control the camera, which is better than the analog stick of the Xbox Controller, it still creates these visual issues.

As I mentioned earlier, this is rather disappointing, because the visuals that are presented within cutscenes and in very impressive location shots are quite good. There are some sections in levels that will simply make you say wow, especially when you realize that you have to traverse that location or a specific area to unlock some puzzle. Lara's animations are quite well done as well, from the handstand to a cartwheel that she'll do as she flips over an edge to the desperate grab for a handhold. The spoken dialogue though the game is very well done, and the musical score is great.At least the PC version of the game attempts to optimize its experience for you, and I noticed that made the visuals much sharper and clearer than expected. I also noticed that there were plenty of jumps where using the mouse and keyboard controls were a much better option than simply using a gamepad, because Lara didn't have nearly as much deviation available in her jumps. While that didn't solve every single camera issue that would lead her to jump to her death, it was refreshing to know that it was an option.

Tomb Raider: Underworld
Publisher: Eidos
Developer: Crystal Dynamics

Minimum System Requirements
OS: Windows XP/Vista
Processor: Intel @ 3 GHz/AMD @ 2.5 GHz
Memory: 1 GB (2 GB for Vista)
Hard Drive: 8 GB Free
Video Memory: 128 MB nVidia GeForce 6800GT/ATI 1300XT
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 9.0c
Keyboard & Mouse

Recommended System Requirements
OS: Windows XP/Vista
Processor: Intel Core 2 DUO @ 2.2 GHz or Athlon 64 X2 4400+
Memory: 2 GB
Hard Drive: 8 GB Free
Video Memory: nVidia GeForce 9800 GTX /ATI HD4800
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 9.0c or 10
Keyboard & Mouse

Worms 4 Mayhem

2009-05-24T08:59:00.000+07:00

Worms 4: Mayhem is the third Worms game in two years, which is a lot of worms. But more importantly, it's hard to believe there's such a rampant demand for these games, considering they really never change or improve over time. Aside from the requisite transition to 3D, the Worms series hasn't changed much since it first appeared on the PC in 1995. Each new installment may tweak the weapon lineup ever so slightly, but these worms tend to stick to their guns. That's both a good and a bad thing for Worms 4: Mayhem. On one hand, you can expect to be chucking holy hand grenades, detonating old ladies, and calling in air strikes in the hopes of destroying the opposing team of little pink worms. On the other hand, if you've done all that before, there's really no reason to play this game, because it doesn't offer anything new and worthwhile.

There isn't really much mayhem in Worms 4. There are explosions and gunfire aplenty, but all that action is doled out in calculated, methodical doses in turn-based team battles. There are several gameplay modes in Worms 4, but they all revolve around the same basic gameplay. The single-player story mode is the best way to warm up to the game if you've never played Worms before. There's a thin story involving a wacky professor worm and his naive but well-intentioned pupil worms. The professor constructs
a time machine, and it breaks down. Consequently, you have to battle through 25 stages to collect pieces of the time machine so you can get back home.

The stages take place in medieval times, the Old West, prehistoric times, and the modern day, and each era has its own set of worms that behave pretty similarly, except for the worms have different hats and voices. The missions in story mode are fairly creative and represent a nice change of pace from the simple kill-everything mentality the series is known for. Some missions have you blowing up certain parts of the environment, and others have you defending the professor for a set amount of time. Unfortunately, the missions never become difficult, and many of them are rather brief. The artificial intelligence here is inconsistent, making boneheaded decisions one turn and blasting you with deadly precision the next. The computer-controlled enemies always favor the same few weapons as well, which makes for some dull and uneven single-player missions.

The only difficulty in the single-player missions comes from navigating some of the platforming sections. The worms in the game aren't really nimble creatures, but you'll often have to hop between small platforms suspended above water, which any Worms veteran knows spells certain death. You can use the jetpack or ninja rope, but the awkward control usually makes using those tools more hassle than it's worth. These types of missions are challenging, sure, but they're frustrating and aren't much fun. Really, we just want to blow stuff up.

There's still plenty of blowing stuff up to be had here, but it doesn't feel all that satisfying. The classic weaponry is at your disposal, like grenades, shotguns, and sheep. There are also some newer weapons, like poison arrows and a really weak sniper rifle. The problem is there are plenty of good weapons available that you're already familiar with, so there's not much reason to try any new ones. You can also create your own custom weapon. But don't get too excited, because the weapon editor is fairly limited. You can create a gun, a thrown weapon, or an air-strike weapon. Then you can design the weapon by mixing and matching various components. For example, if you want to make a gun, you can choose various designs for the butt, scope, and barrel. And then you can set various parameters, such as how powerful the weapon is, whether it's affected by wind or not, how much it will deform land, and so on. You can't simply max out all the stats, though, as you have to keep a pressure gauge out of the red. This means all the weapons you create will be fairly tame...and not too different from the weapons already in the game. Part of the strategy in Worms involves deforming the land with explosions. A bazooka round won't even take out a single worm, but if you use that bazooka round to blow up a chunk of land, you can send multiple worms into the drink with a single shot. The terrain in Worms 4 is still destructible, although only on certain levels. The weapons seem underpowered here, though, and often the map will look pretty much unchanged--even after a lengthy battle. The holy hand grenade still makes quite a dent, but it's nowhere near as spectacular as it could be, and it doesn't feel much better than the everyday grenade or stick of dynamite.The best part of Worms has always been the multiplayer game. It can be a lot of fun to blow your friends' worms to smithereens by making creative use of the weapons in the game. Worms 4 doesn't change the formula, so it can still be a lot of fun. On the Xbox, the game supports four-player battles offline, as well as on Xbox Live. The PC version of the game supports the same number of players via LAN or Internet play. There are four match types: basic deathmatch; homelands, which is basically deathmatch, except each team starts out in its own fort; destruction, which has you trying to destroy your enemies' land rather than their worms; statue defender, which requires you to defend your own statue while trying to destroy your enemies' statues; and survivor, where each team uses one worm at a time until it runs out of worms. The multiplayer matches can be a lot of fun, but unless you set up a Worms league among your friends, you'll have a hard time finding anyone to play against online.

The graphics in Worms 4: Mayhem are the same as they have been since Worms 3D. The worms themselves are cute, and they have a decent array of silly animations and facial expressions. You can customize your team of worms with a variety of hats, glasses, and gloves as well. The stages are bright and colorful, and there are plenty of different themes to choose from. And in the single-player missions, you'll see construction sites, castles, diners, volcanoes, palaces, and more. Unfortunately, you'll often have a hard time getting a good look at the world around you due to some bad camera control. On the PC you can control the camera with the mouse, which works fairly well given the sensitivity of the device. However, on the Xbox, the camera control and aiming are far less precise because you have to use the right analog stick, which just isn't as responsive as a mouse. In both cases, the camera often bumps up against a wall, making it difficult to see exactly what you're doing. This can be particularly frustrating when you're inching along and you suddenly fall through a hole in the terrain that you couldn't see. There's also the same old collision issue here that's plagued the Worms series forever. Sometimes your worms will get into tight spots that they can't get out of because some tiny invisible piece of land is blocking their movement.

The sound in Worms 4 is rather subdued. There are plenty of silly and often funny voice sets you can assign to your worms, but each set only has a few phrases. Consequently, you'll hear every one of them multiple times during the course of a battle. The weapon sounds are pathetically weak here as well. The explosions lack some much-needed kick, and the guns only emit a faint pop. The sniper rifle is entirely silent sometimes, while other times you'll hear a small click at most. Additionally, the music is light, and it simply fades in to the background, where you'll never notice it.It's not necessarily a bad thing to stick to a proven formula--as Worms does--but there at least has to be some reason to keep playing each new installment of the franchise. Even though it's being offered at a budget price, there just isn't any reason to play Worms 4: Mayhem if you've played either of the last two games in the series. If you've never played a 3D Worms game, this is as good a place as any to start. Still, you'd be better off playing one of the classic 2D Worms games instead.

Hardware Requirements:
Windows 98SE/ME/XP/2000
DirectX 9.0c
Pentium III or Athlon at 1GHz
256mb RAM
Supported Graphics card
DirectX 9 Compatible Sound Card
1x DVD-ROM Drive

Recommended Requirements:
Windows XP/2000
Pentium 4 at 2GHz or AthlonXP 2000+
512Mb RAM
Graphics Card: GeForce FX 5xxx or Radeon 9

Pro Evolution Soccer 2009

2009-05-22T11:32:00.001+07:00

PES 2009 is undoubtedly better than last year's disappointing effort. And yet it's got a lower review score. But how can that be? It plays at a more considered pace and, finally, online play actually works with no teleporting, hardly any lag and an impressively speedy quick match option (with two versus two support, no less).

Have we lost our minds? No. Of course we haven't. The reason why PES 2009 is being given a harsher time of it this year is because these things aren't big changes. FIFA 09 is the better game, not only from a graphical point of view, but from a basic gameplay point of view, and EA has tried to tailor the PC version to the hardware. Playing PES 2009 after a FIFA 09 session makes you realise that, actually, there's not much about Konami's game that couldn't be achieved on the PS2 and almost no effort has been made to build a game suited to the PC.

Player animation is rotten. Players run about with their arms pumping back and forth as if they're robot men. The eight way movement is as wooden as ever. The passing and shooting animations are archaic. The commentary is delivered with as much quality as an episode of Hollyoaks. The soundtrack has been cribbed from a wedding DJ's vinyl collection. The player faces look silly. A magical barrier surrounds the throw-in taker. Keepers take forever to distribute the ball. Having speedy wingers cross the ball in for headed or volleyed goals is an overpowered strategy. Month old transfers have been ignored. Half the teams have made up names and games often descend into hilarious
pinball battles as the ball whizzes about as if a cat's plaything (one goal we scored against a friend - where a shot slowly rebounded off the post, onto the keeper's shoulder and into the net, had us crying tears of laughter).None of these criticisms will surprise PES fans. This is the way PES has played for a good few years now, and this is the way it plays once again. We've forgiven PES these deficiencies in the past because, well, FIFA was no alternative. But now it is. In fact it's better. It's impossible to ignore. PES doesn't play a real game of football any more, as it once proudly proclaimed from the terraces. It plays something else, something different.

Admittedly there are some areas where Konami is clearly trying. The Be A Legend mode is at first glance a complete rip off of FIFA's Be A Pro mode, but those in the know will be aware that it's actually the Western implementation of Winning Eleven's Fantasista mode, a feature that's been running for longer than FIFA's alternative. Here, you create a 17-year-old player (you can scan in your face via Web Cam if you fancy it) and bid to become captain of your country. You start out, however, playing for the wonderfully named Babilayna CF versus Athletic Club Salsabie, but you're being watched by a number of scouts from top clubs. After the game you're offered a contract at a top club (no matter how bad your performance you're picked up). We were offered terms with three clubs, but Man City (sans Robinho of course, this is PES after all) seemed like the best bet. From there, you need to impress during training matches to make the bench, and then make an impression when brought on as a substitute. It's an interesting mode to mess about with, and we have to admit that it's something that we can see a lot of players pumping many hours into, especially if they're bored of the now tired Master League, which once again makes an appearance without any significant changes. That you can take your created Legend online is an added bonus. But, ultimately, we can't see the mode replacing the traditional one on one PES match.The addition of the Champions League license sounds a lot better than it actually is. You'd think that Konami's securing of the best club competition in world football would mean PES 2009 would have the official license for all of this year's participating teams, but it doesn't. Only a select number of clubs are officially licensed, once again. Disappointingly Liverpool FC and Manchester United FC are the only officially licensed Premier League teams on offer. The illusion that you're playing a real Champions League game is shattered somewhat when Manchester United are going up against London FC. Yes there's now a full edit mode, which means that those of you with the time and inclination can right all those transfer wrongs (of which there are many - Shevchenko is still at Chelsea and Berbatov is still at Spurs, for example), and correct all the club names, but really it's a pain in the arse we shouldn't have to suffer. The saving grace for the PC version is the ease at which players will be able to download unofficial team and player conversion mods transforming non-licensed teams into something closely resembling the real thing.

And yet, despite all of the problems, there's still fun to be had from PES 2009. It's incredibly hard to nail down exactly why this is, but it's there nonetheless. Perhaps it's due to the fact that the pace of the game has been slowed ever so slightly, and that keepers are actually a lot better than in previous versions. Whatever the reason, a screamer from 25 yards is as magic as it always was. It'll still get you up off your seat and screaming your heart out. This just about saves the game from filling our hearts with bitter disappointment. That and the fact that online play actually works, which is absolutely great. PES might be feature light in comparison to FIFA's packed offering, but it still offers a fun game of virtual football. And, inevitably, some people will always prefer PES' gameplay, which is fair enough.

Still, we can't help but feel that there's going to be thousands of PES fans who embrace the power of the dark side this year, on account of the fact that it simply doesn't feel like Konami is putting much effort into the so-called 'next-gen' versions of PES these days - and that includes PC. You might even say the PS2 is the lead platform, when you compare the strides forward between Konami and EA's efforts. PES 2009 is a good game, but the times they are changin', and we're afraid that Konami is being left behind. Time for a reboot, Seabass.The Minimum system requirements:
- Windows XP SP2, Vista
- Intel Pentium 4 1.4 GHz
- 1 GiByte RAM
- 6 GB an empty seat on a disk
- GeForce FX or Radeon 9700th Pixel / Vertex Shader 2.0 and 128 MiByte VRAM.
- 800 x 600 expansion of the display

Recommended system requirements:
- Windows XP SP2, Vista
- Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz
- 2 GiByte RAM
- 8 GB hard disk
- GeForce 6800 GT / GS, Radeon X1600 or higher. Pixel / Vertex Shader 3.0 and 256 MiByte VRAM
- 1, 280 x 720 expansion of the display

Burnout Paradise - The Ultimate Box

2009-05-20T09:21:00.004+07:00

Burnout Paradise reinvigorated Criterion's ultra-successful smash-up racing series when it launched this time last year on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box brings the series' trademark racing action to the PC for the first time. With solid online and offline play, an almost staggering number of events, and more than 70 vehicles, Ultimate Box is at the front of the PC racer pack.

The amount of variety in the game is huge, and how you approach it is up to you; explore Paradise City's open world at leisure, unlock the 70-plus vehicles one at a time through single-player events, or join other players for races and challenges online. Couple this deep variety with the fact that it's hugely fun, and Burnout Paradise is easy to recommend. In addition to all of the content from the original console game, Ultimate Box also includes all of Burnout Paradise's downloadable content released to date. First up, there's Codename: Cagney, which adds the Stunt Run, Marked Man, and Road Rage modes to online multiplayer. The Bikes pack adds two-wheeled racing and a day/night cycle to the series for the first time. And last, there's Burnout Party, the first paid-for content to hit the game. Burnout Party is a pass-the-controller-style offline party mode for two to eight players and is a fun new way to experience
Burnout.

Gameplay options are largely unchanged from the console version and include normal race, Stunt Run, Marked Man, Road Rage, and Burning Route. For those new to the Burnout series, in Stunt Run you chain together drifts, jumps, and boosts to achieve combos; in Road Rage events you need to eliminate opponents by smashing them into traffic or objects; and in Marked Man you have to reach the finish line before your opponents can destroy your car. Burning Route consists of time trials from point to point, and by completing them you'll unlock an upgraded model of your current ride. Unlike in Burnout 3, The crash mode and aftertouch takedowns from Burnout 3 are missing from Paradise, but it does have the Showtime mode, which lets you take control of a wreck through the streets of Paradise City and rack up a damage bill in the process. Showtime mode isn't as strategically crafted as the challenges in Crash mode, but you'll still get to dish out plenty of carnage on unsuspecting traffic.

The biggest new feature this time around is the Burnout Paradise Party Pack, which adds an offline pass-the-controller multiplayer challenge mode for up to eight friends. Once you've set up the number of players and game types, you'll compete in a series of minigames where you earn points for successfully passing a challenge or beating your opponents' scores. The Party Pack offers instant gameplay for when you and your friends don't want to compete in longer, more demanding events, and it consists of three challenge types: stunts, skill, and speed. Stunts are a collection of insane tricks, such as successfully landing a cliff-top jump. Skill challenges include driving into oncoming traffic with boost on for as long as possible. Speed challenges might have you smashing a few billboards and then racing back to the start within a designated time limit. The Party Pack is a great addition that finally brings offline multiplayer to Burnout Paradise.

Getting online is as simple as hitting a button during gameplay, at which point you'll join your friends or enter a random lobby. The online mode is seamless, and there are no loading times; you can drop in and out of online games at will. You can set up simple point-to-point races all over the city when hosting a multiplayer session, or tackle a Freeburn Challenge set by the developers, with different challenges depending on the number of players. Burnout Paradise included 350 challenges, and there are now an additional 140 challenges with the new packs. The challenge types are varied and include straight races, beat-the-clock events, jumping over other players' rides, and other more-complex multipart challenges, such as meeting at a designated place and racing a route to an end point while hitting specific jumps along the way. Challenges are a lot of fun, especially when you have a large group of friends to play with, and they give the online play a lot of longevity.You'll spend the majority of your time in Paradise City on four wheels, but there's an option to use just two. Bikes are a great addition to the game; and while you can only compete in time trial events, there are different events for daytime and nighttime. Bikes come without boost since they're already blisteringly fast, and they won't take damage either. All of the bikes are extremely light and nimble and are so fast that they almost make the cars feel a tad sluggish by comparison. While it would have been great to see damage modelling on the bikes, and more bikes included, you're guaranteed to have a blast with the two bikes at the start and the two upgraded models you can unlock after completing all of the time trials.

Visually, the PC version is even more of a sumptuous feast than its console brethren. Running at its highest resolution, Paradise City has never looked crisper or more vibrant. Cars smash, pop, scrape, and deform just as you'd expect, and the particle effects make the wanton destruction seem real. The weather effects brought in with the Bikes pack look great, with fog, glowing nighttime neon, and the half-light of dusk all rendered with style.

The audio is also top-notch, with traffic and ambient noises providing a backdrop for the high-pitched whines and throaty growls of the game's cars and bikes. Unfortunately, DJ Atomica is back again from Burnout 3 and is still an irritation for the most part. With its bland and generic rock soundtrack, the audio certainly doesn't live up to the high standards set by the visuals. While there are a few notable artists, including Guns N' Roses (providing the game's title track), Jane's Addiction, LCD Soundsystem, and Faith No More, these are outnumbered by the generic guitar rock and electronic tracks from past Burnout games and tracks from a number of less-illustrious artists.Emerging a year after the original console release, Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box doesn't just manage to keep up with the pace of the competition; it's at the front of the pack. If you own one of the console versions and already have the DLC packs, there's no major benefit to upgrading, but if you're new to Burnout Paradise, The Ultimate Box is the best Burnout experience to date. With a mass of online and offline events and modes, dozens of cars, the addition of bike and night races, and an all-new party mode for up to eight friends, The Ultimate Box is instantly gratifying and long-lasting high-octane entertainment.

Minimum System Requirements :
OS: Windows XP/Vista
Processor: Pentium 4 @ 2.8 GHz (3.2 GHz for Vista)
Memory: 1 GB (1.5 GB for Vista)
Hard Drive: 4 GB Free
Video Memory: 128 MB (Shader Model 3.0+)
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 9.0c or 10

Spider Man - Web of Shadows

2009-05-16T06:06:00.000+07:00

Spider-Man - Web of Shadows starts off with a serious bang. The establishing shot finds Spidey walking across a New York City rooftop in slow-motion, head hung down and ignoring the chaos taking place all around him -- soldiers battling symbiote aliens, explosions in the distance, debris flying inches past his head -- while "Moonlight Sonata" plays, gorgeously juxtaposed with the madness of the scene. The entire opening sequence is perfection -- an elegant tutorial told amid a series of beautifully choreographed cut-scenes and combat scenarios that demonstrate Spider-Man's new moves and animations. Most of the game takes place over the course of the four days leading up to those events, but by the time I caught back up to them, I was more than a little disappointed.

When SpiderMan went to a fully open-world formula with 2004's Spider-Man 2, simply swinging around the city was exhilarating -- even if the combat and missions were an afterthought. The situation didn't improve much in either subsequent entry (Ultimate Spider-Man or last year's Spider-Man 3).

Here, we have codeveloper Shaba Games to thank for fixing the combat: For the first time in two generations of Spider-Man titles, it's fun to fight...for a while, at least. More importantly, webslinging, wallcrawling, and engaging pockets of foes are no longer mechanically disparate elements. Thanks to a few handy new moves and some smooth transitional animations, you can go straight from climbing a building to twisting through the air to kicking a thug in the chest. Or kicking multiple thugs in the chest, once you master the Web-Strike, a couple taps of a button that allows you to pull yourself to a target, hit them, then pop back up into the air to repeat. Silky combat animation, clever camera placement, and a dash of motion blur make combat a treat to watch, too (something the game relies upon more and more as it progresses). Spider Sense is smartly mapped to the left trigger, which serves as both an enemy finder and a camera lock.

Regrettably, that's where the important changes end, as the combat just can't carry the entire game. While side missions don't have you chasing stray balloons or rescuing dangling construction workers anymore, they aren't much better in Shadows, giving you numerical goal after numerical goal of things to kill and people to save. Defeat 10 thugs, then defeat 50, then defeat 150...and then do the same with every other enemy type as they come along. I went out of my way to accomplish these things for the first third of the game -- fueled purely by wanting to complete everything, and because combat was still novel -- and then I simply stopped caring. The rewards for doing anything off the beaten path are minimal; completing objectives grants you XP, which is used to unlock additional moves in a skill tree. You're unlikely to even use these techniques (the vast majority are simply extensions of other moves), as the Web Strike is always the most efficient means of attack. Combat is what you make of it to some extent, but with so many bad guys to quash -- and the same static, unpolished New York City to fight in -- it's tough to imagine using anything but the most effective option.

The story itself is C-grade comic book runoff -- an underdeveloped, drawn-out story of the symbiote alien taking over NYC and its inhabitants as a random selection of Spider-Man's pals and foes come out of the woodwork to play their part. Sure, the narrative lends a reason to swap out gang members for soldiers, then soldiers for infected citizens, and then infected citizens for symbiote creatures...but when they basically behave the same way in combat, it doesn't really matter. You can change between the normal red suit and black symbiote suit by clicking the left analog stick (a neat visual trick), but the barely different move sets don't warrant splitting time between the two. You also encounter several situations throughout the game where you're forced to choose the red (good) or black (evil) path of action; this leads to different cut-scenes and determines who teams up with you along the way. But the game doesn't offer much motivation for choosing the villainous route.A few excellent boss fights punctuate the first half of the game -- a spectacular airborne battle against the Vulture and his cronies high above the city, a trivia-injected alleyway bout with Wolverine -- but these foes aren't anywhere near as entertaining when you have to fight every one of them again in their symbiote forms. By the end of the game, the entire plot just feels like an excuse to make you fight everyone twice. I would bring up the cringe-inducing writing and voice acting -- particularly for Spider-Man himself -- but that's belaboring the point.

Shadows is halfway there. I experienced plenty of cool "Spider-Man" moments throughout thanks to the basic locomotion and combat and the occasional well-done cut-scene...but Shadows never really hits any sort of stride. Rather, it settles into a rhythm of repetition and drags out as its third act self-destructs. And without the unlockable costumes or artwork (despite seeing it behind the closing credits) of most superhero games, you've no reason to power past the bad bits. Shadows might be the best Spider-Man game yet, but that's just a testament to the series' now-mediocre standards.

Spider-Man: Web of Shadows
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Shaba Games

Minimum System Requirements
OS: Windows XP/Vista
Processor: Intel Core 2 DUO @ 2.13 GHz/Athlon 64 X2 4600+
Memory: 1 GB on Windows XP/2 GB on Windows Vista
Hard Drive: 8.5 GB Free
Video Memory: 512 MB (nVidia GeForce 7900 GTX/ATI Radeon 1900XT)
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 9.0c
Keyboard & Mouse
DVD Rom Drive

Mirror's Edge

2009-05-14T06:23:00.002+07:00

Like its heroine, Faith, Mirror's Edge tries to hurdle some significant obstacles, but unlike Faith, it can't always make the leap. No doubt, this fascinating action platformer possesses its share of innovations, from a first-person perspective to a clean and crisp visual style, yet it looks to the past more than you may initially notice. This is a modern-day iteration of an old-fashioned platformer, in which you're meant to play and replay sequences of jumps, grabs, and slides until you get them perfect, or at least perfect enough to continue. But unlike its ancestors, Mirror's Edge is more about speed and momentum, and when you can connect your moves in a flawless stream of silky movement, it's eminently thrilling and satisfying. Unfortunately, Mirror's Edge has a tendency to trip over its own feet, keeping you slipping and sliding blissfully along, only to have a tedious jumping puzzle or hazy objective put the brakes on. Leaderboard chasers looking to set a speed-run record will find Mirror's Edge to be pure gold. Others will give up, alienated by the inherent trial and error of the game's basic design. At the very least, there's nothing quite like it, and it deserves a cautious look from anyone who appreciates games that hew
their own path.

Faith is a runner, in more ways than one. In the oppressed society of Mirror's Edge, runners are an underground network of couriers, carrying sensitive information and documents from sender to receiver. The content of these messages is never clear, and it doesn't matter much; rather, the story's conflict revolves around Faith's sister, a cop who is framed for the murder of a mayoral candidate who promised to bring change to the totalitarian government and bring hope to the runners living on the fringe. Soon, Faith is running for a different reason: to uncover the conspiracy at the heart of the murder and clear her sister's name. The story is straightforward, but it's interesting enough to keep you involved, and though it ends with a sequel-hinting cliffhanger, it wraps up things enough to feel fulfilling nonetheless. More intriguingly, the story plays out between missions in stylishly animated cutscenes, as well as scenes within the game engine itself, which also look attractive but feature a completely different art style. Both types look good, but the disparity is a little odd.

And so you run, across rooftops, through train stations, and along walls. As you run, you pick up speed and are able to string a number of moves together in rapid succession. You can slide under pipes, bound over railings, and leap across impossible-looking chasms, among other techniques. Of course, the most obvious twist in Mirror's Edge is that you do all of this from a first-person view, rather than with the typical third-person camera that we've come to expect. It's an interesting spin, if not wholly new, and it has a way of immersing you as you speed toward your destination. Actions such as balancing on a narrow beam, sliding under a ledge at top speed, and tumbling when you land a long jump are fun to execute and look neat, but it may also make you wonder how much fun it would be to see what Faith looks like when she pulls off these neat stunts, which isn't possible in this game.

Nevertheless, Mirror's Edge excels when you hit that snappy stride, and once you've found the best route through a particularly tricky scenario, it's exhilarating to rush through it without a care to weigh you down. But this doesn't happen the first time you do it, or even the fifth time. You will need to experiment and hone your skills, given that a simple mistake can send you plunging down onto the street below, or will at very least interrupt your stride. You're expected to play each level multiple times to learn the routes that best propel you along, which is great the 10th time around but is often an infuriating series of false starts, mistimed jumps, and full stops during the first few attempts. If you need a hand, you can hold a button to activate runner vision, which turns the camera toward your destination, but it's an imprecise solution that sometimes points you toward a short-term objective and at other times points you toward your long-term goal.Another inconsistently helpful tool comes directly from the game's impressive art design. Mirror's Edge is a game of visual contrasts, in which stark white environments contrast with vivid colors. It looks beautiful and clean, and it's a great way of demonstrating both the bleakness of an authoritarian society and the unique manner in which a runner would see the world--as an array of landing points and jumping opportunities. Important ramps, doorways, ladders, and other points of interest are painted in a vibrant red, which is an important visual cue in some of the broader levels. However, this element too is delivered inconsistently; in some cases, the red hue may not fade in until you are close to the pole or vaulting point in question, and in other cases, Mirror's Edge expects you to figure things out without this visual assistance.

For a game that relies on so much forward momentum, Mirror's Edge has a way of bringing the pace to a halt. Sometimes this is because of the nature of trial-and-error gameplay: fall, die, reload checkpoint. At other times, it's because you're faced with an intricate jumping puzzle that eschews the sense of speed entirely, such as one that has you descending into the depths of the water-supply system and then up again. These aren't bad, but they're not particularly engaging, either; you're likelier to feel relieved rather than fulfilled when you reach your destination. Or you'll be zooming along, only to find yourself in an elevator, reading the news crawl on the wall's electronic panel while the level apparently loads in the background. In all of these cases, you're torn from the experience and reminded that this is, after all, just a game.

Armed enemies further complicate matters. It's best to run right past them when possible, but their bullets have a way of bringing you to your knees as you rush around looking for the best escape route. Some foe-heavy scenarios are particularly annoying, such as a sniper-loaded sequence in the final level. You can confront the threat head-on in some cases, but it requires careful planning and excellent timing. You can perform some close-combat moves such as jump kicks and punches, but these are best when used as hit-and-run tactics; trying to engage in melees with more than one or two enemies at a time is a quick path to the most recent checkpoint. Conversely, you can disarm an enemy in a quick-time event, pressing the disarm button when your foe's weapon flashes red. If you want to hold on to it, you can fire off a few shots until the clip runs out. However, Faith is ultravulnerable to gunfire, and the gunplay is loose and unfulfilling. If you have trouble keeping things in check (it takes some split-second timing to land a pitch-perfect disarm), you can enter a limited-use slow-motion mode, which comes in handy and makes some of these action-focused moves look cool, though it ultimately doesn't add much to the gameplay.If you can overlook the array of quirks long enough to find your stride, you'll want to check out the beat-your-record races and level speed runs. Both modes feature online leaderboards, and both cater to the players likeliest to get the most out of Mirror's Edge. In a sense, the single-player story is simply a practice run for being a virtual show-off, yet the players repeating these levels (who will learn them to perfection) are also the ones likely to see Mirror's Edge at its most thrilling. You will want to break out an Xbox 360 controller if you want to get the most out of the experience. The keyboard-and-mouse setup is decent but occasionally awkward, and it can't compete with the interesting (but intuitive) gamepad controls.

The unusually crisp visuals have seen some nice additional touches on the PC, such as fluttering industrial plastic over a few doorways, and symbolic flags undulating in the wind. The audio also deserves high praise. Sound effects such as Faith's breathy heaves and plodding footsteps are authentic touches that heighten the sense of speed and tension. The voice acting is equally terrific, but it's the pulsing, driving soundtrack that impresses most. Its rhythmic flow augments Faith's most fluid runs, whereas subtle ambient chords fill in the silence during downtimes. The superb musical journey culminates in a fantastic vocal track that plays during the game's final credits.

Mirror's Edge is many things: invigorating, infuriating, fulfilling, and confusing. It isn't for everybody, and it stumbles often for a game that holds velocity in such high esteem. But even with all of its foibles and frustrations, it makes some impressive leaps; it just doesn't nail the landing.
Minimum System Requirement :

Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP SP2/Vista
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz or 100% compatible equivalent
Memory: 1GB RAM
Video Card: 256MB memory with Shader Model 3.0*
HDD Space: 8GB
DVD Drive: 1x DVD Drive
Soundcard: Soundcard with DirectX 9.0c compatibility
DirectX: DirectX 9.0c
Network: An online connection is required for access to Leaderboards

Cryostasis : Sleep of Reason

2009-05-12T12:47:00.000+07:00

The best horror games can make you shiver, but few elicit chills as well as Cryostasis: The Sleep of Reason. This is partially due to the tense atmosphere that slowly thickens as you play, inspiring a general unease that eventually escalates into full-blown panic. But it's also due to its icy Arctic setting, where the freezing air can choke your lungs and heat is the most valuable of commodities. The unforgiving blizzards of the North Pole inspire Cryostasis on multiple levels, from a heavy, deliberate pace akin to wading through drifts of snow, to multiple gameplay mechanics that keep you forever at odds with the cold. This innovative first-person adventure is not for everyone; its slow tempo will numb players seeking instant gratification, and occasional performance and stability issues may frustrate. But Cryostasis has a way of keeping you in its thrall, pushing you forward to see what frosty secrets lie ahead.

The game doesn't give you much in the way of exposition, ushering you into the frozen tundra by way of a seemingly unrelated voice-over about a tribe of forest dwellers seeking refuge within the wildwood. This tale evolves during the game through a series of scattered parchments, though its meanings and metaphors are slow to unfold--much like the main narrative. It's not immediately clear as you start your initial explorations where you are and why you're there, though the raging blizzard and lifeless bodies strewn around indicate that you aren't apt to
encounter many friendly faces. Eventually the framework becomes more apparent: You are on a nuclear-powered icebreaker whose crew has befallen an unusual tragedy, though the glacial crash that seems the most likely cause is only one piece in an increasingly complex puzzle. It's a great mystery, and the gradual flow of information will keep you guessing--and keep you tethered to your screen.

The story is uncovered in flashbacks, but these recollections aren't just plot morsels that exist outside of the gameplay. Rather, you relive key moments as you encounter the scattered corpses of crew members. When you discover bodies, you're transported back in time to witness important events that eventually coalesce into a meaningful narrative, and you do so through the eyes of the poor soul you've discovered. However, you aren't always just a powerless witness; in many cases, you must actively change the circumstances of the past to affect the present. This mechanic manifests itself in different ways and leads to some of the game's most memorable moments. For example, by piloting an undersea vessel through some murky waters within one sinister flashback, you conduct repairs that then remove obstacles in the present. In another case, you'll make a quick jump before icy waters plunge into the room and wash you away.

In fact, many of these "mental echoes" involve saving the victim's life, and often require a bit of trial and error as you jump into the past and figure out which actions lead to success. Try-and-try-again gameplay can be an annoyance in other games, but in Cryostasis, these conundrums take on a classic adventure-game feel with successful results. The puzzles involved aren't overly difficult, but you may need to make a few attempts to complete them without succumbing to environmental hazards, like suffocating smoke and rising water levels. Should you fail, you're transported to the present without penalty. Should you succeed, your surroundings change and usher you toward more mystery.

However, Cryostasis isn't always so forgiving. You may find a lurching fiend awaiting you when you return to the present, and the best way to communicate with such flesh demons is with an axe to the head or a shotgun blast to the belly. These enemies aren't the smartest bunch, but they can inflict a lot of damage, so every shot you fire must count. This is partially because your weapons aren't built for speed; like every facet of the game, slaying your lumbering enemy is a measured affair. The axe, your close-combat mainstay, feels remarkably heavy, and the camera sways forcibly when you swing as if to reinforce that notion. Ranged weapons can be just as ponderous, often devastatingly so. Reload times are incredibly long, and the camera bob that signifies recoil with some weapons is dramatic. The sense of impact doesn't always match up with these effects, which can make combat cross the line from "heavy" to "needlessly clunky." Nevertheless, pelting a blowtorch-wielding brute with flares and watching it panic as it burns to death is satisfying. On the other hand, trying to use the Mosin rifle and its infuriatingly blurry scope won't lead to similar glee.The occasionally awkward combat doesn't thaw the frigid tension, thankfully, and scare attempts hit more often than they miss. Some encounters are predictable, such as those that follow your haunting visits to the past. However, most of them still manage to shock, thanks to clever uses of slamming doors, scurrying beasts, and good old-fashioned surprise appearances, complete with flickering lights and high-pitched ambient chords. Far-off clatters, your character's heavy breathing and occasional wheezing, and the churning, clanging machinery juxtapose well and generate tension on a broad scale. Frequent silences make the excellent sound design even more effective by making it unpredictable, just as the tense lulls between enemy attacks make those encounters seem all the more vicious. Cryostasis is legitimately scary, because death's cold embrace seems perpetually close at hand.

There is limited solace to be had in the various heat sources found on the vessel. Burning torches, flaming debris, and even desk lamps not only provide visual warmth, but also let you replenish your health reserves. Your health meter is dynamic, given that it is affected both by taking damage in combat and by the chill that permeates the Arctic. Although the standard levels of cold won't kill you, they will keep your health meter practically empty, and a few short jaunts through superchilled fogs can easily be fatal. This mechanic is not only a cool idea on its own, but also enhances the tension and general sense of chilled danger, because the effects of the cold directly impact gameplay. The only drawback to this system is that every so often, it foreshadows enemy encounters, which sometimes occur shortly after you discover heating elements.

As you crawl through the tight corridors, you may occasionally experience a sense of deja vu, but that's a product of the setting rather than of uncreative design. In fact, as the tale evolves, so too do the environments that you explore. Just as the frosty hallways start to wear down your resolve, Cryostasis will introduce a new area, often via a grainy mental echo that recounts the eerie events of the past before you explore the same now-decrepit environs in the present. Some of these locales are constructed well, such as a room with a large reactor that looks far different in the present than it does when you first explore it via flashback episode. But no matter which region of the ship you're traversing, you'll feel perpetually frostbitten. Flakes of frost waft down from above, undulating sheets of ice crystals cover walls and machinery, and when you're exposed to full blasts of the arctic tempest, the roar of the wind will deafen you whilst the rush of snow and ice blinds you.The water and ice effects are quite good, as are the lighting and shadows. Flickering lights and icy reflections set up the scares, but these touches aren't used so often that they lose their edge. Additionally, though not always perfectly smooth, good animations bring characters to life, human and nonhuman alike. Yet though the graphics engine projects the right mood, it is somewhat dated. Textures are greatly lacking in detail, and some jagged edges and blocky geometry make Cryostasis look uneven. Despite that, the graphics technology has a difficult time keeping up. The game is prone to major fits of slowdown, even on machines that greatly exceed its minimum requirements, which is a head-scratcher in a game that clearly doesn't push the limits of modern technology. We also experienced a couple of crashes, though the experience was otherwise mostly bug-free. The frame-rate difficulties usually lead to only minor annoyances, though they can be a bit more frustrating when they occur in the midst of combat.

These visual issues aside, Cryostasis's measured exploration and sense of frigid tension make it an experience unlike any other. Additionally, the flashback and health-replenishment mechanics aren't just interesting on their own, but also enhance the atmosphere and give weight to the enigmatic tale as it slowly unfolds. If you need the constant stimulation of flying bullets and sprays of blood, Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason likely won't inspire you. But if you appreciate slow-burning suspense, this adventure will keep you glued to the monitor to uncover the secrets buried deep within the inhospitable tundra of the Arctic circle.

Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason
Publisher: 1C
Developer: Action Forms

Minimum System Requirements
OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista
Processor: AMD Athlon 3000+ or Intel Equivalent
Memory: 1 GB
Video Memory: ATI Radeon 9800/nVidia 6800GT
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 9.0c
Keyboard & Mouse
DVD Rom Drive

Recommended System Requirements
OS: Windows XP/Vista
Processor: Intel Core 2 DUO 6400/AMD X2 5600+
Memory: 2 GB
Video Memory: ATI Radeon 2900/nVidia GeForce 8800 GTS
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 9.0c or 10
Keyboard & Mouse
DVD Rom Drive

Assassin's Creed

2009-05-11T08:27:00.000+07:00

Assassin's Creed features one of the most unique gameworlds ever created: beautiful, memorable, and alive. Every crack and crevasse is filled with gorgeous, subtle details, from astounding visual flourishes to overheard cries for help. But it's more than just a world--it's a fun and exciting action game with a ton of stuff to do and places to explore, rounded out with a complex story that will slowly grab you the more you play. The PC version has a few more issues than its console counterparts, and the keyboard-and-mouse controls strip away some of the smooth magic of exploration. Nevertheless, if you don't mind plugging in a gamepad and have a system that exceeds the system requirements, you'll find the same free-form travels and atmospheric game world that console owners enjoyed last year.

Not enough can be said about the living, breathing universe that you'll inhabit in Assassin's Creed. As assassin extraordinaire Altair, you'll explore three major cities of the Holy Land in the 12th century: Jerusalem, Damascus, and Acre. Each city is beautifully rendered from top to bottom and features meticulously crafted towers that reach for the sky, bustling market squares, and quiet corners where citizens converse and drunks lie in wait to accost you. As you wander the streets (and rooftops), you'll push your way through crowds of women carrying jars on their heads, hear orators shout political and religious wisdom, and watch town
guards harass innocent victims. Altair has a profound effect on this world, but the cities are entities all their own, with their own flows and personalities.The visual design has a lot to do with how believably organic everything feels. The cities are absolutely huge, and though you don't get full exploration privileges in the first few chapters, they eventually open up to let you travel seamlessly from one side to another. Everything is beautifully lit with just the right amount of bloom effect, and almost everything casts a shadow, from tall pillars to Altair's cloak. In fact, sometimes the shadows get to be a bit much and may make you think for a moment that there is artifacting on your screen, when in fact it's a character's head casting a shadow on his or her own neck. Every object, from scaffolds to pottery, is textured so finely that you'll feel as if you could reach out and touch it. Animations are almost as equally well done. Altair scales walls, leaps majestically from towers, and engages in swashbuckling swordfights that would make Errol Flynn proud. And he does it all with fluid ease, generally moving from one pose to another without a hitch. Minor characters move with less aplomb, but that's easy to forgive, considering that the cities are populated with thousands and thousands of individuals.

On a high-powered PC, these elements look even more stunning than they did on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but the splendor comes with a price: The minimum requirements to play Assassin's Creed are surprisingly high, particularly where the CPU is concerned (a dual-core processor is mandatory). On one test PC that runs Crysis at a respectable frame rate on medium settings, Assassin's Creed slowed to a crawl at lower settings. A high-end test machine ran the game with much better results, though with some occasional slowdown.

What you hear is even more impressive than what you see. At the top of a temple, you hear little but the rush of wind, the twittering of birds, and the barking of a far-off dog. In the most populated areas, your ears will fill with the din of street vendors, the pleas of beggars, and the occasional humming. It's never too much, though, and the game does a good job of making sure you hear what you need to hear (for example, the cries of citizens who need your help) without filling your ears with pointless noise. The voice acting of the supporting cast is similarly remarkable. Conversations are completely believable and delivered with the perfect amount of solemn dignity. Oddly, the weakest link is Altair himself. Actor Philip Shahbaz does an all right job, but he isn't up to par with the first-rate acting of his fellow troupe. Rounding it all out is a beautiful orchestral score that is most notable for its subtlety. Many of the game's most impressive moments are accompanied by lovely musical themes that add even more threads to the game's rich living tapestry. We did run into some audio glitches on two of our three test systems, however, in which sound effects would occasionally stutter and hitch. The game's readme file included a potential workaround for this issue, though in our case, it didn't solve it.

The story that binds it all together rises to the occasion. Actually, there are two related stories in play. The unfolding drama of Crusades-era Palestine is a mere memory, forcibly pulled from a modern-day bartender named Desmond by a resolute researcher using a machine called an animus. The memories aren't Desmond's own--they are Altair's, stored safely in the hapless subject's genetic code. We follow Altair as he assassinates nine public figures at the command of his master, and as the common thread that ties these men comes into focus, so does the true identity of Desmond's captors. There are no cutscenes in the traditional sense; every bit of story exposition and dialogue flows smoothly from the gameplay and takes place entirely within the game engine. The ending is confusing and blatantly leaves open the possibility of a sequel, but this is a small blemish on an otherwise stirring tale. Altair's world is not one of absolutes. His assassination targets aren't always evil, and Altair isn't always likable. As he is fond of reminding us, "Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.Of course, such an authentic world would be meaningless without a lot of fun things to do in it. Thankfully, Assassin's Creed is endlessly entertaining in that it features a fine mix of stealthy exploration, tight platforming, and exciting combat. To discover the whereabouts of your assassination targets, you must first follow up on possible leads. There are several different mission types in this regard. In some cases, you sit on a bench and listen in on secret conversations. At other times, you will closely follow someone carrying an important letter that you'll pickpocket. Alternately, you can beat the information out of your target. There are also some tasks specific to this version of the game. Oddly, some of these new missions feel more contrived than the others, such as timed sprints and escort tasks in which guards execute scripted attacks as you move to your destination. Since the game's greatest strengths lie in its unscripted events, these additional tasks feel less organic than the others. On the other hand, missions that let you silently assassinate rooftop archers and fling guards into market stands are more interesting and fit better into the game's sandbox world.

There are also some optional missions, such as rescuing innocent townspeople from the clutches of guards. The reward for doing so is a group of vigilantes who will hang out in the area afterward and hinder any foes chasing you. It's also a good way to try out Assassin's Creed's combat, which is surprisingly satisfying, considering the game's focus on sneaking around. You can pounce on enemies using your hidden blade (an incredibly rewarding one-stab kill), or use throwing daggers to take enemies down from a distance. However, your sword is your melee mainstay, and though the hack-and-slash combat may seem simple at first, it gets more challenging once you unlock the various countermoves. Often, you'll have a dozen or more attackers to fend off at once, but though these fights can be a little tricky, you'll never feel as if you're in over your head. In fact, the few circumstances in which you are forced into combat--such as a late-game boss fight against a seemingly endless crowd of attackers and their leering leader--are challenging and require some pitch-perfect timing to counter every strike and lunge.

Nevertheless, brute force is rarely the best way to handle a situation. You want to slink unnoticed through the crowds, but you can draw attention to yourself in a number of ways--whether it's galloping past a guard station on a horse, knocking pottery off of someone's head, or getting so frustrated by the various beggars that you fling them away from you. (And trust us--these are the most aggressive panhandlers you'll ever meet.) If you antagonize the guards, they'll give chase. Yes, you can stick around and fight, and though it's never the easiest option, breaking stealth does not damn you to death like it does in other sneaking games. But why not lure them to a rooftop? Once up there, you can grab them and fling them to the street below. Or if there are too many of them, you can jump across the rooftops gracefully until you find a hiding place, such as a nice bale of hay or a curtained garden. Once you're hidden, they'll give up the chase and you'll be free to roam about again.

You can also seek refuge in small groups of scholars who serve as mobile hiding places. It's a bit contrived to walk into a stationary cluster of scholars and have them suddenly start moving simply because you're there, but it gets the job done. Actually, if there's any drawback to the usually excellent gameplay, it's how synthetic certain elements feel. Vigilantes are always in the same spot, missions reset if you don't get them right the first time, and those same guards will harass that citizen an hour after you pass by. It's easy to forgive these quirks, though, given the easygoing flow of the world surrounding these pockets of gameplay.Climbing up buildings and jumping around the rooftops is fun and breezy, though keyboard jockeys should be warned that the mouse and keyboard don't deliver the best way to experience the game's fluidity. With a controller, the face buttons are mapped to correspond with Altair's head, hands, and legs; with a keyboard and mouse, the wonder of that arrangement is lost. It's also a bit tougher to time counterattacks using the mouse buttons, though players without controllers needn't worry too much: It's still a relatively comfortable setup. Of course, you can attach a controller, and we were able to use two different gamepads, including an Xbox 360 controller, with success.

Regardless of your preferred scheme, you can leap across alleys and scale walls with ease, and though it's possible to launch yourself from a wall or hurtle through a vendor's booth by accident, these moments aren't very common. You'd think that a city specifically designed to let you climb structures and caper about the roofs would look overly artificial, yet there's never a moment when you will think to yourself, "Wow, that looks like a place where I'm supposed to jump." The architecture looks completely natural, which makes Altair's abilities all the more exciting to pull off. The environments don't look as if they were created for him to climb around on; he just uses the hand he's been dealt, as any good assassin should.

In Assassin's Creed, the greatest joy comes from the smallest details, and for every nerve-racking battle, there's a quiet moment that cuts to the game's heart and soul. Climbing towers to uncover portions of the map is a simple mechanic but forever satisfying, thanks to the beautiful vistas and soft musical themes that accompany the view. Even the beggars that pester you are amusing and fun, though their constant shoving can be annoying when you're trying to pickpocket a pedestrian or eliminate a target without a fuss. It all makes your missions that much more compelling, and you'll be inclined to explore every nook and cranny and take on every optional task just for the fun of it. There's a ton of stuff to do, and even when you've exhausted your official tasks, you can search for the collectible flags and crosses strewn around the cities and countryside. You could probably plow through the main quest in 20 hours or less, but completists might spend many more finishing every quest and gathering every flag.

The PC version of Assassin's Creed isn't the superior one, but this is a case where translation to the PC resulted in some minor hiccups rather than obvious gaffes. If you don't have the opportunity to play it on the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, you should pick up a copy and immerse yourself in its memorable world. It's the kind of game you want to show your friends even if they're not into games, and if you have a high-powered computer, it's one that should be in your collection.
minimum requirements:

Supported OS: Windows XP / Vista (only)
Processor: Dual core processor 2.6 GHz Intel Pentium D or AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ or better recommended)
RAM: 2 GB (3 GB recommended)
Video Card: 256 MB DirectX 10.0–compliant video card or DirectX 9.0–compliant card with Shader Model 3.0 or higher (512 MB video card recommended) (see supported list)*
Sound Card: DirectX 9.0 or 10.0 compliant sound card (5.1 sound card recommended)
DirectX Version: DirectX 10.0 libraries (included on disc)
DVD-ROM: DVD-ROM dual-layer drive
Hard Drive Space: 12 GB

Peripherals Supported:
Keyboard, mouse, optional controller (Xbox 360 Controller for Windows recommended)

*Supported Video Cards at Time of Release:
ATI RADEON X1300-1950 / HD 2000 / 3000 series
NVIDIA GeForce 6600-6800 / 7 / 8 / 9 series

Prince Of Persia (2008)

2009-05-09T15:01:00.005+07:00

In many modern games, you rain death upon your enemies; how refreshing, then, that your main task in Prince of Persia is to breathe life into a darkening world. That doesn't mean that the forces of evil aren't on your tail in this open-world platformer, but the most indelible moments of this enchanting journey are uplifting, rather than destructive. Similarly, the latest iteration in this long-running franchise is a rejuvenation for the series, and it's an ambitious one, offering up a new titular prince and casting certain game traditions aside in favor of player immersion. And for the most part it succeeds, eliminating illusion-breaking mechanics like game-over screens and long loading times in the process. This re-imagining comes with a few caveats, however, and if you're a longtime series fan, you'll quickly discover--and possibly resent--that Prince of Persia is, far and away, the easiest game in the series. But if you can clear your mind and let the game's magic wash over you, its easygoing joy and visual beauty will charm you into forgiving a sprinkling of flaws.

In some ways, Prince of Persia represents a return to Sands of Time's storybook vibe, which had been somewhat lost in that game's two sequels. Yet our new hero isn't exactly Prince Charming, but rather a wisecracking nomad interested only in his donkey (named Farah, in one of several nods to previous games) and the riches she apparently carries. His royal status is referenced but never fully explored, though his companion Elika is clearly a princess, and as the game progresses, you'll become much more invested in her past than the prince's. Together, they seek to imprison the evil god Ahriman, who has been inexplicably set free by Elika's own father. To do so, they must restore a series of fertile grounds to their former fecund
glory, thereby banishing the inky black corruption that has enveloped the land. Storytelling isn't the game's strong suit, and the dismissive, often unlikeable prince is hardly beguiling, a poor fit for the captivating journey ahead. Thankfully, Elika exudes enough charm for the both of them, and the relationship they slowly forge lends plenty of emotional impact to the game's final moments.

This relationship enriches the very core of the experience, given that Elika is not your standard game sidekick. She isn't just a helpless companion, but an important part of a number of gameplay mechanics. As the prince, you will pull off moves familiar to franchise fans: jumping, climbing, scaling, and wallrunning among them. There are also a few new acrobatics to play with, such as the aptly named roofrun, where the prince scuttles along the roof in a vaguely simian manner. But if the moves are familiar, Elika's presence enriches and enhances them. She will jump on your back as you scale across vines, reach for your helping hand as you climb, and perform an elegant pas de deux with you when you need to pass her on a narrow beam. In some ways, this relationship recalls that of Ico and Yorda in 2001's ICO.

While in ICO Yorda was totally dependent on her companion, here Elika is far more helpful to the prince than he is to her. She is, in fact, your constant savior, because she will not, and cannot, allow you to die. Should you fall, Elika will grab you by the wrist and whisk you to safety--meaning the last checkpoint. There is a checkpoint at almost every platform, so aside from possibly having to repeat a few seconds of gameplay, there is absolutely no penalty for plummeting to your doom. You will never see the words "game over," and you won't need to save and reload before difficult sequences. Nor will you need to ever puzzle over how to make it from point A to point B: Elika can fire off a magical homing orb that will show you the precise way of getting to your destination. Combined with simple platforming controls that require a minimum of key or button presses, these facets make Prince of Persia one of the easiest games you'll play all year.

This ease of use makes each individual action seem relatively meaningless as you string moves together. For many, this will translate to a diminished feeling of reward; aside from a few exceptions, there is no sequence that feels remotely challenging, certainly not for players familiar with the old-school difficulties wrought by the early games in the series. Yet while the unique satisfaction of overcoming hurdles is missing, it is tempered by other kinds of rewards. The platforming is fluid, and seamlessly chaining a number of moves together is simple but visually appealing, making for some silky-smooth motion that you'll get a kick out of. To get the most out of it, however, you will want to use a controller. While the keyboard controls work surprisingly well for platforming, the numerous quicktime events aren't well suited to a keyboard, and the key prompts are more confusing when you aren't using a gamepad.As you progress through the game and explore some of the more intricate environments, you'll find some truly impressive level design. Each area flows organically into the next, and while the overall design appears a bit more synthetic than it did in Assassin's Creed, platform placement and other architectural features don't seem overtly artificial. This becomes even more apparent when you begin to unlock Elika's various powers--though calling them powers is a bit of a stretch. As you unlock new explorable areas by collecting glowing orbs called light seeds, you will be able to utilize the various colored plates that dot walls and ceilings. There are four types of plates, and each kind initiates a high-flying feat. Red and blue plates are functionally the same (though visually unique), propelling you automatically toward the next plate or platform. Green plates turn you into a sort of Persian Spider-Man, causing you to quickly scale up walls and ceilings while avoiding obstacles. Finally, yellow plates initiate on-rails flight sequences that give you limited room to maneuver around obstructions, sort of like a 3D version of Nights Into Dreams, the Saturn platformer. Many of the sequences combining plate jumps and standard platforming are exhilarating, and the manner in which some of them utilize all three dimensions make the level design all the more impressive. And amazingly, the camera is rarely a liability, which is quite an achievement. Unfortunately, the flying initiated by leaping from yellow plates is a clear weakness. The constant camera movement and overwhelming visual effect used here make for a few annoying sections, and it is never clear whether you need to go left or right, up or down to avoid certain objects. Given that most of the plate-initiated bits are terrific fun, it's a shame these particular flights of fancy were so poorly crafted.

There is some combat, and while it's hardly Prince of Persia's focus, it looks mightily spectacular. You fight only a single enemy at a time, including the four main bosses, which you'll take on multiple times. Battles are on the simple side: you have four main attacks--sword, gauntlet, Elika's magic, and acrobatic vault--that you can string into various combos. Enemies can change states, making certain attacks ineffective, and there are some other occasional twists. Yet like the platforming, it is on the easy side; even if Elika is bound by corrupted tentacles or rendered unconscious, she's always there to pluck you from death's cold embrace should you miss an important quicktime event (of which there are many). But battles are still uniquely satisfying and look fantastic. The prince throws Elika into the air with ease, stringing throws, slices, and magic attacks together as the camera zooms in and out to showcase the slashes and backflips. The stringent enemy-focused camera and odd scuttling motions of the prince feel confining but work just fine in most of these battles, though they're a bit less successful during certain boss fights that require some environmental manipulation.

Combat's not the only thing that looks spectacular. Prince of Persia is beautiful to look at, thanks to vibrant cel-shading and some sumptuous environments. Tendrils of corruption reach toward you as you navigate the cold, colorless caverns of infertile regions. The contrast between these areas and the beautifully lit vistas and thriving vegetation of healed locales is palpable, and the transformation of a fertile ground from darkness to light may remind you of similarly impressive moments in Okami. There are a few rough spots here and there, in the way of glitched animations and tiny frame rate stutters, but they barely detract from the lovely visual design. While there are some minor differences, all three versions look great and well represent the capabilities of their respective platforms. And all three feature the same lovely ambient music, which sounds more Persian than the very American-sounding prince.Most will be able to finish Prince of Persia in around a dozen hours, though if you want to collect every scattered light seed and avoid quick travel (you can teleport from one healed ground to another instantly), you could add a few more hours to the total. But while a few unlockable skins may not seem like enough reason to return, this game is so enjoyable and delightful that you may want to return to it as you would return to a favorite fantasy novel or film. While its lack of challenge may lull fans, its ease of use will delight newcomers and draw in anyone who appreciates a touch of magic.

Prince of Persia (2008)
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Ubisoft

Minimum System Requirements
OS: Windows XP/Vista
Processor: Pentium D @ 2.6 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+
Memory: 1 GB for XP/2 GB for Vista
Hard Drive: 8 GB Free
Video Memory: 256 MB (Shader Model 3.0+)
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 9.0c

Recommended System Requirements
OS: Windows XP/Vista
Processor: Intel Core 2 DUO @ 2.2 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+
Memory: 1 GB for XP/2 GB for Vista
Hard Drive: 8 GB Free
Video Memory: 256 MB (Shader Model 3.0+)
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 9.0c

* Supported Video Cards at Time of Release:
ATI RADEON X1600*/1650*-1950/HD 2000/3000 series
NVIDIA GeForce 6800*/7/8/9 series

The Wheelman

2009-05-02T08:10:00.002+07:00

Action hero Vin Diesel takes center stage in Wheelman, blending explosive action with vicious car chases into something clearly aimed at teenage boys across the globe. Beneath the cartoonish action is a surprisingly slick story. The burly protagonist, Milo, is an undercover agent sent to infiltrate the criminal underworld in Barcelona. By taking on the role of personal driver, Milo has a front row seat to meet some of the biggest names in the business – a bit like the pizza delivery guy, only with a slightly more exciting set of job skills. While the cinematic delivery of this tale might have been more interesting on the silver screen, it works well enough to propel the main character from one mission to another in the context of an action game.

As you may surmise, the simulated driving mechanics in Wheelman are shifted a bit closer to the arcade classic Crazy Taxi than to reality. While the action maintains a heightened level of danger rather than zaniness, there’s definitely more polish on the pizzazz than the driving mechanics that form the game itself. The fancy stunts and daredevil driving isn’t all just for show, however. Rather than earning arbitrary “points” for pulling off moves, your focus meter builds, which can then be used to pull off a variety of useful maneuvers. The stunts themselves are not only useful, but completely necessary. As you’re speeding down the road and swerving through lanes of traffic (sometimes striking cars with minimal effect), you’re often chased by thugs and law
enforcement officials who’d like nothing better than to end your roadway crusade. To combat these guys, Milo can ram his vehicle against others, and even unleash a barrage of slow-motion gunfire, provided his aim is true.Making his way from one mission to the next requires that Milo travel on foot in certain areas. This isn’t so bad most of the time, and would have been even better had some light-RPG style elements been incorporated. Unfortunately, there are a few instances where the combat takes place on foot, and this is where the game seems to fail the most. The mechanics for these gunfights appear inexcusably underdeveloped, and despite their blessed infrequency throughout the game, these firefights detract significantly from an otherwise pleasant gameplay experience. Movements and aiming feel very unnatural, and the enemy AI seems like something out of a game from the nineties.

On the graphical front, Wheelman is surprisingly bland. There isn’t nearly enough depth here to attract players on anything beyond a superficial basis, and yet the game suffers from flat texture and outdated shadows all over the place. Audio is thankfully superior, with grinding metal and fiery blasts aplenty, so there’s more than enough here to give any action junkie a workout for their surround sound setup. Vin Diesel voices the main character, easily stealing the show from the supporting cast. Pithy lines in exaggerated baritone litter than aural landscape, which will no doubt make guys smirk and gals scream. Even so, the simple nature of Wheelman’s gameplay begins to wear thin quickly, despite the full game taking only a few hours to complete. A few side missions have been packed in as well, but there isn’t much here to keep players strapped in once they’ve finished the campaign. Diesel fans will love the action, but even the most indiscriminate adrenaline junkies won’t find a very long term fix with Wheelman.

Publisher: Midway Games
Developer: Midway Studios - Newcastle

Minimum System Requirements
OS: Windows XP SP2/Vista
Processor: Intel Core 2 DUO @ 2 GHz
Memory: 2 GB
Hard Drive: 9 GB Free
Video Memory: 512 MB (NVidia GeForce 7900/ATI Radeon x1950)
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 9.0c

Empire Total War

2009-04-30T16:26:00.007+07:00

Like diving into a murky lake from the rocky cliffs looming above, plunging into Empire: Total War is an intimidating prospect but an exhilarating experience. As with previous games in this strategy franchise, there's an overwhelming amount of content to unearth, though now the clock has been spun forward hundreds of years. Technological advances have made bows and arrows weapons obsolete, the British colonies strive for independence, and major empires approach their inevitable collapse. These historical waters are deep, but also a bit turbulent. Empire is the biggest and broadest Total War yet, and like an aging historical parchment, it's brilliantly ambitious in scope but somewhat tattered at the edges. Nevertheless, the game's historical breadth, turn-based tugs-of-war, and enjoyable real-time battles (both on land and at sea) will transfix series fans and newcomers a like.

The grand campaign is the meat of Empire: Total War, and it's there where you're likely to spend the most amount of time. The game stretches across the 18th century and lets you choose from a number of world powers, from Great Britain and Russia to fallen domains such as the Maratha Confederacy and the Ottoman Empire. Once you choose an empire, you can select from a few different campaign types that determine victory conditions and campaign length. Whichever you decide, be prepared: Even a short, 50-year campaign can take a good amount of time to complete, given that each turn requires strategic thinking on multiple fronts. Battles usually determine how regions are won and lost, but diplomatic relations, economic strangleholds, assassinations,
and many other subtleties must be tweaked and considered at each turn, and they have noticeable impact as the years progress. If this sounds overwhelming, or if you're an American history buff, you'll want to check out the Road to Independence campaign before jumping into the grand one. This is essentially a long American tutorial that slowly introduces you to the basics and culminates in a grand campaign of its own.

The factors you must consider run the gamut, starting with an important new feature: the technology tree. Three areas of research and multiple subtrees let you improve your military, industry, and philosophy; in turn, your choices may benefit your economy or your success in battle. The benefits may seem minor at first, but as the campaign wears on, their effects are more noticeable, and your choices within these trees must be informed by the strengths and weaknesses of your particular empire. Do you concentrate on industry and use sheer numbers of troops to overwhelm your enemies, or do you focus on naval improvements and reap the ensuing benefits of successful trade-route blockades? As your campaign wears on, your needs may shift, whether because enemy blockades require a stronger navy, because you are spreading quickly across land, or because your economy is unable to sustain your growing army. Technology is also a limited diplomatic option, given that it's a commodity that you can not only trade during negotiations but also steal from foes. Additionally, it's not easy to convince a friendly nation to offer technology. Even when offered multiple technologies or monetary compensation, your closest allies rarely accept a request to share even a single technology, which makes it a limited political tool. In Empire: Total War, knowledge is more easily stolen than shared.

In fact, your more successful political dealings are the underhanded ones. Your agents may differ between nations (for example, gentlemen and rakes for the British, scholars and hashishin for the Ottomans), but the tasks are similar: covertly disrupt the affairs of your enemies and potential enemies. Religious agents such as missionaries will slowly but surely convert the populace, staving off potential rebellion in newly captured regions. On the other hand, the impact of religion is not as deep or impactful as in the Europa Universalis series, in which social and diplomatic events are more fully explored. Regardless, it's great fun to cripple whole economies, especially when your strategies work in tandem with each other. Sending in a naval fleet to seize enemy trade supplies, sending another directly into an enemy's port (and therefore obstructing incoming goods), and dispatching an agent to sabotage commercial ports can have profound effects. In cases like these, an angry, resource-deprived public and cash-strapped armies then ease the way for a quick triumph.

Nevertheless, this is Total War, and though assassinations and sabotage lighten your wartime load, there are no diplomatic, religious, or technological victories. Might is right, and as such, your armies and navies drive the quick spread of your domain--and if you want to meet the campaign's success requirements, you'll want to be aggressive, right from the start. The artificial intelligence doesn't always take sensible steps; smaller countries may declare war, only to be quickly steamrolled, whereas major foes can seem almost oblivious to your spread across their regions. However, campaign AI is good enough to keep you occupied across multiple theaters, and minor nations and rebels can often keep your hands full, leaving room for major foes to invade. You will review every fleet and army at every turn, and now that army recruitment, resource production, and other aspects of play are spread across multiple locales within a region, mobility (and therefore, roads) is an important strategic asset.Unlike with most turn-based historical games, battles can be played out in real time, and though the autoresolve option may look tempting, you should, at least on land, manage any battle in which you have a reasonable chance of winning. The most obvious reason is that they're enjoyable to command and enjoyable to watch. Thousands of units clash in a dizzying mass of artillery and bullets, camels and swordsmen, and as in prior Total War games, it's more about position, formation, and geography than about unit micromanagement. Garrisoning musketeers, and taking heat off of cavalry by keeping enemy gunmen occupied with melee infantry, are just a few of many possibilities to consider. Once armies clash, these prebattle decisions generally have far more impact than any midskirmish choice, and it's as enjoyable as ever to zoom in close to your troops and watch them engage. The landscapes are on the bland side, but soldier animations and the general amount of model detail make for a wonderful visual treat.

The other reason you'll want to play out most battles in real time is that the real-time AI is weak and can be exploited to your advantage. Enemy troops often fail to engage you, even when under direct fire. It isn't uncommon for your AI opponent to use only a few units at any given time and let you get an early upper hand, particularly when you have taken care with your formations during the deployment phase. This is especially true on settlement maps, in which narrow paths must be taken into account and buildings can be used for garrisoning. The AI is often confused by garrisoned troops, letting cavalry get pummeled by gunfire without taking any steps to reposition, even at higher difficulty settings. And at times the artificial intelligence is outright broken. On multiple occasions, we watched units refuse to engage or respond to attack commands, our own troops and the enemy troops milling among each other as if they were at a cocktail party rather than in the midst of battle. Other battle quirks--such as rare moments when movement across the map occurs in slow motion, as if troops are moving through mud instead of a grassy field-may also crop up.

Real-time naval battles are another new feature, and they are the most impressive visual offering here. The water is absolutely stunning and the ships are incredibly detailed, down to the movement of sails and oars, as well as the movement of troops on the decks. As ships take damage, debris falls from the hull and litters the water, all while fireships may be volleying flames into the air. It's the best-looking naval combat in any game, and it is compelling when in top form. Like land battles, naval warfare benefits from smart positioning, and you can further micromanage by choosing different ammo types, firing your cannons manually, and even by grappling and boarding another ship. But as with land warfare, the AI seems incapable of managing the battle with much success on normal and hard difficulties. In dozens upon dozens of naval battles, the enemy deployed ships in the same exact manner and always focused on doing hull damage, but never on alternate strategies such as using grape shot to whittle down a crew and then initiating boarding. In a stand-alone naval skirmish using default deployments on normal AI settings, we won a battle after issuing a whopping two commands during the entire match; if you want a challenge in one-off naval battles, crank up the difficulty level to expert.As problematic as the AI can be, both types of battles are fun to play, and the addition of oceanic combat fleshes out the package well, making for multifaceted gameplay that encompasses a lot more than it could be expected to. This includes a number of multiplayer options, both over a local area network and online. You can battle both on land and at sea in a one-off skirmish for up to eight players; take part in a one-on-one siege in which one player defends a fortress while the other attacks; or engage in a historical scenario, such as the battle of Brandywine Creek. Sadly, a full multiplayer campaign like the impressive 32-player extravaganza featured in Europa Universalis III is not yet part of this package, though developer Creative Assembly has announced that a multiplayer campaign mode will be added later.

The strengths of the core gameplay are far more apparent when you're playing against real people. As with prior Total War games, you get finite resources to spend on units of your choice, you can customize weather, and you can narrow unit selections to early or late 18th century. Without the bizarre AI behavior, you can concentrate on real battlefield tactics and not on exploitation, and matches can be an absolute blast. The measured approach and attempts to flank, the intimidating presence of a rocket troop, the final standoff of two fatigued units: These moments make Empire: Total War's multiplayer options worth returning to again and again. Naval battles are also much more fun when facing a human opponent, who will be likelier to slow your frigates by using chain shot, and to take advantage of tactical positioning and effective deployment.

However, you may very well need to turn down your graphics options when entering an online match, lest the frame rate drop to a crawl under the weight of the game's ambitions. Indeed, Empire: Total War requires a lot of horsepower to run, and it's prone to peculiar behavior, even on systems that exceed recommended requirements. We experienced a few crashes on several machines, and the game tends to slow the longer that it has been running. On two test systems, the soft haze applied to distant objects also blurred out some ship geometry and the onscreen compass, and various other graphical bugs cropped up from time to time. At least within battle, however, it seems that this power is being put to mostly good use; hundreds if not thousands of individually animated troops can be onscreen at any given time. Pleasant weather effects, the din of clashing swords, the pop of gunfire--all of these elements make for an enjoyable audiovisual experience during battles.

It's impossible to condense an experience as broad and as rich as Empire: Total War to a few thousand words. Its complex amalgam of turn-based empire building and real-time skirmishing is exciting and involving, and it's both fuller and more streamlined than its predecessors. But like those predecessors, it inspires that compulsion to accomplish just one last turn, even when your eyes are bleary and your body longs for sleep. Although some rough edges are in serious need of sanding, this is a complex and rewarding game that will keep strategy fanatics tied to their keyboards for months at a time.Minimum System Requirements
OS: Windows XP/Vista
Processor: Pentium 4 @ 2.4 GHz
Memory: 1 GB
Hard Drive: 15 GB Free
Video Memory: 256 MB (Shader Model 2.0)
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 9.0c

Monopoly 2008

2009-04-24T12:06:00.001+07:00

An Updated Classic Returns: MONOPOLY Purists Rejoice! It's the World's Most Popular Board Game brought to life! Acquire wealth by buying and developing the Monopoly properties you know and love. It's all about money - and making more of it than your opponents. Features Include: -Cleverly Animated Tokens, Bright 3D Graphics, New Music -Enhanced Faster Moving Gameplay -Multiplayer Mode with up to 4 Friends OR Play against up to 3 Computer Opponents with an advanced A.I. -3 Opponent Difficulty Levels: First Time Buyer, Entrepreneur and Tycoon -Limitless Replayability -Fun and Addictive Action for Everyone!

Minimum PC System Requirements
* Processor Type
Intel® Pentium® III processor
* Processor Speed
850MHz
* Operating System
Windows XP, Windows Vista
* System Memory
512MB RAM
* Hard Drive Space
50MB
* Video
32MB 32-bit 800 x 600 DirectX 7.0-compatible video card
* Sound Card
16-bit DirectX 7.0-compatible sound card
* Drive Type and Speed
CD-ROM 8x
download this game.
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Call of Duty 5 - World at War

2009-04-23T10:42:00.001+07:00

Call of Duty - World at War is a lot like its predecessor, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. In most respects, this is a good thing. The guns are tightly tuned, the tone is gritty and mature, and the action is exciting and fast-paced. It boasts the same addictive multiplayer system as Modern Warfare, and even expands the multiplayer possibilities by allowing four players to play through the campaign cooperatively. Like every game in the series before Modern Warfare, this Call of Duty takes place during World War II. World at War does an admirable job of spicing things up, but between the well-worn source material and déjà vu game mechanics, there is a pervasive familiarity to the game. Still, though World at War lacks the freshness that made Modern Warfare such a hit, it nevertheless provides a hearty, filling meal--one that shooter fans are sure to savor.

The most salient difference between World at War and Modern Warfare is the WWII setting. In the campaign, you split time between two soldiers in two offensive theaters: the Russian push out of their homeland and into the heart of Germany, and the American struggle to wrest Pacific islands from the Japanese. Though you'll alternate
between them every few levels, the campaign feels like one solid progression, thanks to the adept pacing.

Each soldier's journey begins at a low point. Weaponless and surrounded by the enemy, you get a taste of the despair many soldiers are never rescued from. Though the emotional tone eventually rises toward triumph, you never quite forget the fate you nearly met. The first few levels are a hard scrabble as you and your fellow soldiers try to gain a foothold for your country, while later levels are suffused with a sense of hard-won momentum as you fight bigger battles and push closer to your enemies' capitals. Throughout each level you are accompanied by a superior officer who sets the emotional tone through well-acted dialogue. The vengeful, spitfire Russian pumps up your adrenaline to intoxicating levels, while the grim, determined American provides a sobering influence. This grim sobriety is further enforced by the actual WWII videos, photos, and statistics presented in stylish interchapter cutscenes. The message is, by nature, a conflicted one: Though you may feel like an action hero, you are actually participating in the most horrid of human endeavors. How you ultimately feel about this message will depend on your personal disposition, but suffice to say that the elevated emotional timbre makes for an exciting campaign.

Also exciting? Bayonets and flamethrowers, the two standout new weapons in World at War. You wield both in the American campaign, using them to enthusiastically dispatch enemies in trenches and fend off the aggressive banzai raiders. These raiders snipe from the treetops, or pop out of holes and charge you with merciless determination; this aggression makes the American campaign feel uniquely tense. The Russian campaign is slightly more predictable, but it remains vigorous throughout and ends in a spectacularly satisfying way. Explosions and gunfire will cause enemies to lose limbs and copious amounts of blood, making World at War a sight more violent than Modern Warfare. Still, in between the burning, stabbing, and gibbing, there is a lot of crouching behind cover and picking off enemies with your trusty rifle. This kind of action, and most of the other weapons, will feel familiar to anyone who has played a World War II shooter before. It's a well-tuned and exciting familiarity, but it doesn't make any notable leaps.

World at War does make a leap for the Call of Duty series by offering two-player split-screen and four-player online cooperative campaign play. It's the same campaign as the single-player experience, though the number of enemies increases for every player that joins you. You can turn competitive scoring on and see who can earn the most points by killing enemies or reviving teammates, and this adds a bit of fun to the campaign and lightens to mood (it's hard to feel grim when there are point values popping up all the time). There are also special items called death cards in each level, and collecting these will allow you to enable a cheat for cooperative play (for instance, enemies die by headshots only or headshots cause enemies to explode). These add a little more spice to the pot, but the only tangible incentives are challenges. Completing these tasks (such as kill 100 enemies with pistols or take first 20 times in competitive co-op) will earn you experience points that go toward your multiplayer rank (co-op is not similarly ranked). Cooperative play is fun in its own right, but linking it to the addictive multiplayer ranking system makes it relevant in a whole different way.In case you missed it last year, the multiplayer system introduced in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is fantastic, and World at War has updated it to fit its WWII setting. The hook is experience points, which you gain by winning matches or completing one of the aforementioned challenges. As you earn these points, you'll rank up and earn access to new weapons, new accessories (like sights and suppressors), and new perks. Perks are special abilities that grant you a wide variety of bonuses, but you can only choose four (one of which is vehicle-specific). This introduces an engaging element of customization: Will you choose to toughen up by increasing your health and bullet damage, or will you go the stealth route and increase your sprint speed while becoming invisible to enemy recon planes? Perks are well balanced, and you have multiple save slots, which enable you to easily switch between your various pretweaked loadouts. This allows you to take full advantage of this deep, engaging system that is just as great this year as it was last year, albeit slightly less novel.

There are, of course, new maps, and the bonuses you earn for kill streaks have been updated (notably, the attack helicopter you earned after seven kills in Modern Warfare is now a pack of nasty attack dogs). There are also a few maps that support tanks, powerful additions that mix things up without being too dominant. Most of the modes remain the same, though some have received slight tweaks and Capture the Flag has returned after a hiatus from Modern Warfare. The most striking new mode is actually a cooperative game called Nazi Zombies, playable when you beat the campaign (or play with someone who has). This absurd game puts up to four players in a house that is being assaulted by the undead. Killing the fiends and repairing the barricades earns you points that you then spend to replenish ammunition, buy new guns, and unlock new areas of the house. Each subsequent wave brings tougher, faster, more numerous enemies, and the game inevitably ends in grisly death. Though the random weapon box, assorted power-ups, and skills of your teammates add some variation, each play-through is similar to the last. Still, it makes for some intense, frantic fun and provides a welcome, if slightly bizarre, change of pace.

By staying largely true to the formula that made Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare so successful, Call of Duty: World at War has ensured a proven level of technical quality, particularly in the multiplayer arena. On the other hand, one of Modern Warfare's strengths was its fresh approach, and by embracing a familiar setting and familiar mechanics, World at War achieves greatness but falls short of excellence. This is only a bad thing if you are expecting this game to top its benchmark predecessor. If, however, you are hoping for an exciting campaign, fun cooperative play, and engaging multiplayer action, then you'll find a lot to be happy about in World at War.
Minimum System
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3.0Ghz /AMD Athlon 64 3200+
Video Card: NVIDIA Geforce 6600 GT 256MB / ATI Radeon X1600 XT 256MB
Memory: 1024MB (512 for XP)
Free Disk Space: 8GB
Operating System: Windows XP SP2 / Windows Vista
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 9.0c

Dynasty Warriors 6 Reloaded

2009-04-22T14:34:00.001+07:00

Dynasty Warriors 6 is the first game in Koei's long-running hack-and-slash series to be built specifically for current-generation consoles, and as such it benefits in one major area: It looks pretty. Other than that, this is Dynasty Warriors as it has been since its inception: a huge, sprawling, button-mashing affair set in ancient China, complete with the series' requisite cheesy cutscenes, dozens of playable characters, bad dialogue, and mostly incomprehensible storyline. Of course, there are new gameplay additions in Dynasty Warriors 6, but they're tweaks rather than overhauls and will be more exciting to long-term fans than casual players of the series.

If you are a newcomer, then suffice it to say that the Dynasty Warriors franchise has represented some of the best button-grinding fun to be had on consoles, although the series has been widely criticized for being just that: unashamed, action-focused, and strategy-light games that become almost hypnotic in their repetitiveness. The gameplay in Dynasty Warriors generally consists of your chosen character taking on hundreds of opposing soldiers single-handedly, which is usually accomplished by pressing one or two buttons ad nauseam. Like previous entries in the series, Dynasty Warriors 6 is set in the Three Kingdoms
period of ancient China, a time when three rival factions were battling it out for supremacy over the land. You take the role of a general from one of the factions--Wu, Shu, or Wei--and are set loose in large, open battlefield areas to take on an opposing army practically alone. (The kill counts at the end of each level usually number in the hundreds, if not thousands.) Although only nine generals are initially selectable, there are a total of 41 playable characters who become unlocked as you play through the game, a number that is not quite as many as in previous Dynasty Warriors offerings.

One of Dynasty Warriors 6's key innovations is the Renbu system, a new way for characters to build up their attack combos. In previous entries in the series, combos were usually tied to the quality of weapon your character was wielding, with more powerful weapons (usually found throughout the course of a campaign) allowing generals longer and longer consecutive attacks. The Renbu system ditches the weapon-based combo count completely and replaces it instead with a gauge that gradually fills as you perform attacks. If you string together enough attacks without getting hit, then your Renbu will go up a level, which in turn lets your character perform a longer combo. If you go too long without attacking or suffer from a serious blow, then your Renbu goes down. This means that characters will be able to perform up to six-hit combos practically from the get-go, although longer strings will still have to be unlocked as you progress through the game and earn more Renbu levels.

Though the ability to do wicked six-string combos from the opening level of the game is all well and good, what the Renbu system really does is make the Dynasty Warriors brand of basic button-mashing even simpler by boiling down a two-button-mashing affair into one. Previous games in the series forced you to use both the normal and charged attack buttons to perform different hit-number combos, but with Renbu, you can now simply press the normal attack button over and over again to come up with flashy-looking and effective moves. (Charged attacks in Dynasty Warriors 6 are now best left for trying to break the block of an enemy.) It doesn't do much to dispel the series' reputation of being a brainless bash-'em-up, but then again Dynasty Warriors has never positioned itself as gaming's version of advanced calculus.Another major addition to the series is a skill tree that you can use to improve the attributes, attacks, and special abilities of your generals. Generals still earn experience in campaigns and go up in levels, but instead of attributes such as health, defense, and attack improving automatically, you now receive skill points to spend on building a character. Skill points can also be spent on other abilities, such as more Renbu levels, bigger damage to specific attacks, being able to carry more items, and others. There's enough in the skill tree that you won't be able to unlock all of a general's abilities during your first play-through, but it's certainly not as exhaustive as in other games.

The rest of Dynasty Warriors 6's new features, though quite significant in the context of the series, will probably leave everyone who hasn't drunk the Three Kingdoms Kool-Aid scratching their heads, given that they've been staples of many other games for quite a while now. Generals can now--wait for it--climb ladders and swim. Series stalwarts will most likely appreciate the introduction of ladder climbing, which--in addition to the ability to now jump down into lower levels of maps--gives Dynasty Warriors 6 a more multilayered feel. You can send your generals up into castle battlements to take down enemy archers and ballistas, and you can also take a shortcut down a winding mountain path to quickly get behind an enemy unit. Swimming seems less integral, although it's neat to now be able to swim through some of the game's water-based levels (such as in the Battle of Fan Castle) instead of taking a longer but dryer path. In another addition, enemy bases can now be invaded by simply bashing down the door that leads into them, as opposed to finding the appropriate defense captain and sending him sprawling. Duels with enemy generals have also been tweaked somewhat; enemy soldiers now form a cordon around the two combatants during their battle.

With so many generals in the game's lineup, there's plenty of replay value in Dynasty Warriors 6, although the amount of replay you'll get from this really depends on how you feel about doing the same thing and going through the same levels (albeit with a different character) over and over again. If you're fine with the repetition, then there are well over a hundred hours of play to be had in Dynasty Warriors 6, considering that each general's campaign will take roughly three or four hours to complete. Returning in Dynasty Warriors 6 are challenge modes, which task you with performing set tasks such as defeating as many enemies as possible within a set time limit, moving from base to base as quickly as possible, and more. The game also features a two-player, split-screen cooperative mode, although sadly there's no online option whatsoever apart from leaderboards.Thanks to the power of current-gen consoles, one of the key areas of improvement in Dynasty Warriors 6 is in the looks department. Each of the generals has undergone a complete facelift from previous games, and now all sport snazzy motion-captured moves that make their attacks look more fluid and realistic. The series' dreaded and much-mocked fog of war has also disappeared, which means that Dynasty Warriors 6 has a decent draw distance that lets you see the lay of the land more clearly. However, it's not all sunshine, given that the game--much like every other Dynasty Warriors game before it--still suffers from horrendous pop-ups and pop-outs. Enemy and allied soldiers will routinely just appear out of nowhere while you move through the expansive battlefields, and pieces of the environment (grass in particular) will simply disappear as you get closer to them. And though the game does have many more characters on the screen at once, we encountered several instances of serious slowdown during some of the more hectic scenes. The slowdown wasn't enough to affect gameplay, but it was most definitely notable, particularly when playing two-player split-screen. Where audio is converned the series' cheesy and generic rock soundtrack still dominates. As always, it's mainly uninspiring and seems to have not changed at all from the series' PlayStation 2 days.

There's no question that Dynasty Warriors 6 plays it safe with the series' tried-and-tested formula, which means fans will lap it up, whereas those who tried a previous game and found it not to their liking will find nothing here to change their view. For everyone else, Dynasty Warriors 6 is a decent beat-'em-up with plenty of gameplay packed in.
Minimum Requirements

Processor: Intel Pentium 4 1.6Ghz /
Display Card!: ATI Radeon X1650 Series / NVIDIA GeForce 7600 Series
Memory: 512MB
Free Disk Space: 5GB
Operating System: Windows XP / Vista

Recommended System

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 /
Display Card!: NVIDIA GeForce 7600 Series /ATI Radeon X1650 Series
Memory: 512MB
Free Disk Space: 5GB
Operating System: Windows XP / Vista

Call of Duty 4 - Modern Warfare

2009-04-21T09:32:00.001+07:00

It took awhile, but Infinity Ward finally got the message that World War II is played out. With modern times and international affairs becoming more and more, shall we say, interesting in recent years, the 1940s just don't carry as much weight as they used to. Perhaps that's why Call of Duty 4 has a new subtitle, Modern Warfare. By bringing things into a fictionalized story that still seems fairly plausible, the developer has made a much heavier game. But COD 4 is more than just an updated setting. It's also an amazing multiplayer first-person shooter and a great but brief single-player campaign with the visual chops to make it a standout shooter in an era filled with seemingly dozens of standout shooters.

The only real catch is that the single-player is almost shockingly short. If you've been keeping up with this style of game, you'll probably shoot your way to the credits in under five hours. While you can raise the difficulty to give yourself more of a challenge, the main thing this does is make the enemies frustratingly deadly, which sort of detracts from the fun.

While it may have a lack of single-player quantity, it makes up for most of it with its quality. The game tells its story from multiple perspectives, and you'll play as a new British SAS operative as well as a US Marine. The campaign takes you from a rainy night out at sea on a boat that's in the process of sinking to a missile
silo where it's on you to save millions from an unsavory nuclear-powered death. Along the way, there are plenty of jaw-dropping moments where you'll look around the room for someone to whom you can say, "I can't believe that just happened." In a world filled with war games in which the good guys come out unscathed and the world is left at total peace, Call of Duty 4 will wake you up like a face full of ice water.

The action in the campaign is usually very straightforward. You have a compass at the bottom of your screen, and the direction of your current objective is very plainly marked. But getting from point A to point B is never as simple as running in a straight line, as you'll be conducting full-scale assaults in Middle Eastern countries by moving from house to house, taking out what seems like a never-ending stream of enemy troops along the way. You'll also get an opportunity to raid Russian farmhouses in search of terrorist leaders, disguise yourself as the enemy, and, in one sequence, don a brushlike ghillie suit and crawl through the brush as enemy troops and tanks roll right past you. It's a breathtaking moment in a campaign filled with breathtaking moments. Unfortunately, it's about half as long as the average shooter, and there are plenty of sequences where you wish there were just one or two more hills to take.Of course, if you're looking for longevity, that's where the multiplayer comes in. Up to 18 players can get online and get into a match on one of 16 different maps. Many of the levels are taken from portions of the single-player and they offer a healthy mix of wide-open, sniper-friendly areas and tight, almost cramped spaces where grenades and shotguns are the order of the day. There are six game modes to choose from. The old standby is team deathmatch, though you can also play in a free-for-all deathmatch, which isn't as much fun as the team modes. The other modes are more objective-oriented, and a couple of those have you lugging bombs across the map to blow up enemy equipment, or preventing the enemy from blowing up your base. Others have you capturing control points. Lastly, you can change up the game rules a bit with a hardcore setting that makes weapons more realistically damaging or an old-school mode that puts weapons on the ground as pickups and generally moves away from the simulation side of things.

In addition to just firing your weapon or tossing grenades, you earn some more interesting tactical moves for skilled play. If you can shoot three opponents without dying, you're able to call in a UAV drone, which basically is an upgraded radar that makes enemy positions show up on your onscreen map for 30 seconds at any time. Normally, enemies blip up onto the map only if they fire their weapon to make their location known. If you can go on a five-kill streak, you can call in an air strike, which brings up a shot of the entire level map and lets you place the air strike wherever you like. When combined with a UAV sweep, this can be really devastating. If you can make it all the way to seven kills--which is actually easier than it sounds--you can call in a helicopter for support. It'll buzz around the map and automatically open fire on enemies, though enemies can shoot it down, too. These additions to the normal first-person shooter gameplay really open up the game a lot and make it superexciting to play.

You'll also always have something to work toward, regardless of mode, because in standard, public matches, you earn experience points for just about everything you do. Capturing control points, getting kills, calling in support, all of these things give you points that go toward your rank. Ranking up unlocks most of the game's multiplayer content.The class system in Call of Duty 4 is also very interesting. Each class has a different weapon loadout and different traits, called perks. As you rank up, you eventually unlock all five of the preset classes and the ability to create your own class. This lets you pick your own main weapon, your sidearm, attachments for both weapons, what sort of special grenades you want to carry, and three perks. The perks are broken up into three groups to help keep things balanced, and as you continue to level, you'll unlock additional perks. These class traits are one of the game's neatest tricks and, again, really helps to set COD 4 apart from the pack.

Perks in the Perk 1 group are more focused on explosives, letting you get more flashbangs if you like, or letting you lug around a rocket launcher, which is great for taking out enemy choppers. The other two perk groups have traits like juggernaut, which increases your health. There's also last stand, which activates when you are killed by dropping you to the ground and switching you to a pistol, giving you a moment to kill the guy who took you out before he realizes you're still squirming around and finishes the job. Our current favorite is martyrdom, which causes you to drop a live grenade when killed. It adds a healthy dose of mayhem to the proceedings. The perks and other unlockables feel nicely balanced, too, so you probably won't run into situations where one class is just better than the other. As it should be, your ability to point the red dot at the head of your enemy and squeeze the trigger before he does the same is still the deciding factor.While there are a ton of compelling gameplay reasons to play Call of Duty 4, it also has top-notch presentation. The graphics are fantastic throughout, and they do a great job of rendering wide-open fields, tight buildings or houses, smoke-belching silos, and lots more. Some of the multiplayer maps look like they've already seen a lot of action, with blast craters, destroyed tanks, and other things that you can hide in or behind. It also has terrific lighting, so everything looks as it should. Everything sounds right, too. When you hear a battle raging in the distance, it sounds appropriately muffled, and up close, the crack of an M16 or the full-auto barrage from an AK-47 are appropriately loud and angry sounding. There is also quite a bit of voice work throughout the game, and it's all nicely done. The music, for the most part, is the typical sort of action-movie music you've come to expect from a first-person shooter, except for a rap over the end credits that seems to simultaneously detail the game's story while also acting as a subliminal diss record with some slick talk about how this is the third chapter by Infinity Ward, perhaps lightly inferring that you should ignore Treyarch's contribution to the series, Call of Duty 3. It's great.

COD 4 is available on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC, and each version holds up admirably. The differences between the two console versions feel mostly negligible. Both systems deliver good frame rates and have good, easy-to-use multiplayer setups that most closely resemble Halo 2 and 3's party system and matchmaking playlists. The PC version of the game uses a more traditional server browser to get you into games. Both systems work just fine on their respective platforms. The PC version has the ability to run in a higher resolution, if you're equipped with a PC that can handle it, but it seems to scale quite well. You can also create servers that allow up to 32 players to play at once on the PC, as opposed to a limit of 18 in the console versions, but given the size of the multiplayer maps, putting 32 players in them makes things a little too crowded. Despite listing 1080p support on the back of the box, COD 4 appears to prefer 720p on the PlayStation 3. The only way to get it to run in 1080p is to tell your PS3 that your TV doesn't support 720p or 1080i, but the difference seems minor. Either way, you'd be hard-pressed to tell it apart from its Xbox 360 counterpart. And all versions control just fine, making the decision over which version to buy totally dependent on which controller you like the most.

It's a shame that the single-player is so brief, but you should only skip out on Call of Duty 4 if you're the sort of person who doesn't appreciate great first-person shooter multiplayer. The quality of the content in the campaign is totally top-shelf, and the multiplayer is some of the best around, making this a truly superb package.
Recommended system requirements

* CPU: 2.4 GHz dual core or better is recommended
* RAM: 1 GB for XP; 2 GB for Vista is recommended
* Harddrive: 8 GB of free hard drive space
* Video card: 3.0 Shader Support recommended. Nvidia Geforce 7800 or better or ATI Radeon X1800 or better

Minimum system requirements

* CPU: Intel® Pentium® 4 2.4 GHz or AMD® Athlon™ 64 2800+ processor or any 1.8Ghz Dual Core Processor or better supported
* RAM: 512 MB RAM (768 MB for Windows Vista)
* Harddrive: 8 GB of free hard drive space
* Video card (generic): NVIDIA® Geforce™ 6600 or better or ATI® Radeon® 9800Pro or better

Men Of War

2009-04-20T13:09:00.006+07:00

In the already crowded field of World War II real-time strategy games, new contenders have to provide something special to distinguish themselves. In order to achieve this, game developers must experiment and push beyond the ordinary, creating games that give us new reasons to revisit WWII again and again. Men of War succeeds at carving a niche within the genre by delivering an epic campaign full of historical detail, plus the ability to jump into your units with a third-person "direct control" mode. Furthermore, Men of War forgoes base building so that you can focus on tactics. These elements combine to produce an experience steeped in history and rich in detail that will reward anyone looking for a challenging new twist on the genre.

Men of War is a complex and difficult game, and as such it can be tough to get into. The first mission, which is the closest thing the game has to a tutorial, only teaches you a few basic commands. After that, you'll get some help from the interface, such as the ghostly outlines that show where your troops can take cover and the occasional tool tip that flashes by, but that's about it. This can be problematic when a mission asks you, for example, to booby-trap enemy vehicles or hide dead bodies but gives you no clue as how you do so. Unorthodox controls are common in Men of War, so even
relatively simple actions like dividing your units into numbered control groups might prove elusive if you don't take the time to read the instruction manual. The default control scheme uses only the left mouse button for movement, unit selection, and attack and can be tough to learn. Thankfully, you can switch to the more traditional RTS mouse setup in the game options if you prefer.

The gameplay in Men of War is engaging and varied. The single-player game is a set of three campaigns. First is the lengthy Russian campaign, which follows two friends in the Red Army who participate in a wide variety of early war missions, such as evacuating Soviet factories and defending the city of Sevastopol. It's truly refreshing to play a WWII game that doesn't take you through the overused battlegrounds of Normandy and Stalingrad, preferring instead to deliver new challenges from the lesser-thumbed pages of history, and, perhaps because Men of War's developers are Ukrainian, they deliver a seemingly thorough and authentic depiction of the war from the Soviet perspective. It's no surprise, then, that the developers played favorites with the Soviet campaign and made the German and American campaigns, which focus on the fighting in North Africa, about half its length. However, the shorter campaigns are anything but short, clocking in at about eight hours apiece, which puts the full single-player experience at 30-plus hours.

Part of the explanation for the game's long play time is its grueling difficulty; the rest it owes to a diverse array of long, involved, and realistic missions. Overall mission objectives go well beyond your typical "annihilate the enemy" fare and range from buying time for workers evacuating factory equipment to helping a small team of partisans stir up trouble behind enemy lines. In addition, you'll find a wide variety of tasks to accomplish within each mission. For instance, in the Tobruk level, you must push enemies out of their forward defenses, double back to remove mines and tank traps, fight to get your artillery to the coast, blow up several transports and a dilapidated battleship, swing around to take out a fortress behind your lines, and then send five men through an underground tunnel to seize control of British fuel supplies. With so many objectives to tackle, you'll often spend 90 minutes or more on a single mission--hours if it's a particularly difficult one--and at the mission's conclusion, you'll be able to enjoy a well-earned sense of achievement.

Men of War's most distinctive feature is the ability to take direct control of one of your units. This lets you control the unit with your keyboard and mouse like in a third-person action game. Although you'll need to directly control an infantryman in certain circumstances (such as shooting out enemy spotlights on a stealth mission), tanks are by far the most fun. While driving a tank, you can alternate between machine gun and main gun firing modes at will, and given that all buildings are destructible, you can, for instance, flatten a house filled with enemy infantry and then cackle maniacally as you pepper the fleeing survivors with your machine gun. Of course, playing with tanks is fun no matter which mode you're in, especially if you love seeing numerous real-world models depicted with historical accuracy. For example, tank enthusiasts will be wowed by how many different models of the Soviet T-34 tank are represented.
As if directly controlling units, finding cover for your infantry, and working toward your objectives aren't enough, Men of War has an additional responsibility in store for you: Limited ammo. In the event that any of your guys run out of bullets, you'll need to search corpses and supply creates for more. Additionally, looting corpses will garner you all sorts of items to augment your troops' effectiveness. Although there is a certain engrossing realism to the fact that your soldiers can equip any dropped gun, helmet, or grenade that they find, micromanaging your squad's inventory, and looting and equipping items, can become overwhelming. Regardless, you will still experience a profound feeling of accomplishment whenever your motley crew of units scavenges enough enemy supplies to barely make it through a mission.

Multiplayer in Men of War supports up to 16 players in both LAN and online matches and there are seven different game types to choose from that consist of variations on four basic themes. Given that there are no enemy bases to destroy, multiplayer matches are decided by points. Depending on the game type, those points can be earned by controlling areas of the map; by towing a randomly placed cargo wagon to your base, or simply by killing as many enemies as possible. Furthermore, you can play through the campaigns cooperatively with a friend, which is definitely a welcome addition. Curiously absent is any kind of skirmish mode for playing against computer opponents, which is unfortunate given that versions of the game from different territories aren't always compatible with each other which can make opponents difficult to find.

Men of War's graphics and audio are nothing special, although the sound effects are good enough that you can distinguish noises as subtle as an enemy soldier crawling through the grass to throw an antitank grenade. The music is repetitive and becomes annoying due to the prolonged nature of the missions. Furthermore, the pathetic English-language voice acting, when combined with awkward character animations, makes for some unintentionally hilarious cutscenes that don't mesh with the game's otherwise gritty mood. One nice thing about the visuals is the inclusion of some greenery, in contrast to the traditional WWII palate of dirt brown and rubble gray. Overall, though, the graphics don't compare too favorably with recent RTS games.

From the direct-control feature to the lovingly replicated historical vehicles, Men of War is full of well-crafted details that should make it especially appealing to history buffs. The steep learning curve alone will be enough to keep some players from enjoying everything that Men of War has to offer, but the reward for perseverance is a WWII campaign experience like no other game on the market.

Minimum PC System Requirements
* Processor Type
Intel® Pentium® 4 processor, AMD Athlon™ 64 processor
* Processor Speed
3GHz
* Operating System
Windows XP, Windows Vista
* System Memory
1GB RAM
* Hard Drive Space
6.5GB plus 1GB swap file
* Video
128MB DirectX 9.0c-compatible ATI RADEON 9600 or NVIDIA GeForce 5900 3D hardware accelerator video card
* Sound Card
DirectX 9.0c-compatible sound card
PC Drive Type and Speed
DVD-ROM 6x
* Additional Requirements
Internet service required to access online features

Need For Speed Pro Street

2009-04-14T21:31:00.001+07:00

November 13, 2007 - EA's Need for Speed series has long been an ever-evolving franchise, one that changes up its focus, mechanics and style every couple of years. Though the game sells incredibly well, the developer/publisher doesn't like to sit still. This obviously means that the series has had its ups and downs, and unfortunately Need for Speed ProStreet isn't one of the ups.

ProStreet is a game that doesn't really seem to know what it's trying to be. It's been years since we've seen a Need for Speed title that focused solely on track racing, with the franchise branching out into open world settings with a story, cop chases and all sorts of other things to make it stand out. ProStreet, however, goes back to the track-based racing, putting the player into race after race on closed circuits, and then sending them back to a menu after each race is over.

This setup is perfectly fine and, in this case, does work well to some extent, but there's not really a whole lot of extra "stuff" outside of the races that makes it seem like Black Box had a good idea of exactly what it was trying to accomplish. Yes, the fundamentals are there and the setup does work well, but the bulk of the presentation doesn't feel all that robust, especially when compared to what we've seen in recent years.

As well, the control scheme and arcade vs. sim aspects feel a bit confused. ProStreet adds a ton of great customization options to the franchise, which we'll get to in a bit, but the driving physics are anything but realistic. They're an odd in-between of the two and wind up in some place that really just does not work very well at all. The series has generally had strong racing controls, but those were somehow lost in the latest game.

Most of the cars in the game feel like caricatures of their real-life counterparts, but not in a good way. Most every vehicle drives like a boat and feels very reluctant to want to turn at all. Even vehicles in hardcore driving sims like Gran Turismo turn with much greater ease than most any of the vehicles found here, and yet the game isn't even trying to be ultra-realistic.

A few of us around the office drive some of the cars that you'll find in the game, like a 2007 Civic Si (which is identical to the '06 in the game) and a 2006 Pontiac GTO, and none of them handle anything like the real deal. ProStreet's version of the GTO barely turns at anything above 30mph, and doesn't really instill any sense of its 400hp engine. The real Civic Si is a nimble little car, but ProStreet's Si feels very top-heavy and slides around corners like they're covered with ice.

And though we don't drive every car in the game, it's clear that most of them, if not all, do not drive like what we would expect from the real thing. It's sad, too, because this one, huge fault brings down a game that would otherwise be fairly solid.

Though there's not a lot of pizzazz and whatnot to it as we mentioned before, the Race Day progression does offer up a nice assortment of race events for you to partake in. Each Race Day features a handful of events -- be they grip races, drag races, sector challenges or what have you -- and pretty much all of them are good fun.

Drag races start out with a mini-game where you heat up your tires before heading to the line, and then it's all about timing your shifts, using your nitrous at the right time and keeping your car in a straight line, which can be tricky when you get to the really fast cars. The tire heating mini-game can get a little old, especially since each drag race event has three runs, so you'll play the game three times in the span of a couple minutes, but it's fun to try and shave a couple hundredths of a second off your time by getting a perfect start.

The Sector Shootout challenges can be fun, but there were a few occasions where we had problems with the driver AI and the basic setup for the event. The idea is that the track is broken into a number of sectors, and if you can post the best time for a sector you'll score points. The score counts down as time rolls on. So if someone scores 350 points on a sector, but then you come through and score 360, you'll add that total to your score. Score less, though, and you'll get zero.

It's a good idea, except that it's fundamentally flawed. You begin in a staggered manner instead of all at once, so the lead car automatically has a chance to set the record for each section and score points. You don't lose any if someone bests one of your times, so the lead automatically has a huge lead. As well, if there are ten sectors on a map, and one car has set the record on all of them, and then you come in and beat nine of those sectors by a small margin, you'll still be way behind because you've gotten zero points for the tenth and the other scores were close enough that it doesn't make up the difference. Had you lost your points when someone else beat your score, everything would have been fine. But as it is, it's fundamentally broken.

The track design is decent, but nothing stands out whatsoever. All of the races take place out in the middle of nowhere on closed-off tracks, so you won't see too many interesting trackside vistas or what have you. They're also all rather flat and most of them lack characteristic turns or sections. They're all different enough that you'll quickly learn the layouts and won't be confused as to what track you're on at the start, but nothing here screams great track design.

The car customization features here are great, however. As with a number of the previous games, you can swap in new visual parts for your car and change in and out internal upgrades that'll boost your performance. What's cool though is that AutoSculpt, which was introduced in last year's Need for Speed Carbon, now actually affects performance. Changing the angle of certain parts will increase or decrease drag, which then has a direct impact on your acceleration, top speed and handling.

As well, you can now tweak a number of settings like shock spring rate, roll, nitrous boost and whatnot to fiddle with how your car will perform. If you don't know what you're doing you can just leave them at the default settings, but these let you go in and mess with the metal if you want to.

The online options also have a cool new component in that while you're perfectly capable of partaking in live races, you can also set up a Race Day for others to race in. The difference here is that it's not a live event, so other players can go in and compete at their own leisure and the person with the most points at the end of the time period wins. You can mix and match any of the event types, lock down the available cars or leave the selection wide open and basically set up the Race Day however you want. It's a great idea that works quite well and allows players from all over the world the ability to compete without having to worry about time zone differences.

Minimum Requirement :
OS: Windows XP/Vista
CPU: 2.8 GHz or higher (Windows Vista requires 3.0 GHz)
RAM: 512 MB RAM or higher (Windows Vista requires 1 GB RAM)
HDD: 8.1 GB free disk space or more
Graphics: 128 MB or higher (Pixel Shader 2.0, AGP and PCIe only)
DirectX: Version 9.0c

The Godfather II

2009-04-14T21:03:00.001+07:00

If The Godfather II had been a mediocre, mindless action flick, the game of the same name could at least be considered faithful to its source material. As it is, though, Coppola's Mafia-themed masterpiece has been reduced to an uninspired, repetitive open-world action game with out-of-context movie quotes and a handful of recognizable characters sprinkled throughout its forgettable story. To make matters worse, The Godfather II has clearly been released in an unfinished state and is riddled with performance issues and bugs like they've been fired from a Tommy gun.

You play as Dominic, an important member of the Corleone family who somehow managed to make it through the epic movie trilogy without ever wandering into camera shot despite apparently being involved in a number of key scenes. As one of Michael Corleone's most trusted men, you've been groomed to head up your own family, and after a brief introductory sequence set in Cuba, the game proper gets under way in a diminutive New York where you're instructed to set about making a name for yourself. From this point on, much of your time is spent seizing and attempting to retain control of businesses run by rival families in order to make money and, ultimately, force said families to retreat into their compounds where you can eliminate them entirely. Unfortunately, killing rival mafiosi and intimidating business owners gets repetitive quickly and isn't much fun to begin with.

That's largely because the gunplay in The Godfather II is neither challenging nor satisfying. You have an impressive arsenal at your disposal, and weapons like the Magnum and the shotgun really feel like they pack a punch, but the enemies you're using them against rarely seem too interested in self-preservation. Too many of them simply stand their ground or charge at you and, if they somehow manage to get close before you put a couple of bullets in their heads, can easily be grabbed, punched, strangled, or head-butted into the afterlife. With that said, the made men working for rival families are geniuses compared to the clowns you get to recruit into your own family. They have their uses, but even having them do something as simple as walk through a doorway ahead of you or climb into one of the game's many slow but slippery cars with you can take some work. Predictably, things don't get any better when they're put into combat situations or are asked to perform the very specific tasks that they supposedly each specialize in, which include cracking safes, committing arson, and kicking down doors.

The problem isn't that they're unable to perform those tasks; it's that walking from A to B is rarely straightforward for them. When they're not failing to get into cars with you or running rings around one another at superhuman speeds, your guys can often be observed wandering off in the wrong direction or just remaining stationary while appearing to ponder their next step. Doorways are especially problematic, regardless of whether you're leading the way or are trying to send your guys in ahead of you to soak up some enemy fire. When you're in front, it's not uncommon to open a door, step into a room, and encounter the guys that were right behind you already standing around waiting for you in there. Other times they prefer to enter through different doors while running backward, or perhaps crash through a window for an entrance that really gets them noticed. If you turn your back on them, though, they'll be warped instantly to your side, sometimes.

Initially you get to recruit only one of these laughable soldiers for your family, and you get to choose between a demolitions expert and a medic. The former can create shortcuts through walls and blow up buildings, but like most of the crew abilities, these can be used in only very specific locations. The latter is arguably the most useful guy you'll ever meet, because if you or any other crew member gets killed, he can bring you back to life with full health just by sticking a needle in you. Ultimately, you can recruit up to seven made men for your family, and as they prove their worth, you can spend money on attribute upgrades and better weapons for them and even promote them so that they can specialize in more than one field. It behooves you to take the maximum allowed three crew members with you on every mission that you accept and to every business that you make a move on, because location layouts are generally so contrived and architecturally improbable that, for example, the only way into a building with seemingly easily accessible doors might be to blow a hole in a wall or to have your engineer cut a hole in a fence. Annoyingly, there's no consistent rule set in the world of The Godfather II, so while some fences can be cut through in specific locations, other, identical-looking fences, are impenetrable. Doors are another example; some can be kicked down, some can be lock-picked, and others can't be opened even with dynamite. You can't even predict which waist-high walls you'll be able to vault over until you get close enough to try, which is incredibly frustrating if you're fleeing from the cops on foot.
Businesses that you control after successfully negotiating all of the aforementioned problems don't just earn you money; they can also unlock special perks for you if you claim every business within a crime ring. Controlling both of New York's prostitution rackets will get you brass knuckles, while three diamond smuggling operations in Florida will earn you and your crew bulletproof vests, for example. These crime-ring bonuses add some small degree of strategy to the proceedings when it comes to planning your next move, not least because rival families can benefit from the same bonuses that you can, but none of the bonuses significantly impact the difficulty of subsequent actions--regardless of who has them. Rivals will often attempt to reclaim or bomb businesses that you control, denying you your bonuses if they succeed, so it's important to hire guards to protect them. The guards aren't always up to the job if a rival family decides to send soldiers and capos along, but at the very least they'll buy you some time until you can send members of your own crew there via the "Don's View" map screen or go and join the fight yourself.

Rival families can be eliminated only when they've lost control of all businesses and have retreated to their fortress-like compounds. At this point, the compounds become unlocked so that you can get into them and fight your way to wherever it is that you need to place a bomb. In theory, you shouldn't attempt this kind of operation until you've weakened a family by assassinating a number of its made men, but in practice, the only real difference between those guys and the regular guards is that it takes more bullets to put them down. Interestingly, the only way to permanently kill a made man other than to bomb his family's compound is to do so in a way that sends a specific message to his family, and you can find out which message needs to be sent only by doing favors for people you meet on the street. Remember how Vito Corleone was unable to turn down any request from a friend on his daughter's wedding day in the first Godfather movie? Well, this is nothing like that. Rather, you approach complete strangers and tell them they look like they need help, at which point they tell you who or which building they want attacked. Do them the favor, and they'll tell you where one of your enemies can be found and that he can only be killed with a Molotov, with a shot between the eyes, with a fall from a great height, by being run over with a car, or something similar. Not only is soliciting murder advice from random pedestrians totally absurd, carrying out these contrived actions is more trouble than it's worth, so you'll probably end up just bombing the compound every time.
Once you take down all five families, you're about done with the single-player portion of The Godfather II. Multiplayer modes designed for up to 16 players include Team Deathmatch, Demolition Assault, FireStarter, and Safecracker. You play as one of the members of your crew from the single-player game, and as you earn honor points online, you can use them to upgrade your guys' weapon licenses so that they're able to use more-powerful guns both online and off. Your choice of crew member will likely be dictated by the game type that you're playing because, in case you hadn't guessed, those last three modes favor players with demolition, arson, and safecracker skills, respectively. Unfortunately, The Godfather II's multiplayer isn't much fun. Targeting enemies without the lock-on feature feels too imprecise on consoles, completing objectives on the non-deathmatch modes doesn't earn you as many points as just killing people, and most of the maps are too big for just 16 players.

One of the more interesting multiplayer features, regardless of the fact that it's functional rather than fun, is the option for one player on each team to play as the don. As the don, you don't play as a guy on the ground at all, but as a disembodied camera flying high above the map and able to relay information to teammates about enemy locations and the like both with voice chat and by dropping waypoint beacons. When your team captures strategic locations on the map, you can also reward them with bulletproof vests and other perks, which is great for them but as boring as it sounds for you. Worse still, you can only fly around freely at a fixed altitude, so although you have the option to jump between players and key locations with a couple of button presses, your movement still feels oddly restricted. It's possible to make money as the don by betting on the outcome of games, but money's unlikely to be an issue once you near the end of the single-player game, so it's hardly compelling.
Questionable design choices aside, the problem with almost every aspect of The Godfather II is simply that it feels unfinished. Dated visuals, voiced lines of dialogue that seemingly play at random and often inappropriate times, dead bodies falling through scenery, a car hovering in the air about half a mile off the Cuban coast, being able to snipe enemies through walls and doors that haven't popped into view yet, guards who fail to recognize you as a threat when you walk into a federal building and crack a safe, cars and pedestrians that appear and disappear long before they leave your range of vision, getting stuck in an animation somewhere between a regular walk and a crouch after vaulting through a window--these are just some of the problems we encountered in the 13 hours or so that it took to play from start to finish. Even looking past these anomalies, all you're going to find is repetitive, unsatisfying gameplay in an illogical, inconsistent world. The Godfather II should have been an offer impossible to refuse, but like Michael's brother Fredo, this one will break your heart.

Minimum System Requirements
* OS: Microsoft Windows XP/Vista
* CPU: P4 2.8GHz or faster
* RAM: 1GB or more
* Hard Drive: At least 9GB of free space
* Video: DirectX 9.0c compatible video card
o NVIDIA GeForce 6800 or better (7300, 7600 GS, and 8500 are below minimum system requirements)
o ATI X1600 Pro or better (HD2400 is below minimum system requirements)
o 256MB Video Card and Shader Model 3.0 required
* Sound: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card
* DirectX: The latest version of DirectX 9.0c

World of Warcraft - Wrath of the Lich King

2009-04-13T04:45:00.001+07:00

Four years and well beyond 10 million subscriptions after the release of World of Warcraft, Blizzard's phenomenally successful massively multiplayer online role-playing game is barely recognizable as the same game that sold almost a quarter of a million copies in its first 24 hours. The game has been in a near-constant state of evolution since 2004, and up until last month, the steady flow of new features and improvements had all been patched in for free, with only one exception: the Burning Crusade expansion pack that's required to play Wrath of the Lich King. The recently released second expansion pack doesn't boast as many back-of-the-box bullet points as its predecessor, and it doesn't offer anything for new players, but if you're still playing WOW or you're looking for an excuse to get back into it, this thrilling new adventure is not to be missed.

All of the new content in Wrath of the Lich King comes with a character-level requirement. You can't play the new death knight hero class until one of your existing characters reaches level 55, and you can't attempt any quests in the new Northrend continent until you're at level 68. The most significant exception to this rule would have been the new inscription-crafting profession, but that ended up being patched in shortly before the expansion's release alongside new talents for every character class in the game, an Xbox Live-style
achievements system, barbershops, an extremely useful in-game calendar, and numerous user-interface improvements. There's new content for low-level players, but you don't need the expansion pack to get it.

Regardless of where you choose to start your Wrath of the Lich King adventure, it'll quickly become apparent that considerable effort has gone into making the new content compelling. There are still plenty of fetch quests, and there's certainly no shortage of non-player characters looking for heroes to kill a certain number of whichever species or faction they have a beef with. Liberally sprinkled in among those genre requisites, though, are some quite different challenges that not only add some much-needed variety but, in some cases, also do a great job of immersing you in Warcraft's rich lore. Previously, WOW relied on you reading the briefings that bookend quests for its storytelling, but in Wrath of the Lich King, it's often the quests themselves that get the job done along with a handful of in-game cutscenes. You might go into the expansion not knowing your Arthas from your elbow, but after questing in Northrend for a while, you'll inevitably gain some understanding of just why the world of Warcraft needs so many heroes.

Playing through the death knight's starting area also exposes you to some interesting Warcraft lore, and doing so is recommended even if you have no intention of playing the new class beyond that point. It's only fair to warn you that death knights can be tough to put down, though; not only are they very powerful and fun to play, but they also start at level 55, they get a free epic mount, and they're fully decked out with great-looking blue (rare) gear by the time they leave their starter area at level 58 or so. It's unfortunate that you need to gain another 10 levels playing through Burning Crusade content before you can accept any quests in Northrend, but the death knight is such a powerful class with so little downtime that you can get through it relatively quickly. Players sticking with their nonhero classes will almost certainly feel compelled to tell you that your new death knight is overpowered at some point, and they're right, at least as far as leveling and questing is concerned. The death knight is also one of the more complex classes to play well, and unfortunately it's too soon to comment on how they fare in player-versus-player scenarios.

When your death knight or one of your preexisting characters reaches level 68, you need to get yourself to Northrend as soon as possible. Not only is the new continent epic in scale and more impressive-looking than any of the game's previous locales, but it's also bursting with hundreds of quests to complete for the numerous new races and factions that you'll encounter there. To give you some idea of just how many quests there are in Wrath of the Lich King, you need to complete at least 875 of them to unlock the questing achievements scattered across all eight of Northrend's major regions. There's so much new content that you could conceivably level two characters from 70 to 80 without having to repeat many of the same quests, though some of them are so good that you'll want to.

New in Wrath of the Lich King are numerous quests in which you complete objectives at the controls of a mount or vehicle. Quest-specific rides include dragons, mammoths, airplanes, bipedal mechs, and even a giant. The controls are slightly different for all of them, but they're never complicated and they're always clearly displayed onscreen as soon as you climb aboard. Another gameplay mechanic that's used frequently in new quests is phasing, which lets you see areas of the world differently from other players. Similar to how the world appears in gray scale when you die and have to run back to your corpse as a ghost, phasing quests often apply some kind of visual filter to the environment and let you interact with NPCs in different ways. Wrath of the Lich King takes this idea to a whole new level. By completing certain quests, you trigger dramatic changes to the environment that are the same for all players who have completed said quest, but for players who have yet to do so, the world still exists in its original form. Whether this is achieved though technical wizardry or just straight-up magic is unclear, but its integration is seamless, and it's incredibly satisfying to feel like your actions are having a significant impact on the world around you.
However, not every quest in Wrath of the Lich King is so fulfilling, mostly because the vast majority of them simply aren't challenging. When accepting a quest, you rarely have to question if you can complete it; you just need to figure out when you can fit it into your jam-packed hero schedule. There are quests for which you need to group up with other players, but even these aren't nearly as challenging as similar offerings in the pre-Lich King game. It's no secret that Blizzard wants to make content that's accessible to the vast majority of WOW players rather than just to those in elite raiding guilds, and in this regard the new expansion is undoubtedly a success, but at times the new content feels a little too easy. There are a dozen new dungeons designed for five players, and every one of them can be beaten in about an hour by a reasonably good group. To get your hands on the best loot dropped by bosses, though, you need to play through those same dungeons on the heroic difficulty setting, which makes all of the enemies tougher and is available only to players who have hit the new level-80 cap.

In addition to the heroic-difficulty dungeons, there are a handful of larger "raid" dungeons for groups of 10 and 25 players that are designed to cater to more experienced players. The challenge ramps up considerably in raid dungeons, and if that's still too easy for you, there are achievements you can unlock by, for example, defeating bosses in less than three minutes, with a small group, or without letting a single player die. Some of the achievements in Wrath of the Lich King come with tangible rewards such as titles and tabards, and a few of the most challenging ones earn you mounts that can't be obtained any other way. So if you're an elitist, don't worry, there are still plenty of opportunities for you to distinguish yourself from the crowd.

If you're more interested in player-versus-player encounters than in quests and dungeons, Wrath of the Lich King has you covered, too. There are a number of PVP-oriented quests scattered throughout the world for which you can earn experience, honor, and gold on a daily basis. There's also a new attack-and-defend battleground that incorporates siege weapons, and then there's the icing on the PVP cake: Wintergrasp. Large enough to support battles between hundreds of players simultaneously, Wintergrasp is a region that exists solely so that the Horde and Alliance can fight for control of a large fortress in a battle that rages for up to 40 minutes every three hours or so. The goal for the attackers is to knock down the walls of the fortress using siege weapons, get inside the keep, and activate a titan orb (read: large glowing ball) within the 40-minute time limit. The goal for the defending faction is to stop them. When enough players show up to make the battle worthwhile, it's arguably the most fun you can have in Wrath of the Lich King. Unlike traditional WOW battlegrounds, Wintergrasp is designed in such a way that even players who haven't reached level 80 yet can contribute, and if your faction is underrepresented on the battlefield, you'll automatically receive a buff that keeps things competitive.

Besides being a blast, there are plenty of incentives for participating in the battle for Wintergrasp. The faction that controls the fort gains exclusive access to rare-item vendors and to a small one-boss raid dungeon. Furthermore, while your faction controls Wintergrasp, every dungeon boss in the expansion will drop Stone Keeper's Shards, a form of currency that can be used to purchase powerful items, in addition to their regular loot. A similar feature was introduced in the Burning Crusade expansion, but the associated PVP goal wasn't as fun, the shards dropped in only a handful of dungeons, and the items that you could exchange the shards for weren't nearly as desirable.
Among the usual assortment of rare items, epic items, and exclusive PVP mounts that you can exchange your shards for, you'll find a number of items that look identical to armor and weapons that you might have used in 2004 but that are actually very different. These "heirloom" items are unique not only because they bind to your account rather than to an individual character, allowing them to passed around, but also because they can be used at any level and their stats scale appropriately. Heirlooms are a great idea for anyone who has a high-level character and is looking to start a new one, though it's unfortunate that they look so dated and generic alongside newer items.

In fact, the look of most of the non-epic armor pieces and weapons in Wrath of the Lich King is disappointing. If you've spent any amount of time acquiring good gear in Burning Crusade, then you're probably heading into Northrend wielding a wonderfully ornate weapon or two and dressed to kill. That gear will likely last you for a few levels, but inevitably you'll have opportunities to upgrade it as you progress. Is that sword made from two pieces of stone held together with string really more powerful than your blade that looks like it belongs in the hand of a god, though? Yes it is. Armor items in Northrend have a similarly improvised feel, and to make matters worse, it's entirely possible for you to upgrade them several times en route to level 80 without ever getting an item that looks different or that isn't the exact same model with slightly different coloring.

The armor and weapons are an acquired taste at best, but there's no disputing the fact that their design is very much in keeping with the rugged nature of Northrend itself. The continent's harsh environments are inhabited by half-giant warriors, woolly mammoths, and plenty of other creatures whose appearances suggest that they're well-equipped to survive there. A few of the models are recycled and showing their age, but as always, the quality of the animation breathes life into them and makes their rudimentary geometry easy to ignore. Northrend's environments are more epic and detailed than any that have appeared in World of Warcraft previously, but it's the believability of the behavior of the characters and creatures that makes them really come to life. For example, bears have always featured in World of Warcraft, and they don't look any different now than they did four years ago. Nevertheless, it's only in Wrath of the Lich King that they've learned to fish for salmon and to be protective of cubs. Similarly, herds of animals can be fascinating to watch; males will fight each other and are the first to respond to any threat from players, whereas females and their young will flee at the slightest hint of danger.

Adding significantly to the appeal of even Northrend's most foreboding environments is an original soundtrack that, when appropriate, is every bit as grand as the scenery. Having an orchestra play alongside a male voice choir in the background while you ride on a fire-breathing dragon high above the snow-capped mountains of Dragonblight feels truly epic, and the rustic Celtic-sounding fiddle track that plays in the less fantastical Grizzly Hills region as you round up horses or hunt for bears is equally appropriate and even more impressive.

If you're in a position to enjoy what Wrath of the Lich King has to offer, then let's be honest, you're probably doing so already. The expansion's launch was successful enough that players on high-population servers had to wait for hours at a time to log on, and the most common complaints were simply that some quests were difficult to complete because so many players were trying to do them simultaneously. The queues are mostly a thing of the past, and now that things have settled down Northrend is an absolute joy to explore. If you're not level 68 yet, we suggest you double your efforts and hop on a boat or a zeppelin there as soon as possible.

System Requirements

OS: Windows XP / Windows Vista (with latest Service Packs)

Processor:
Minimum: Intel Pentium 4 1.3 GHz or AMD Athlon XP 1500+
Recommended: Dual-core processor, such as the Intel Pentium D or AMD Athlon 64 X2
Memory:
Minimum: 512 MB RAM (1GB for Vista users)
Recommended: 1 GB RAM (2 GB for Vista users)
Video:
Minimum: 3D graphics processor with Hardware Transform and Lighting with 32 MB VRAM Such as an ATI Radeon 7200 or NVIDIA GeForce 2 class card or better
Recommended: 3D graphics processor with Vertex and Pixel Shader capability with 128 MB VRAM Such as an ATI Radeon X1600 or NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT class card or better
Sound: DirectX-compatible sound card or motherboard sound capability

Red Alert 3 - Command & Conquer

2009-04-13T02:28:00.001+07:00

Uprising, the first expansion to last year's excellent RTS Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, is a curious beast. It's a download only, standalone, entirely single-player experience. That's right, we said entirely single-player experience.

Which is a strange choice from developer EA Los Angeles. The best thing about Red Alert 3 was the co-operative campaign - well, that's we we thought anyway. Perhaps the decision to provide four new single-player mini-campaigns and a vast single-player Challenge mode is an indication that we were wrong. RTS expansions exist to give fans more of what they liked from the games they're expanding upon. That there is no multiplayer in Uprising suggests that most people who bought Red Alert 3 played it on their own.

True or false, what we have here, for £15 from the EA Store, is an expansion that at times impresses by making you feel like an RTS god, then disappoints because it falls short of the high-quality spectacle that was the original, and feels, well, just a bit lonely.

Uprising picks up where RA3 finished. At first only the Soviet mini-campaign and the bonus dungeon crawl mini-campaign are available. The Soviet campaign begins with a trademark tongue-in-cheek live action clip (Uprising brings half-an-hour's worth of new footage). The Allies, having dealt with the Soviets and the
Empire of the Rising Sun, and with Tim Curry's Premier Cherdenko safely behind bars, are wallowing in the glory of their victory. European Union president Rupert Thornley, played by Malcolm McDowell, is addressing the media, downplaying rumours of a Soviet resistance force. It exists of course, as we soon discover, and we're in charge of making it work on the battlefield, with a little help from the returning Intelligence Officer Dasha Fedorovich, who's still showing just enough boob to distract us from the Days of our Lives acting.
Uprising is hard, as the very first mission, one that unlocks the Allied Nations and Empire of the Rising Sun campaigns, proves. With a small infantry force you're charged with rescuing captured scientists integral to the resistance effort. It's a tough challenge, even on the easy difficulty setting, and sets the tone for the rest of the game, but it is doable. This isn't a criticism; it's more of a warning (although why the Allied Nations and Empire mini-campaigns need to be unlocked at all is beyond us). RTS expansions usually begin with nary a care for newcomers. They're for players who've honed their skills on the main game. Despite the fact that Uprising will work without having the original, it still follows this RTS expansion convention religiously.

One of the main criticisms of RA3 from hardcore players was that the shoddy AI made things too easy. The AI is similarly silly in Uprising, but you'll still need decent skills to get your £15's worth. Free from the need to balance units, there are moments experienced in the three main faction campaigns that seem designed to test your patience to its limits. The game will at times just open up a new front and fire waves of enemy units at you. You'll die often, quick reload, then try again. Some fans will love the challenge. Others will find it unfair. That's just the way it is.

More of a problem, however, is the lack of co-op. That the game's new maps, all playable in a single-player only Skirmish mode, can't be taken into online multiplayer is something that's just about forgiveable, but why not make the mini-campaigns playable co-operatively? It would have added excitement to what's an at times underwhelming set of missions. Bah.
The live action footage suffers from the same below-par feel. Uprising's eclectic cast of actors, which includes the aforementioned Malcolm McDowell, Holly Valance and ex-wrestling star Ric Flair, do a decent job, but there's something lacking here, something RA3 had. Maybe it's that they don't feel as over-the-top and downright silly as they did in the original, or don't seem to have had as much money spent on them. Whatever it is, they don't captivate as they did in RA3.

It's through the mini-campaigns that you're introduced to the 12 new units Uprising brings to the RA mix. Each faction gets four. Highlights include the Allied Nations' Cryo Legionnaire, a Mr. Freeze-esque infantry unit that, predictably, freezes everything in place; the Empire's Giga-Fortress, a giant robot head that fires an insane amount of missiles, and the Soviet Desolator, an infantry unit that melts enemy infantry with toxic green goo. Every unit fits the RA universe perfectly. They're unmistakeable on the battlefield and clearly designed by a team having a hell of a lot of fun. And as far as RTS expansions go, 12 new units is a generous helping. It doesn't quite make up for the lack of a completely new faction (the Dawn of War expansions showed how to do it), but fans will enjoy getting to grips with them nonetheless.

Where Uprising shines is in the fourth mini-campaign, a three mission dungeon crawl (a first for the series) that feels more Diablo than it does RA. In it you assume control of a single unit: the Empire's commando Yuriko Omega, as she escapes from various prisons at the beckoning of her sister. Remember Testsuo from classic anime Akira? Imagine him wearing a Japanese schoolgirl uniform while tearing up Neo-Tokyo and you're halfway there.

Yuriko's psychic powers allow her to do a devastating infantry popping area of effect attack, force enemy infantry to fight on her side via mind control, shield herself from enemy fire and finally (and best of all) lift vehicles and bits of the environment such as exploding barrels (what else?) and send them slamming into whatever you want. Class.
Yuriko's three missions aren't hard. In fact you might call them easy. But difficulty isn't the point here. The primal thrill of devastating everything that gets in your way makes up for the lack of challenge. You're having so much fun sending enemy tanks smashing into each other that the repetitiveness of it all doesn't bore. It's designed to be a diversion; an amusing aside, and nothing more.

Which sums Uprising up, really. Without any multiplayer at all there's no reason to replay any of the mini-campaigns once they're completed. The Commander's Challenge mode, which pits players against AI commanders in 50 unique one-off scenarios, will hold your attention more stringently, but again, once you're done with, that's it. Uprising's over.

Uprising's decent value at £15, but without any multiplayer features it lacks longevity and feels at odds with the original game. It introduces some nice new units and successfully makes a move into the dungeon crawl arena, but ultimately it's an underwhelming experience that never hits the spectacular heights of the game that fathered it.

Minimum System Requirements:

* OS – Windows XP / Vista (32-Bit)
* Processor – XP: 2.0 GHz (Intel Pentium 4; AMD Athlon 2000+; Multiple Cores) / Vista: 2.2 GHz (Intel Pentium 4/AMD Athlon 2200+/Multiple Cores)
* Memory – XP/Vista: 1 GB
* Hard Drive – Media: 6.0 GB / EA Link: 12.0 GB
* DVD Drive - 8 SPEED
* Video Card – NVIDIA GeForce 6800, ATI Radeon X1800 or higher end DirectX 9.0c compatible gfx card
* Sound Card - DirectX 9.0c compatible (Creative Sound Blaster Audigy cards require a Intel P4 2.6 GHz or similar under Vista, Yamaha Xwave-512 not supported)
* Online Multiplayer – 512 Kbps or faster; 2-8 Players
* Input - Keyboard, Mouse
* Optional – VoIP Headset

Tom Clancy's H.A.W.K

2009-04-13T01:37:00.002+07:00

The first time we heard of Tom Clancy’s HAWX we thought it was a professional spitting game, one that’d probably have some sort of pseudo-realistic combat angle mug-fistedly forced in there. Judging by the name it was either that or a game about the robotic harem of an acclaimed military fiction author.

Turns out that we were wrong; it’s an arcade flight simulation game. The titular HAWX isn’t an onomatopoeic device about gobbing loogies; it stands for High Altitude Warfare eXperimental, which is the most spurious and unnecessary use of the letter X in an acronym that we’ve seen since BMX XXX.

The setting for HAWX is the usual Tom Clancy schtick then, set in the not-too-distant future and centralised around a string of possible combat technologies that could theoretically change the face of warfare as we know it. It’s the same basic formula which both Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon were built around, to name a few.

HAWX is more than just similar to those games on a general level too – it actually ties in closely with the GRAW universe, with one of the first levels in the games being an interesting crossover between the two acronyms. The tutorial mission for the game sees the HAWX squadron down in Mexico supporting the Ghosts.

If you’re looking for lots of missions like that though, where you get to explore Ubisoft’s newly announced consistency in the Tom Clancy universe, then you might be a little dismayed. At the end of the first mission you’re told that the HAWX squadron is being disbanded and it’s at this point that you and your wingmen decide to become mercenaries.

You promptly sign up with Artemis Security who, according to the awfully lip-synced cutscene, are allowed to operate as a private army for the world. Thus begins your life of glamour; flying planes around exotic locales, earning more cash than you can count and introducing air hostesses to the, erm, cockpit.

That plan goes a little awry when war breaks out between the mercenaries and the Government though, with you trapped in the middle and having to decide which side you want to be on.

Well, not ‘decide’ as such – more just be lead on to the next level after a brief cutscene. HAWX demonstrates the exact same disregard for player morality that we’d find ourselves complaining about if the story was at all important to HAWX. So, let’s be clear; the story isn’t important to HAWX at all and it doesn’t matter how big the name of the author is on the package, it will never be enough for us to take the plot seriously.
That’s fine though, because we’re not really bothered by the plot. The fact that the characters are all paper thin and the cutscenes shorter than a squashed ant doesn’t matter, because HAWX is more about wish fulfilment than anything else. It’s like a sports game in that all you really want from it is the chance to do some crazy stunts and feel like a hero.

Despite these relatively simple requirements, HAWX is a lot more complex than it needs to be a lot of the time. The HUD is cluttered with more windows than a glass refinery and the default mouse and keyboard control system is formidably laid out. Really; it scares us how many buttons there are. We're sure fingers weren't meant to stretch that far.

As a flight combat simulator that sits firmly in the arcade genre, HAWX could have got away with being a far more simple and streamlined game than it actually is. Not that that's a complaint though; it's rather gratifying to see a game aspire to be more than it needs to be.

All the game really needed was a decent camera and a lot of explosions, but instead Ubisoft has built a role-playing mechanic into the game, as well as series of interesting UI tweaks.

The RPG side of things is achievement based and built into the missions directly. Taking out targets earns you a small XP boost, with more threatening opponents being worth more experience than ground troops. Completing each mission objective earns you a medium amount of XP too, while fulfilling certain conditions is worth a lot more.

Some achievements even have unlockables directly linked with them too. Downing your millionth enemy with a JSA missile will get you a new medal, XP boost and a new weapon layout if you want it. As we said before the story is dry and drably put together, with the most awfully pseudo-futuristic cutscenes ever, so the process of upgrading your character soon becomes the most important thing, especially since your current rank is made visible in multiplayer and co-op matches. You can even earn XP in online matches too, which is a nice way to give the multiplayer game an aim for those who don't like the singleplayer.

Who cares about Artemis PMC when your next bombing run might bag you a new plane to impress your friends with? Nobody, that's who!
Speaking of planes and weapons, there’s a huge variety of both on offer in HAWX, though you only start off with the bare minimum. As you progress through the game you steadily unlock more and more wings and different types of weapons - air-to-air missiles, and bombs with larger payloads, for instance.

There are tankbusters, heat-seekers, drop-bombs, heat flares and under-wing miniguns that seem intended more for ambience than practicality. Actually bring an enemy down with bullets is both difficult and pointless when you’ve got an illogical amount of missiles in store. Playing on Normal difficulty you seem to start each mission with at least 300 missiles, somehow.

Not that the game is easy though as, even on Normal, you’re often heavily outnumbered and forced to take on vastly superior foes. Some of the levels, particularly the Air Force One level, are almost masochistic at points and the fact that you can’t save your progress mid-mission doesn’t help things. The reliance on far-spaced check points means that the game can often become infuriatingly repetitive.

Still, if you find yourself having problems with specific missions or areas then you can always take your flights and fight into the online arena. HAWX has got both a sturdy multiplayer mode and a co-op mode. It’s the latter that shines out, if you ask us as, although there’s nothing wrong with the rudimentary control you can exercise over your CPU allies, chatting over voice com to a human wingman is much more satisfying. And geeky.

Minimum Configuration:

CPU: Intel Pentium 4 2.0 GHz/ AMD Athlon XP 2000+ or higher
Operating System: Windows® XP (with Service Pack 3) or Windows Vista® (with Service Pack 1)
RAM: 1 GB Windows XP / 2 GB Windows Vista
DVD-ROM: DVD-ROM speed 4x, dual-layer drive
Drive Space: 1.5 GB

Recommended & Preferred Configuration:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 6320 / AMD Athlon X2 4000+ or higher
Operating System: Windows® XP (with Service Pack 3) or Windows Vista® (with Service Pack 1)
RAM: 2 GB
DVD-ROM: DVD-ROM speed 4x, dual-layer drive
Drive Space: 1.5 GB
Graphics Card: 256 MB DirectX® 10.0– compliant video card or DirectX 9.0 – compliant Graphics Card: 256 MB DirectX ® 10.0-compliant video card or DirectX 9.0 - compliant
card with Shader Model 3.0 or higher (see supported list) card with Shader Model 3.0 or higher (see supported list)
Sound Card: DirectX 9.0 – compliant sound card
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0 or 10.0 libraries (included on disc)
Peripherals: Xbox 360® Controller for Windows Peripherals: Xbox 360 Controller for Windows
®

Need for Speed Undercover

2009-04-11T18:00:00.001+07:00

For the most part, the reaction to the last few Need for Speed games was the same: "Why aren't they more like Need for Speed Most Wanted?" "Where are the cheesy cutscenes and the over-the-top cop chases?" It seems as if EA heard those cries, because for better or for worse, Need for Speed Undercover feels like Most Wanted.

In Undercover you play the role of...wait for it...an undercover officer. Along with agent Chase Linh, played by the attractive Maggie Q, your job is to take down a group of street racers that have somehow become involved in an international smuggling ring. The story is told via campy cutscenes that fail to capture the charm of Most Wanted thanks to uninteresting characters and a predictable plot. Having a story provides incentive to make it through race after race, but the whole "this is cheesy so it's cool" thing feels kind of forced this time around.

Like many other Need for Speed games, all of your racing will take place on the streets of a fictitious open-world city--here it's the Tri-City Bay area. You'll start with a lousy vehicle, but it won't be long before you're able to snag a pink slip to a nicer ride. As you progress you'll earn cash, which can be used to unlock (50+) new vehicles from manufacturers such as Nissan, Dodge, Cadillac, Ford, Porsche, Lamborghini, BMW, Aston Martin, Mitsubishi, and more. If you're into tuning individual aspects of your ride or purchasing individual parts you can do that, but if you're not into tinkering you can purchase an upgrade package and be on your way.

Not only will you earn money for winning an event, you'll earn driving points for dominating it--basically beating it really, really bad. You can power up a number of your driving attributes, but they don't have a noticeable effect on how your car handles. As long as you drive fast you'll probably dominate, but there are occasional races where you'll totally obliterate the time needed to dominate an event, but you'll still lose to the CPU. The game also encourages you to drive with style and drift, draft, and drive really close to other cars, but other than increasing your nitrous there's little to gain from doing so. That said, the new J-Turn mechanic, which lets you bust quick 180s, is invaluable when chasing down rivals or evading the cops. You'll use it because it's useful, though, not because it gets you heroic driving points.
The cops are back in full effect in Undercover, and for the most part, their return is welcome. The challenges in which you must ram and take out a certain number of police cars are great fun, as are the challenges where you must cause a certain monetary sum of damage. Of course, you don't always have to ram cars to take them down; you can also run into log trucks, electrical towers, billboards, and more to leave a little surprise for your pursuers. It's too bad that some odd quirks hamper the cop chases. The environmental hazards that you can unleash certainly look cool and are effective, but quite often you won't see any police cars get hit by the objects, yet when the cutscene ends the cars are trashed. Sometimes you won't have to do anything at all to evade police--the game says "go" and you stay still and nobody finds you. Cops are capable of laying down spikes, but you can go the entire game without them ever doing so. The biggest problem, however, is that the cops don't do much other than bang on the side of your car and yell at you, so if you last long enough they sort of fade away on their own. This makes the chases less challenging than they could have been and also makes them feel artificial, like you're just fulfilling some sort of time requirement until the game decides you've done well enough to escape.

Undercover isn't just about messing with the Man. There are events where you need to maintain a lead for a specific amount of time or get a certain distance ahead of your opponent. Sometimes you'll have to shake the cops while trying to keep a stolen ride in pristine condition, and there are checkpoint races and circuit races as well. There's not a whole lot that's original here and the races are generally extremely easy--you might not see another car for an entire race once you've cleared the starting line. They're difficult on occasion, but this is usually because of the occasionally choppy frame rate, which makes the otherwise great-handling vehicles a chore to drive when it rears its head. What's odd is that there's really no obvious reason for the game's sometimes poor frame rate; the city doesn't look much different than those in Carbon and Most Wanted.

That said, the game does do a few things very well. The online cops and robbers mode, where the robber tries to pick up money and take it to a drop-off point while another person plays the cop and tries to ram them, is quite a bit of fun. But mostly what the game gets right is its pacing. The races are short--sometimes as short as 20 seconds, and almost never longer than five minutes. Another cool thing the game does is it lets you instantly jump to the closest race by pressing down on the D pad. If you want to find a specific event you can press up and you're taken to a GPS map, where you can instantly go to the race of your choice. It'll save you a lot of needless backtracking, and combined with the short races, makes sure that Undercover never gets boring.

If you're one of the many people who loved Need for Speed Most Wanted, flaws and all, you'll find a lot to like in Undercover. It's not very original, but there's no denying that it's just good fun to run from the cops and wreak havoc on a city in the process.

Here are the NFS Undercover Minimum PC requirements:

* Windows XP/VISTA Operating system with latest service pack installed
* Processer: Intel Pentium 4 (or equivalent) CPU running at 2.8 GHz or higher (3.0GHz for Windows Vista PC)
* Minimum amount of RAM needed : 1GB RAM
* Graphics Card : Geforce 6500, Radeon 9500 or better DirectX compliant video card with Pixel shader 2.0 or above (AGP and PCIe only) using a supported chipset
* DirectX compatible sound card
* 8X or faster DVD Drive
* 2.0 GB of HD space required to install game
* DirectX Nov 2007 edition (included in Game Disc)

Dawn of War II

2009-04-11T16:28:00.001+07:00

Build your base, order your troops, and command them in the field of battle. It's been the standard operating procedure of the real-time strategy genre since Dune II cemented the foundation. Now with Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, Relic has smashed apart a major pillar of the RTS formula by eliminating base building. In its place have been fused elements of role-playing games, whereby the squads you control in each of the campaign carry over mission to mission, grow, and evolve according to what gear you decide to equip and what skills you decide to improve. The notions of persistence introduced in the expansions to the original Dawn of War have been expanded, the cover system and destructible environments from Company of Heroes imported, and the capture point mechanic for resource acquisition built in and simplified for the skirmish mode. It's a game that, like Massive Entertainment's World in Conflict, slices the strings that bind genre entries to tradition, and in the process emerges as something as strange as it is familiar, that sometimes stumbles in its newness but still manages to find its footing.

The game is divided into a campaign mode and skirmish mode, all of which feature multiplayer. In the campaign, Relic gives you the option to play cooperatively, with those participating working together to vanquish the enemy, though it's only the host who reaps the persistent rewards. In the skirmish mode, you
can participate in 1 versus 1 or 3 versus 3 matches online with others or against AI-controlled opponents of several difficulty levels using Tyranid, Eldar, Space Marine, or Ork armies.

In the campaign, you'll play strictly as the Space Marines, and though both modes illustrate Relic's move to eliminate base building, the campaign is the more obvious example. Instead of constructing a linear, mission-to-mission campaign, Relic has opted for an reworked version of the persistent campaign map that showed up in the Dark Crusade and Soulstorm expansions to Dawn of War. This time there's a far greater narrative element that's woven into the action. As a newly promoted Force Commander for the Blood Ravens chapter of the Space Marines (genetically altered superhuman soldiers) you'll battle against the Eldar, Orks, and menacing Tyranids to save your home planets.

Aboard the starship Armageddon you'll only ever amass six squads throughout the campaign, and you'll never build a unit-producing structure; you only capture relays and buildings to reinforce squads and net other bonuses. It's up to you which four squads to bring into any mission, as well as how to equip them. Unlike real-time strategy games past where each unit has a specific function with a few ways to differentiate through research upgrades, Dawn of War II lets you gradually accrue an assortment of wargear throughout the campaign that can dramatically affect functionality. Collected as a reward for completing a mission or dropped from enemies killed in the field, wargear consists of new armor sets, weaponry like chainswords, power axes, and heavy bolters, as well as a large number of accessories like melta bombs to smash up vehicles or Terminator armor-mounted missile racks for annihilating structures.

In between every mission you can swap out bits of equipment, so if you're tired of your Force Commander charging into fights with a power sword, slap on that set of Terminator armor from your inventory. Now your armor is boosted and you can crush the cover the enemy is using just by walking through it. Equip the fancy teleporter unit you just picked up from the last mission and drop in that Thunder Hammer and Storm Shield and now you're a melee powerhouse capable of blinking directly into entrenched enemy positions, crushing a few faces, then blinking right back out to safety, ideally before the orbital strike you just called down using an equipped beacon accessory purges the area of the living.

Contributing to the versatility of each squad is not only the wargear and accessories but individual abilities, something that can expanded upon by investing points as squads level up. By killing enemies in missions, completing assignments, capturing structures, and recycling unwanted equipment experience points are gained. Upon leveling up, skill points are allocated to that unit to be distributed however you see fit, and with the units' progress capped at level 20, you can't max every skill bar. If you don't care about your Dreadnought's ranged abilities, then you can skip adding points to the ranged skill bar and focus on melee. As points are added into the skill bars new abilities get unlocked as the overall category is strengthened, similar to Mass Effect's system, meaning there'll be abilities you never see on your first time through. In this way, Relic makes multiple playthroughs more worthwhile, even after you know the story.
This kind of fully-integrated equipment swapping and skill set management is pretty strange for the real-time strategy genre; it's something to be expected more from titles like Diablo or Titan Quest. Yet here it works really well, making for a steady stream of rewards and establishing a connection with your individual units more effectively than the limp dialogue of the story sequences. Instead of thinking of squad leader Tarkus as the respected elder of the bunch, you're more likely to think of him as the guy who's carrying your med kits, melta bombs, and frag grenades. Unless you're a sucker for anything Warhammer 40K, this narrative and the way it's presented likely isn't going to draw you in, shifting the focus to how the game plays, which in this case happens to be really well.

From your starship you'll float between three planets, selecting missions of critical narrative importance or side-missions. It's a flexible system, allowing for wins and losses, and in some cases, should all your squads die, closing off a mission for good. If successful, each mission provides a reward, and after each performance you're rated on the number of enemies you wiped out, how many of your squads survived without requiring a revive, and how quickly your tasks were completed. Even on the longer missions, an outing rarely lasts longer than 15 minutes unless you're being extra careful or have the difficulty cranked up above the default level (which I recommend doing), and during that time you'll dig into some excellent tactical gameplay.

For instance, should you toss a grenade to blow apart enemy cover or jump in your assault troops to land on enemy heads as you pick apart those who get tossed around with sniper shots? Or maybe sneak in your scout troop and throw a satchel charge at that tower the enemy garrisoned to blast it to bits before charging in your Dreadnought walker while your heavy bolter lays down suppressing fire? Making these kinds of decisions and the number of options given to players for implementing a range of battle plans helps to keep things interesting as the campaign progresses.

While the missions directly related to the story are strong, as some highlight the viciousness of the struggle between the fiction's races and the action proves to be more dynamic, you may grow weary of the side-missions' similar goals. This won't be an issue early on, but as you continue to kill what seems to be the same boss time after time, or defend captured foundries and shrines day after day in the campaign, the content may seem to get a little stale. What's refreshing is that there is any mission variety at all, and each outing isn't just "kill the enemy base" intermixed with "solo commando infiltration" missions. Since each mission tends to be short, you're never stuck for hours slogging away at enemy defenses like you may have experienced in the campaign for Gas Powered Games' Supreme Commander, a title that reveled in its complexity and economic management. In Dawn of War II, you're never going to have huge armies or have a hard time keeping track of resources. It's all about small groups of units tackling other small groups, utilizing each group's versatility according to what the situation demands, and having the freedom to choose where you want to fight. It's also a system that, because it allows for losses, forces the player to make calculated sacrifices when determining where to strike next, incorporating decisions about which rewards are most valuable, and the overall worth of each territory when faced with time-sensitive assaults on multiple fronts.

With multiple difficulty levels and the ability to effectively "grind" optional missions for better gear before entering into the final battle, the campaign offers quite a bit of gameplay hours, and should help players get acquainted with how at least the Space Marines play before testing out the skirmish mode. In it, the three other factions are opened up to you, including the Tyranids for the first time in the franchise. Depending on which style of play you prefer, either swarming with the Tyranid hormagaunt melee units or laying down destructive arcs of fire with the Eldar's array of anti-vehicle and anti-infantry mobile weapons platforms, you should be able to find a style to your liking.
Add to that three selectable heroes for each army, each with individual skills and the ability to level up and be equipped with performance enhancing items, and there's quite a bit to learn here. Aside from the more powerful heroes, many of the regular units can be upgraded in a number of ways as well, so it'd be best to test yourself out against the easy AI first before heading online to figure out what options are available. In skirmishes you do have one base structure, but that's pretty much it and it exists right from a match's beginning. A few of the units can erect defensive or reinforcement structures of their own, but the majority of your success in battle is being able to quickly move out into maps and capture resource points to fuel unit production. It's a system that encourages combat and makes turtling, the process of building up base defenses in order to tech up and raise an army, essentially impossible, so that even within a minute or two of a match starting you can expect to be in combat. And with the low population cap and smaller number of unit groups moving around, it makes every troop on the field that much more valuable.

Of the seven maps included with the game, three 1 v 1 and four 3 v 3, the overall layouts are smaller compared to titles past and allow for fluid battles. While a few maps do feature structures and pathways players must follow, rarely are there hard and fast choke points. If there is a bottleneck, there are usually two or three other avenues to access the area, making it difficult to try and lock down any section of the map without giving up something else, meaning games are in an almost constant state of flux with regards to control point ownership. Anyone who's played the original or particularly Company of Heroes is going to be familiar with the setup here, especially considering the victory point mechanic is pretty much the same thing from the latter.

Destructible terrain is another contributing factor to the seesaw nature of battles, as buildings can be knocked to the ground, cover positions flattened and even larger walls and structures broken to pieces by explosives or run through with vehicles. You may be able to set up a decent defensive position for a little while, but it's only a matter of time before a grenade eliminates whatever you're hiding behind or your opponent pulls off a flanking maneuver, keeping you on your toes, forcing you to pay attention to exactly how the battlefield is changing, and ensuring there's always a conflict raging somewhere on the map.

The ferocity of the fighting is, like the original, emphasized by a gratuitous amount of blood and gore. Units hit with hammers will sometimes sloppily shatter into bits, explosions send troops flying across the map, and there's the occasional special animation as a unit kills another with a grisly, multi-hit flourish. The level of detail heaped onto each character model is impressive, as are the animations, such as the wild jet-jumping spirals of the Ork stormboyz and the slow, inevitable advance of hulking Tyranid carnifexes. As might be expected there's a lot of personality packed into the unit acknowledgements as well that helps to set them apart and, in the case of the Orks, achieve a degree of humor. Like with Company of Heroes, the sound effects built into the game are top-notch, heightening the sense of conflict as heavy bolter fire pounds amidst booming explosions and crumbling structures.

A side from the derivative talking head narrative delivery, the game's presentation values are strong. From the slick interface menu that's presented as the Armageddon orbits planets to the story cinematics and easy-to-manage in-game interface that lets you know what's going on within the planetary system, everything's set up well, giving you access to all the information you need. The game even auto-assigns hotkeys to your units as they're pumped out of the production facility during skirmishes, further streamlining management. As campaigns progress you're scored on your overall performance, again encouraging multiple playthroughs for higher scores. Leaderboards, race-specific statistics, and a custom army painter are also added into the game, providing a sense of permanence with online play and, with the painter, the option for Warhammer 40K fans to imbue armies with a little individual flair.
We did notice a few glitches here and there on our way through, including enemies shooting through solid structures and some not appearing to respond to incoming fire, but they seemed to be relatively minor. For online play Dawn of War II uses Microsoft's Games for Windows - Live, meaning you'll have to sign up for a free account if you haven't already. Also, if I'm not mistaken on this, this game is the first PC-only title to feature achievement points. If you don't know what those are, don't worry - they're not important.

Minimum Requirements

* Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista SP1
* P4 3.2 GHz (single core) or any Dual Core processor
* 1 GB RAM (XP), 1.5 GB RAM (Vista)
* A 128MB Video Card (Shader Model 3) - Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT / ATI X1600, or equivalent
* 5.5 GB of Hard Drive space

Recommended

* Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista SP1
* AMD Athlon 64×2 4400+ or any Intel Core 2 Duo
* 2 GB RAM (XP and Vista)
* A 256MB Video Card (Shader Model 3) - Nvidia GeForce 7800 GT / ATI X1900, or equivalent
* 5.5 GB of Hard Drive spac
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