The first thing you should understand about the new Castlevania is that it's possibly not the Castlevania you were expecting. While Konami's latest offers plenty of Gothic crenulations and whip-centric combat as yet another Belmont faces off against a wave of Halloween nasties, it sidesteps, to a large extent, the architectural complexity and wily level design that has helped define the series.
You'll still be unlocking new skills to open what amounts to a variety of different doors, engaging in a little light puzzling, and picking your way through environments that grow gradually more elaborate as you head deeper into the adventure. But MercurySteam, the series' current custodian, has shifted the emphasis away from the detailed non-linear exploration of a single location in order to embrace an action adventure with a broader, but more straightforward, approach. The second thing you should understand, however, is that this isn't necessarily as bad as you might fear. Stripping away much of the intricacy – the levels folded in on themselves, the poring over the mini-map as you hunt for promising gaps – sounds like heresy, but it feels, more often than not, like smart pragmatism. This is a series that has always struggled whenever it has headed away from a 2D plane, and while you can curse the developers for lacking the ambition to truly get the old formula to work in three dimensions, you can't really fault the adventure they've offered up instead. As reboots go, this is smart, pretty, and generous. Fans will understandably be miffed at the absence of things like the classic soundtrack and the old plotlines – Lords of Shadows is determined to start its own story from scratch, with Gabriel on a quest to bring his dead wife back to life – but there are plenty of things to help distract them from their misery.
Blade Kitten comes to us from Krome Studios, the talented developer behind Ty the TasmanianTiger. It’s a wonderful side-scrolling action game starring a half human, half feline bounty hunter named Kit Ballard, who uses her floating sword and death defying acrobatics to defeat a variety of evildoers. Controls take some getting used to, but once you conquer the learning curve, you’ll have a blast chopping up bad guys and snagging loot.
As soon as the first level began, our first thought was “hey, this reminds us of Shadow Complex”, which is definitely a good thing. Each of the game’s massive levels sport plenty of secret rooms to find that contain HEX, Blade Kitten’s currency, so there’s a fun incentive to traveling off the beaten path, especially when it involves grabbing cash to purchase tons of items and weapons.
We’re also big fans of the combat. Kit doesn’t have a wide variety of maneuvers, but her move list gets the job done, as we disposed of enemies with her floating blade and destroyed a few of them at once with a ground pound. Not only are these attacks simple to pull off, but beaten enemies also drop HEX.There’s also a satisfying mix of platforming, as Kit scales/climbs up walls and double jumps to reach higher areas. Krome also did a nice job placing obstructions along the way, such as lasers, fire and other impediments.
You can't avoid comparing PlayStation Move's bowling motion controls to Nintendo Wii's. And, basically, they're the same: you hold a controller in your hand and you swing your arm. But what Wii Sports Bowling stripped the sport down to its basics; you threw the ball down the lane and tried to knock over all the pins. High Velocity Bowling for PlayStation Move, however, brings real-life variables into play, things like oil patterns on the lane and the quality of your bowling ball, in an attempt to create a more challenging, well-rounded gaming experience. Unfortunately, if you're looking for a fun, simple, pick-up-and-play bowling match, you'll find yourself frustrated by HVB's counter-intuitive controls. The first thing I noticed was how difficult it is to use the Move controller to navigate through menus; the loose feel makes it too easy to skip past items I want to select. The game shouldn't require that much finesse to simply set up a match, but it does. Once you do start playing, you'll discover that you aren't simply just bowling; instead, you take control of a character with specific attributes and limitations. To be honest, this completely put me off the game at first. Why wasn't I able to throw the ball the same way from one bowler to another? But it actually does create an interesting challenge for you to learn how to best use (and win) with a character in order to upgrade to the next bowler or the next higher-quality ball.You start off only able to choose below-average bowlers (using below-average quality bowling balls),
The dominant scent in the Lotus garage at the moment isn’t warm Bridgestones or posh deodorant – it’s defeat. Nine races into the 2010 season and the team have yet to score a point. By rights, their new driver, a Finn called Timo Stone, should be ready to throw in the towel. The fact that he isn’t says a lot about Codemasters refreshingly risqué take on F1.
A lazier licence-holder would simply have bolted some next-gen visuals onto a stock genre template, then swanned off to the bank. Codies, to their credit, have tried something far bolder. F1 2010’s career mode provides a fascinating glimpse of what it must be like to be a Lucas di Grassi or a Bruno Senna, a driver at the bottom of the pecking order, cursed with a car that is woefully uncompetitive.
For your first season (careers can span up to seven 19-race seasons) podium finishes are a preposterous pipedream. You are just battling to out-perform your teammate and to meet very modest team objectives. A twelfth place finish or qualifying on the seventh row can be enough to see your stock rise. Keep turning in solid performances and dealing with press questions, and eventually the offers from bigger teams should roll in.
Well, that’s the theory. Right now even meeting the demands of a minnow outfit is tricky. Whether this is down to difficulty levels, or inherent (realistic) car weaknesses, it’s hard to say, but demanding physics can’t be implicated.
When I first got my hands on Sid Meier's Civilization V, my life became a fight. I don't mean I was struggling to guide my civilisation to global renown, languidly picking my way up the research tree, sending little men to die in little wars. It wasn't that kind of fight. I mean I was fighting not to click the icon that led to the game that led without fail or mercy to me entering a kind of strategy fugue, which I'd emerge from, hungry and dehydrated, between three and seven hours later. To say this game is addictive is like saying that dry toast is edible. Of course it is, but that's not the whole picture.
If you haven't played a Civilization game before, they have the grandest of all strategy concepts. You're given control of an entire race of people circa 4000 BC, and from a humble beginning caving in the heads of local barbarians you engineer your nation's success over whole millennia, eventually reaching a day-after-tomorrow technological level with Nanotech and (new with Civ V) Giant Death Robots. One of the more curious parts of Civ is the different ways you can win it. The Domination victory has been simplified with Civ V to "simply" holding the capitals of all the other civilisations. Then there's the Science victory, whereby you assemble the various parts of a spaceship and launch it; the Diplomatic victory, where your peaceful ass is voted to be head of the United Nations; and the Cultural victory, which in Civ V means using culture points to complete five social policy branches and then the 'Utopia Project'.
It's only been a couple of months and 2010 is already shaping up to be one of the best ever for gamers. If your wallet hasn't already been emptied, Electronic Arts and development studio DICE have tossed yet another videogame on the pile that can't be missed. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 ups the intensity and visual prowess of its predecessor, while still delivering one of the most compelling multiplayer games around.
If you were to buy Bad Company 2 solely for the single-player campaign, you might come away a bit disappointed. That's not to say it's particularly bad in any way, but it doesn't feel impressive enough to stand on its own as a great experience. Once again, the multiplayer game is the star of the Battlefield show. The single-player campaign follows the story of a rag-tag bunch of soldiers as they traipse around the world on the hunt for a mythical weapon of mass destruction which absolutely must not fall into the hands of the Russians. It's a typical story of unlikely heroes as they attempt to save the world, and it will take you across a great variety of locations that range from frozen mountains to densely packed jungles. These gorgeous locales are the first thing that will spring out at you as you begin the fight. The vistas and skyboxes look nearly photorealistic in many situations, and DICE did a wonderful job blending the particle effects and game objects in the foreground with the more static backdrops. The result is a sense of depth that few videogame worlds can offer.
The plot is the same as usual. Dr. Robotnik has once again taken tons of cute, fuzzy creatures hostage and turned them into cute, not-so-fuzzy robot creatures. In order to combat this evil, Sonic and his pals must romp thorough a plethora of worlds and levels filled with platform madness. You can play as six different characters: Sonic (duh), Amy the Hedgehog (his girlfriend), Tails the mutant fox, Knuckles the Echidna, E-102 the Robot, and Big the Cat (my favorite). Instead of just playing the same game with a different character (a la Sonic & Knuckles), each character has specific levels and an unique view of the plot line. While a few of the levels for the different characters are remarkably similar, most are quite different. In order to understand everything that goes on plot-wise in the game, you have to finish it with each character. 
It was 1991 when we first met our super-fast hero. When Sonic the Hedgehog appeared on the Genesis, it instantly became a classic. Gamers couldn't get enough of the blazing framerate and well-designed levels. Since then, Sonic and his pals have graced countless games, from the typical (Sonic 3D Blast) to the bizarre (Sonic Spinball, Sonic R)Now, to herald the launch of the new Sega system, Sonic makes his debut on the Dreamcast. With a super-fast framerate and neat little extras, Sonic fans are sure to be pleased. Though good, Sonic Adventure is not Sonic's best game ever.
My hero DeathSpank hasn't changed much in the last few months. He's still running around dispensing Justice (with a capital J, obviously) to anyone that needs it. He remains the champion of the downtrodden. And if you've got some evil to vanquish, you can't do better than Mr. Spank. Unfortunately for him, the second trip to his world isn't a whole lot different from the first. As an action RPG, it's still super-streamlined, which might annoy some of the more hardcore fans of the genre. The combat is ultra-simple, with four buttons mapped to four different weapons and no spells to speak of. Other than how much HP you have left, the only meter that you need to pay attention to is the Justice meter which, when full, unleashes whatever special attack your weapon has under its sheath. It's not a very deep combat system. Only further serving to annoy hardcore players, many of the quests aren't very well laid-out. Getting a quest to go to the Town of Strumfuquel in order to buy some rum so Captain Taint will consider you a real pirate, thus allowing you to borrow his ship so you can go to the North Pole and fight Santa Claus, only to find out that you won't actually get to work on that assignment until several hours later, with no explanation that that's the case, is rather annoying. It doesn't help that at any given time you could have dozens of uncompleted quests with no real direction from any of them, leading to some parts of the game spent wandering around wondering what to do next. 
The King’s Bounty series has been around since before Sega made, and stopped making, consoles. In fact, the originals were playable on DOS. Since then, the series has undergone a variety of upgrades to make today’s demanding gaming audience happy. The latest installment in the series is King’s Bounty: Crossworlds, which isn’t so much a sequel as it is a large and comprehensive expansion. It features the original King’s Bounty: Armored Princess and then adds three additional “campaigns” on top, one of which is the original with some extra updates.
It is important to note that there are three versions of Crossworlds. The full version is a standalone game that contains the original Armored Princess plus all the new content. The second version contains just the new content but is still a standalone game. Finally, the third is more along the lines of a traditional expansion pack, therefore requiring you already have Armored Princess installed on your computer. Providing the varying options is great because for someone like me, a newcomer to the series, the full version feels right, whereas veterans who already own Armored Princess won’t be forced to purchase it all over again.
Crossworlds is a mix between RPG and turn-based strategy. In each campaign, you control a main character and guide him or her through a real-time world talking to NPCs, accepting quests, using gold to acquire troops to fight in your army, and upgrading your weapons, skills, and spells. But, once the battles begin, the RPG, point-and-click movement is replaced with a turn-based, hexagon-style strategy game.
When demonstrating this game to the press, Atlus repeatedly rejected the notion Shiren the Wanderer was a rogue-like; perhaps they didn’t want it to be associated with the genre’s reputation for unfair difficulty. What they should have emphasized is that Shiren the Wanderer tones down the worst of that genre’s abuses, resulting in a dungeon-crawling RPG that is usually fair (or at least not completely cruel) and quite fun.For those not familiar with this type of game, Shiren the Wanderer revolves around controlling a small party on a square grid, exploring dungeons that you only have partial maps for; it’s up to you to figure out the rest of the layout, defeat enemies, and find treasure. The best explanation I can offer is a mix of basic Tactical RPG play with ’loot and explore’ RPGs like Diablo, and even that isn’t really an exact match but it should give you the overall idea. Interestingly enough, the monsters in each dungeon aren’t your biggest concern but rather resource management is. The player must be sure to bring enough weapons for each party member (plus back-ups; weapons can be stolen or broken), food (so your party doesn’t go hungry), healing items, miscellaneous trouble-shooting items like magic scrolls, and more. The problem is that you only have so much inventory space, so you have to think ahead on what you’ll likely need for each trek. Loot in the dungeon can help to some extent, but since you’ll find random items each time you don’t know what to expect.
Set in a world that seems to be inspired by Japanese mythology, Shiren the Wanderer initially has you just seeking out treasure and slaying bandits, but the plot gets much wider in scope as you go. This is actually one of the game’s strong points; unlike some Rogue-likes, this title has a fairly developed and character-driven plot. The story is unapologetically Japanese, invoking mythological creatures like the tengu and using bits of traditional music in conjuction with the normal soundtrack, so it helps to have even a cursory grasp of the language and culture. On the other hand,
Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon is that type of game that would not have seen a release in the States 15 years ago. Yet thanks to companies like Atlus, NIS America and XSEED Games, a niche market of distinctly Japanese games has grown to a point where a game as unusual and dreamlike as Fragile can make it to Western shores.
The lead character is Seto, a young man who has been left alone by his recently deceased grandfather. With no reason to remain in his home, Seto departs with a cryptic message to head for a mysterious tower miles away (which players will recognize as Tokyo Tower). Shortly after venturing outside, he encounters the silver-haired Ren. Even though she quickly eludes him, Seto is compelled to find her again.During this pursuit he encounters a host of characters, each one as interesting as the next. The mischievous Crow is a pest a first, but soon develops a heart-felt friendship with Seto. The playful Sai is a bodiless soul who guides Seto through a good portion of the game. Even a portable computer that Seto carries on his back develops a touching relationship with him. Seto will need all the friends he can get in a world devoid of humans, through a journey to gather clues on why everyone has disappeared.Seto's world very much reminiscent of the History Channel series Life After People; man-made structures are everywhere, but there is no one to maintain them. Vegetation has grown, metal has rusted, and buildings are run down. This adds an effective level of otherworldliness even though the surroundings are recognizable.
Not really at the cutting edge… Being a turn based wargame, Struggle for Russia does not require top of the line 3D graphics. Complicated textures and lighting effects powerful enough to melt your graphics card or send your CPU back to its factory crying are not necessary for this type of games. As long as they are functional, informative and above all ‘working as intended’ they can be seen as good enough. However, the game’s visuals are dated, bulky but most importantly deviate from historical accuracy. First of all, the map overlay is lacking in detail as well as information with respect to terrain types. Two dimensional maps are fine as long as they are done right but in this case, things could definitely have been done better. Blending 2D generic colored hexes with pseudo-3D elements is easy on system specs but hard on the eyes. Wargames require from you to stare at a map almost constantly so it’s important to have a well detailed and informative one. Struggle for Russia’s digital battlefield succeeds partially on the informative part but fails miserably on the artistic aspect. 
The game focuses on Germany’s invasion of the USSR during World War 2. It’s possible to play with both sides of the conflict, although each campaign is more or less separate from one another. Thus, the Axis one consists of nine scenarios starting at June 22nd all the way through Operation Typhoon. Unfortunately it just ends there, not giving the player the possibility to continue through later stages of the Eastern Front campaign. As for the Soviet one, it begins with the winter offensive of 1941 at the gates of Moscow and ends at Berlin. A somewhat bizarre design decision that limits the game’s scope considerably. Although there are a few scenarios available such as the Axis summer offensive to Stalingrad, Kharkov as well as the obligatory Zitadelle, they feel disjointed from the whole affair. After all, they are just that, singled-out scenarios instead of being part of a campaign or two. Struggle for Russia seems to ‘struggle’ in terms of scale, scope and a non-dynamic campaign.
It's no secret that the Samurai Shodown series played a huge role in vaulting SNK up to the big boy fighting game table. And as popular as the original release was, it was the sequel that would set the standard by which all future titles of the franchise would be judged. Samurai Shodown III would mark the first time the series underwent any major changes, and while many of them certainly improved the playability of the game, they also ended up rubbing some longtime fans the wrong way.
Many of the same fighters from past games return in this third instalment, although there are a few new ones tossed into the mix. While it still retains the hack 'n' slash feel of past releases, there are quite a few noticeable changes that won't take diehard fans long to notice.
When your fighters are getting ready to begin the match, they can now move around from side to side in order to get into position for their first attack. The old combination of pressing two buttons at once to initiate a strong slash or strong kick has now been replaced with three slash buttons – light, medium, and fierce – and only one kick button. This is definitely a much-needed improvement and offers a very small trade-off since the kicks have never before played a large role in the overall scheme of things.
Today marks the launch of Aion: Assault on Balaurea, Aion's first free expansion. What separates Assault on Balaurea from your standard MMO content patch? It's often tough to say, but in this case, there are a few things.
Arc Rise Fantasia tells the story of a mercenary called L'arc Bright Lagoon (seriously) and a prince called Alf (seriously) who become sort-of Jesus Christ and fight with a God while trees turn into crystals (seriously). In case you haven't guessed, this is a JRPG storyline through and through. Silly, convoluted, yet taking itself absolutely seriously, Arc Rise has a narrative that only this type of game could get away with.
Surprisingly, it's actually not terrible either. While it lacks any real emotional impact, the story is a pretty decent yarn, especially as the game rises in tempo roughly ten or so hours into the experience. There are the obligatory plot twists and a number of characters even risk being rather interesting. At one's most negative, you could say that Arc Rise Fantasia's plot is no worse than any other RPG's and sometimes it almost becomes a bit better than the norm., Any good the story does, however, is quickly undone by one major flaw -- the absolutely atrocious localization. Whoever they got to provide the voices in Arc Rise, I can tell you right now that they weren't actors. Lines are delivered by people who make it abundantly clear that they don't care, making dramatic scenes instantly feel flat and dull. It's frustrating to finally reach a climactic moment and fail to enjoy it because the actors ruin the mood with their apathetic delivery and inability to convey more than one emotion. To its credit, you can mute the voices,
OK, I’m proper scared. I’ve just been stalked through a sewer by something I can’t see, let alone fight.
The only thing that gave it away was the languid ker-splosh of its footsteps as it ranged around after me. Every time I lost my footing on the narrow path of tottering crates and other detritus and landed in the drink, a flurry of intense sploshing rose sharply in volume as it made for my meat. It was utterly, panicinducingly horrible. I made errors in judgement, I missed jumps, I clenched. When it was all over, I nearly had a little cry.Amnesia does Lovecraft in the purest sense: it understands that the imagined far outweighs the known in its psychological punch, and it gives you enough audio and visual cues to imagine a very carnival of horrors. From the twisted brainpipes of Frictional games, the guys behind the Penumbra series, this is every part the worthy successor, with considerably higher production values, bags more atmosphere, and a deeper exploration of the parallel themes of horror and insanity. While these screenshots shout FPS, it shares more with point-and-click adventures than shooters. There’s not a weapon in sight: it’s all about the puzzles, exploiting the neat physics engine, combining items to apply to the environment, and hiding when the nasties come.The story unfolds from a locus of zero knowledge, aside from one fact: your name is Daniel. You wake in a medieval castle, and finding a note you’d previously written for yourself, you discover you’re here for a reason. In fact, you’ve been here for some time, and as the plot expands through further diary-notes and flashbacks, the unsavoury purpose behind your presence becomes apparent. You’re also just a bit afraid of the dark. The whole place is graveyard-dim, but you collect tinder-boxes to light torches and candles, and oil for your lamp. Keeping the shadows at bay is a constant – and necessary – struggle.
When you see a stately owl perched on a cragged branch, its dignified demeanor brings to mind intelligence and good grace. Author Kathryn Lasky explored the secret lives of these feathered folk in her Guardians of Ga'Hoole series, which proved popular enough to spawn an upcoming animated film called Legend of the Guardians. The game of the same title is the inevitable kid-friendly tie-in, and it's not a bad one. As a young owl named Shard, you zip about, crashing into bats and the evil owls knows as Pure Ones, sometimes taking a break to take out some turrets or rescue a few helpless owlets. (You may wonder how owls created defensive structures with just wings and talons, but no matter.) It's unfortunate that the fun is so short lived. This $49.99 game clocks in at about three hours, but the simple mechanics and repetitive missions lead to monotony long before you reach that final hour. Legend of the Guardians is attractive and accessible, but even the most patient younger players will grow bored before it's over.You play as young guardian Shard, whose father was wrongfully accused of betraying the residents of the Great Tree. The film's story follows that of the first three novels in the series, but the game seems to have little in common with those initial books. Shard was created specifically for the game, and does not appear elsewhere in the franchise; owls like the members of The Band are given tiny cameos; and concepts, such as mysterious particles known as flecks, are never adequately explained. Those familiar with the tale may get some enjoyment out of seeing some of their favorite characters come to life onscreen, but they will be disappointed that they don't get to reenact important events from this avian tale.
Change can be a painful process. Just ask one of the unfortunate citizens of Kijuju, the fictional region of Africa that serves as the setting of Resident Evil 5, the latest entry in Capcom's ongoing zombie videogame saga. A power-mad corporation's evolutionary manipulations have caused a biological disaster that turns people into mindless hosts for a military-grade parasitic infection. And you thought the Bird Flu was nasty. The citizens of Kijuju are going through some ugly changes, many of which involve tentacles, oozing eyeballs and heretofore unexplored bloodlust. And, as is the custom in a Resident Evil game, you drop into the situation woefully underprepared for what awaits. The resulting experience is an intense, action-packed adventure replete with satisfying combat, tight gameplay and gorgeous, well-crafted environments. Resident Evil 5 offers all those things and then some, but it doesn't do many of the things longtime fans of the series expect. It won't scare you. It won't fill you with creeping desperation. It won't have you collecting and counting bullets like they're precious stones. It won't, in essence, make you feel like you're playing a traditional Resident Evil game.Like the story it's trying to tell, Resident Evil 5 is all about evolution. Capcom has gone out on a limb with the latest numbered sequel in its long-running survival horror franchise, and although one of your goals as a player is to survive the horrors around you, this entry in the series is a radical departure from the genre Capcom helped create near Raccoon City more than a decade ago.
Motion controls make a lot of sense as far as racquet-based sports games go. With that in mind, Ubisoft’s Racquet Sports, a game that was originally released on Nintendo Wii, is now available on the PlayStation 3 with complete Move support. Unfortunately, while the concept sounds ideal, Racquet Sports is anything but a proper representation of Move’s capabilities. Racquet Sports offers a series of racquet-based games and allows up to four players a simultaneous gaming experience. You can even play online. The activities in Racquet Sports include tennis, badminton, squash, table tennis, and beach tennis, with the visuals considerably improved over the Wii’s Mii-style avatars, allowing you to dress your character up in various outfits. Outside the characters, there is plenty of detail in the different environments and even the spectators. The problem with Racquet Sports is that it offers a decidedly poor showcase in regards to the Move’s precision and unique features. The game is filled with lag and commits the common Wii crime of only having to flick your wrist to hit a decent shot. There seems to be little reason to actually move around while you play through the different activities, and the slow reaction time of your onscreen counterpart really draws attention away from the game. Beyond the actual problems in gameplay, the game offers virtually no depth. There is a career mode for all five activities though it offers little incentive for players to pursue, outside of Trophies or costume rewards. If that weren’t enough, the five different activities are practically identical. Table tennis is probably the best of the five, but it pales in comparison to the same mode in Sports Champions. Squash appeared interesting, but it is extremely monotonous and demonstrates another irritating part of the game.
The Lord of the Rings: Aragorn’s Quest is s new game from HEADSTRONG Games and Warner Bros, a licensed game with the franchise backing of the now classic film trilogy of a decade ago. This game has two key distinguishing characteristics that set it apart from the other games under this brand. One is that it’s designed to be family friendly, which means while you’re butchering countless vicious and snarling goblins, orcs, and Uruk’hai, they won’t bleed. The other is that it follows the story of The Lord of the Rings movies from the perspective of Aragorn, also known as Strider, Elessar, Estel, Heir of Isildur, or as his pastor called him, Mikey.
The idea here is that it’s been fifteen years since the events at the end of Return of the King. Frodo, Bilbo, and the rest have sailed away with the elves. Samwise Gamgee now has a family with that blond hobbit with the long curly hair. This batch of children are sitting on the floor of his home while he reads to them from a book about the adventures of Aragorn. Mixed in between the Aragorn’s Quest chapters are largely optional sections where one of Samwise’s sons, named Frodo of course, runs around a hobbit festival grounds which is being prepared for a visit from the king. This serves as a tutorial area, and the few required portions here are designed to teach you skills you’ll be using in the next chapter of Aragorn’s Quest.
Well, there is some fuss, as you have to complete some tutorial missions before you finally hit the mean streets of Hong Kong to escape the bad guys, but beyond that, the game is fairly to-the-point. Basically, you accelerate by flicking the Move controller downward to sort of "pump" the vehicle forward, which makes sense. But to really make a smooth path to the goal, you'll have to perform jumps, dashes, dodges, and kicks to clear out obstacles, including the gangsters coming for you. Unfortunately, performing these moves isn't very natural. Simple turning is fine, but jumping requires you to flick the motion controller up, and apparently straight up, so that it has a split second to recognize it. Similarly, to perform a Super Dash, you thrust the Move controller forward -- a technique that has proven, over the years, to be the least effective use of a motion controller. Needless to say, I rarely pulled off the dash, diminishing its value with me more and more with each attempt. My only savior was in the options screen, where you can bump up the sensitivity for both the jump and dash motions, which I admit did make a noticeable improvement in my accuracy and overall success in the more hectic levels, but I still didn't feel like using the Super Dash. 
For a game where you ride office chairs and other wheeled objects down city streets,Kung Fu Rider is something that most people expect to have explained to them. However, it doesn't need an explanation, and the game knows this: the title screen shows you all you need to know: private detective Toby and his bubbly (in more ways than one) secretary Karin hide behind their doorway as a group of mafia goons wait outside for them. The two argue with each other for a few minutes, worrying about their fate, but once you start the game, they're already on the run when they find an aforementioned wheeled object in the street that they use for a makeshift getaway. No muss, no fuss.
EA's NHL series has established itself as one of the best sports franchises on the market, but it's been conspicuously absent on Wii. Their maiden effort on the console, NHL Slapshot, follows in the footsteps of the Madden Wii games, eschewing traditional sim elements in favor of a fast and simple arcade approach that succeeds thanks to its excellent controls and fast pace. It's clear from the moment you open the box that Slapshot is meant to appeal to kids. The game comes packed with a plastic hockey stick peripheral, and it's the perfect size for children between the ages of 8 and 12. Inserting the Wii Remote and Nunchuk into the peripheral allows it to function like an actual hockey stick, and it works well thanks to the simple but effective motion controls.Both the stick and the Wii Remote/Nunchuk setup rely on broad gestures for puck handling and shooting. A flick of the Wii Remote or the stick results in a crushing check, while holding down the B button makes it possible to deke out the goalie. The MotionPlus peripheral isn't supported, but I was still pleased by how easy it was to rear back and hit a slapshot, or perform a little wrist shot while aiming with the Nunchuk's analog stick. Ultimately, while I opted to stick with the more traditional setup, the stick is a perfectly viable alternative.
Since the controls are incredibly easy to grasp, NHL Slapshot is ideal for parties or parents who want to play with their kids. Where it suffers a bit is in the defense, subtle moves such as stick lifts and blocks just feel inaccurate. Combined with some poor goalie A.I., it's annoyingly easy to get caught out of position and scored upon. Of course, even in the event that the A.I. does manage to score, it's not terribly hard to mount a comeback. In one game I played on the highest difficulty level, I was able to come all the way back from four goals down in the final period to tie the game and win in a shootout. Given how easy it is to score, 12-10 games are distressingly common.
Last I checked, flying a high-powered jet fighter is supposed to be all about precision. When I get my hands on the controls of one of those planes, it’s fair to expect some precision handling, precision flying formations, and precision air strikes. Unfortunately, it’s tough to deliver all of that on the control scheme available on the PSP.
That is Joint Assault’s main fault. The solid semi-realistic dogfighter is horribly marred by the limitations of the PSP. Without a second analog stick to move the camera around, it’s tough to keep tabs on the battlefield, and the smaller portable screen only serves to worsen the tunnel vision effect.
Don’t get me wrong, the vision problems don’t completely hamper the ability to play the game. The HUD does its job without making it overly complicated, and once you switch to the expert controls – which are what you’d expect from a flight game, with left and right controlling the roll of the plane rather than just turning it automatically – it starts to feel more like flying a high-performance fighter instead of a 747 with missiles duct taped on.
Like an average Ace Combat game, the campaign is woefully short, clocking in at about two hours. This could be forgiven if the missions were more varied and original, but around the sixth time I took down a huge flying fortress above a real-world location (Tokyo, San Francisco, and London appear, among others), it started to get a bit old. Heart-pumping missions, like maneuvering a huge passenger jet through a tiny canyon, are few and far between, and even then they’re definitely not enough to redeem the mediocrity of the rest of the campaign.
Valkyria Chronicles 2 boasts the same brand of deep, strategic combat as its console-based predecessor, but occasionally falls victim to a lackluster narrative and temperamental control scheme.
It’s hard enough for sequels to live up to their predecessors, but Valkyria Chronicles 2 faces the extra responsibility of introducing the franchise to a new platform. The combination strategy/role-playing game attempts to repackage its unique blend of stylized artwork and gameplay complexity for the PlayStation Portable while adding new elements to the formula its PlayStation 3 parent made famous.
As a portable game, Valkyria Chronicles 2 is everything a PSP player could hope for, even if they didn’t play the original. It has hours and hours of content and battles packaged into convenient chunks that don’t eat up more than half an hour at the most. The tutorials, while long, are easily skippable and can be reviewed after the fact with an in-game system that also keeps track of cut-scenes, in case you skipped those, too. You could, in fact, play through the whole game without ever watching a cut-scene or paying any attention to the plot and have an enjoyable strategy-RPG experience.
And that’s why Valkyria Chronicles 2 fails at being a sequel -– players can skip the whole story, and many might be sorely tempted to do so when they find out the game is basically a Japanese schoolgirl anime. Instead of picking up where the original game left off with the same squad in a neutral country surrounded by war,
Rugby League live is the latest rugby league game to hit the Xbox console series since Rugby League 2 was release on Original Xbox back in 2006. Tru Blu Games has handed Big Ant Studios the duties to revive the great game of Rugby League on the leading consoles.
The Game is of course set in the current 2010 season for both NRL and SL, with the line ups been taken from the beginning of the 2010 season. When you first start up your Rugby League Live game, you will be pleased to not hear the lame music that was in the previous games, with a more rock n roll guitar introduction, and also a major improvement in the menus, looks and how less laggy it is to navigate.
Now before I start I’m going to get straight to the point, the gameplay doesn't have that much of an improvement from the previous League games, there is still the major flaw in dummy half running, which allows you to break right through the ruck with too much ease. Though in saying this, they have address many other issues which appeared in the other games, there is no longer a free try when you pack the scrum, nor can you simply side step your way through the defence, though I’m not saying you can’t side step, the designers have neatly made the combo very obscure and difficult, making you do it less frequently.
One added improvement to defensive play I admired about the game was the fact you can shift the defence to compress on a certain part of the field, so for example, of the opposition has been tackled on the left wing, you can compress your defence holding the left trigger, shifting your line to the left, though obviously you do this at the risk of long passes.
Telltale Games is best known for its episodic point and click adventure game series, like Tales of Monkey Island and Sam & Max. But with Puzzle Agent, the developer is going in a distinctly different direction. And that's a good thing. The game itself feels like a mashup of a David Lynch film and the Professor Layton games, with just enough quirky humor to make it feel like a Telltale production. It's short and somewhat simplistic, but Puzzle Agent provides a great atmosphere and a solid dose of brainteasing puzzles. Nelson Tethers is a federal agent with the FBI. But he doesn't investigate drug imports or terrorists, instead he works for the Department of Puzzle Research. After a bizarre dream in which he's visited by an eerily prophetic astronaut, Nelson gets assigned his first bit of field work. Soon enough he's on his way to the sleepy town of Scoggins, Minnesota to investigate an accident that occurred at the town's eraser factory. Of course, as is often the case with small towns, Scoggins is full of mystery. The story is surprisingly dark, but this is offset somewhat by the game's sense of humor. When your main enemy is a group of mysterious garden gnomes it's hard to take things too seriously. That being said, Puzzle Agent does an incredible job of creating a chilling atmosphere. Though the various residents of of Scoggins all seem friendly, it always feels like there's a dark secret hiding in the background just waiting to come out. Overall, Nelson's investigation and the town of Scoggins serve as a great setting for the actual gameplay.
The Professor Layton series suffers from a curse shared by all franchises which create and define their own genres. While games cut from a less original cloth can change wildly between iterations, a logic-puzzle-adventure-mystery series like Layton doesn't really have much room to mix things up without defying the tropes that made everyone fall in love with it in the first place. In short, don't expect the Good Professor to engage in any first-person deathmatches any time soon.
The way franchises like Layton introduce change between entries is by expanding the game's universe and deepening the player's connections with its characters. Professor Layton and the Unwound Future does so swimmingly -- but wow, does it take its sweet, gentlemanly time in doing so.Much like Curious Village and Diabolical Box before it, the third installment in the Layton series possesses equally gargantuan amounts of polish and charm. Level 5's crisp, Miyazaki-esque visuals and dreamlike, accordion-centric melodies return, reminding players that not all AAA titles on Nintendo's platforms require the participation of plumbers, Hylians or interstellar bounty hunters.The premise for Unwound Future is arguably the series' most intriguing to date. The top-hat tutor is asked to help solve a mystery set 10 years in the future -- a request purportedly sent by the futuristic counterpart of his stalwart apprentice, Luke. This chronologically unsound mystery seems to have connections to a disastrous event witnessed by the puzzle-solving duo a week prior, as well as a similar accident from 10 years ago -- one which had particularly tragic consequences for Layton.
TerRover has the makings of a quality video game, or at least it would seem that way. The controls are responsive, the hero’s adorable and the stylish graphics remind us at times of Sony’s PixelJunk Shooter. Going in, we saw no foreseeable reason why it wouldn’t be a shining gem in the PS3’s lineup, but after several hours of play, this title doesn’t have what it takes.
Creat Studios’ latest casts you as a multi-wheeled vehicle that travels to different planets completing stages in the fastest time possible. Initially, the character looks fairly basic, but later, you can purchase new parts that make things easier, such as a gun, missile launcher and magnetic grip. While that stuff’s fine, it doesn’t necessarily correct the primary issue, which is, unfortunately, the hero itself.
Playing TerRover reminds us of trying to control a cheap RC car over different forms of terrain. Traveling across a flat surface produces no issues. Frustration sets in, however, when things get bumpy, and having to jump across pools of lava or fight our way through a compartment full of yellow balls had us ready to chuck the controller into a wall. The vehicle moves so awkwardly that the game becomes a maddening chore, largely because of the controls. To change directions, you must press a button to slide the character’s head left and right, but you can also flip it upside down by either shaking the controller or tapping Triangle. On paper, this may have seemed like a good idea, but in practice, it’s easy to forget what does what.
Playing HAWX 2 confirms that we made the right career choice, especially considering how the game's very first mission ends. Initially, you'll assuming the role of HAWX 1's returning hero pilot Colonel David Crenshaw, who is subsequently captured by shady insurgent forces (of course) and declared MIA after three nuclear warheads go missing in Russia, before taking the reins as other pilots from three nations.
In typical Clancy stylee, HAWX 2 weaves conspiracy and intrigue among its narrative threads and tells its story from three different perspectives, so while you start out as Crenshaw, you'll soon be playing as American pilot, Major Alex Hunter, British RAF fella Lt. Colin Munro and Russian airman Captain Dimitri Sokov, who are all involved in the same overarching plot that runs throughout the game. It's the same old Clancy stuff though, with enough frankly missable military blather and techno-babble to have you constantly clawing at the 'skip' button during the cut-scenes.However, telling the story using three different nations is a neat device that ensures you're presented with a veritable hangar-full of fighter jets to choose from, each of which is lovingly crafted and can be drooled over in the selection screen, where you can rotate and zoom in and out of each model, if you're so inclined. And once you're in the skies, things handle with just as much arcade style as the previous game, although this time, some missions demand that you take-off and land, which isn't nearly as daunting as you might think.Taking-off is a simple operation, where you merely press a button to start up your engines and then use the triggers to taxi to the runway, accelerate, brake and keep your nose straight with the bumper buttons. When you reach optimum speed, pull back on the analogue stick and up you go. Easy. Less simple is executing a landing, as it's easy to come in too hot and crash. Slow right down and pop out your landing gear when prompted though, and you'll come up against few problems. There's always assistance just a single button away too, if you need it.
Thanks to the killjoys behind the Hague and Geneva Conventions it’s now illegal to win a war by inviting your enemies to sham peace talks then feeding them poisoned danishes. You can’t disguise your tanks as ambulances. Soldiers can’t even use fake arms to pretend to surrender any more. All the furtive fun has been stripped from warfare.
Well, almost all. The noble art of misdirecting a foe with mock attacks and bogus buildings, intercepting and decrypting communications, that’s all still legal, and it’s such shenanigans that are celebrated in this surprisingly fresh, unfailingly entertaining WWII RTS.
Doing something novel with one of strategy gaming’s hoariest themes is a tall order, but Eugen have managed it. In addition to the titular ruses (more on which later) the Parisians blow the cobwebs away with truly massive battlefields. Rolling your mousewheel backwards in this game is like snagging your braces on a V2 rocket. One minute you’re down on the deck amongst ravishing villages, pastures and woods, the next you’re up in the stratosphere viewing entire regions through a veil of wispy cirrus.
Ruse needs the extraordinarily elastic Iriszoom engine because… um… Actually, I’m not sure it needs it at all. Observing battles from church-tower height is lovely but entirely impractical. Most of the time you’ll hover a few thousand feet higher at a level where you can take in all forces,
When Plants vs. Zombies [App Store] was originally announced on April 1st last year, PC gamers everywhere (myself included) were unsure if Popcap's newly revealed game was part of an elaborate April Fool's Day hoax or not. A little more than a month later, the game was released and not only saw universal acclaim from the gaming media resulting in an 88 on Metacritic, but also earned the title of Popcap's fastest selling game of all time.
In Plants vs. Zombies, Popcap takes the standard tower defense formula and greatly simplifies it. Instead of a path to build towers along, you drop seeds in your yard which then grow in to plants that have various offensive or defensive capabilities. The yard is organized in a grid, and zombies move straight across the row they spawn on, munching (or in some cases jumping or flying over) anything that they come in contact with.A gauge on the top of the screen shows how close you are to the end of the level, with flags indicating when big waves of zombies are going to come. When you clear a stage, you're often awarded with the seeds of one more of the nearly 50 included plants. This seemingly constant progression does a great job of keeping you interested, as it always seems like you have a new toy to play with. To shake things up even more, mini game levels are mixed in, including a bowling game of sorts, a whack-a-mole game with zombies, and others.Originally designed to be played with a mouse, Popcap did an excellent job of porting Plants vs. Zombies to the iPhone. The resource required to build your defenses is sunlight, and in the PC version feverishly moving your mouse around to click on the small suns falling from the top of the screen got tiring (especially when playing on a laptop with a touchpad). On the iPhone, the sunlight mechanic is also in place, but seems to work so much better when you only have to tap the falling suns to collect them.
Those hoping for some sort of satisfying closure on the Morrigan storyline in Dragon Age: Origins unfortunately won't find it here. If you know what that sentence means and find it to be disappointing, then you're the target audience for this downloadable content. If you have no idea who Morrigan is and why you should care about her exploits, then bail out now. This content is meant for those who have either finished Origins or were too lazy to get through the whole thing and are beyond the point of caring about spoilers. Called Witch Hunt, this is the latest in a long line of small storyline expansions. Morrigan, the sultry magic user from Origins, is the star here, though she only shows up very briefly at the end. The interaction is frustratingly shallow as well, which is too bad for fans of the fiction hoping for a little more detail. The conversation options with Morrigan will change depending on what you've done previously, assuming you import your character from Origins. If you lost your save files or just want to battle through with a new class, you can create a new one and assign specialization and points to statistics and skills as you see fit. The story begins at Flemeth's hut about a year after the events of Origins, where you start your search for Morrigan alongside Dog, an especially noisy mabari hound. It's not long before the entirety of your four-person party is filled out as you pick up a Dalish elf named Ariane and a goofy, sheltered mage named Finn who's eager for adventure. It turns out everyone's looking for the same thing – Morrigan and the relics she's accumulated – so it's up to you to retrace her steps and track her down. Combat and conversation should be familiar to any Dragon Age player at this point, and through the various short dungeons visited you'll find a few mechanics at work to keep the conflict from becoming stale. In the basement of the Circle Towe
Such is the unhappy case with Elemental: War of Magic, the new 4X game from Brad Wardell. When playing it, experienced strategy fans will doubtless be able to feel the good ideas, the years of design experience, and the sense that the game is striving for that "just one more turn" addictiveness factor. Somewhere along the way, though, those intangible parts, excellent as they are, turn into a terribly flawed reality -- one rife with bugs, burdened by an awful GUI and less user-friendliness than the One Ring, and wielding graphics that would look right at home in a Dire Straits video. What happened? We may never know. But Elemental should be a lesson for ambitious designers to make sure they ground their ambitions in the realities of the resources they have at hand. Clearly, this game's reach exceeds its meager grasp. For what it's worth, Elemental tries hard to be the spiritual successor of a fantastic turn-based strategy game cum RPG called Master of Magic. As in MOM, Elemental players take on the role of various wizard-kings (one in particular, if they choose to play the main campaign) who are on a quest to rule the world. As in most games of this type, you can accomplish your world domination plot either through conquest, diplomacy, or research, but however you choose to do it, you'll have to focus on exploration, warfare, city-building, and leveling your characters. Like Master of Magic (which was itself quite buggy and not without gameplay foibles), Elemental suffers from trying to do too much. It's admirable that the game offers you the wide variety of gameplay choices it does, but the fact that it doesn't concomitantly offer you the ability to easily manage the information necessary to make those choices intelligently is its Achilles heel. 
In other words: some of us may be lucky enough to have a fantastic idea, design, thought, whatever, locked up inside our imaginations, but all too often some ineffable force, some unknown obstacle prevents us from making that idea a workable reality.
The result of this team up allows you to switch between four different play-styles (to change things up between stages), and you can also choose the order in which you play the levels within a given act. But this latter freedom really only serves to make the already weak story feel more disjointed. Each level feels completely separated from the others, and it's only during the final act that there's any sort of communication between each of the Spider-universes. With a plot penned by comic veteran Dan Slott, it's a shame that the generic story is one of the game's largest shortcomings. While the separation between levels sacrifices any compelling reason to travel through these comic book worlds, it does allow for wholly different ways to approach each new challenge. For instance, when playing as Spider-Man Noir, you must use the darkness to your advantage and stealthily eliminate enemies; whereas, Ultimate Spider-Man uses his Rage ability to deploy powerful combos against large groups of foes. Changing the way in which you fight is an interesting idea, but every level follows an almost identical formula: meet the boss, battle them once, save civilians, battle the boss again. Rinse and repeat. 
Spider-Man has been around a while (since 1962, to be exact), and like every superhero, he's gone through big changes both cosmetic and practical over the years. But it's still surprising that developer Beenox chose to take three recent incarnations of the web-slinging superhero and bring them together in the same game: Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions. When the evil Mysterio breaks into a museum and the Tablet of Order and Chaos is broken, problems in multiple realities ensue -- to set things right, Madame Web tasks the Amazing Spider-Man (voiced by Neil Patrick Harris) to work with three of his counterparts from other dimensions: Spider-Man 2099, Ultimate Spider-Man (in the symbiote suit but without any evil side effects), and Spider-Man Noir.
Hockey doesn't get a lot of love in the United States. I have no idea why, but that's the way it's been for ages. Still, that hasn't stopped EA Sports from churning out one of the most consistently great sports franchises around with its NHL line of games. If you're a hockey nut, rest assured that NHL 11 is no slouch. It packs a cool, super-deep dynasty mode in the form of Ultimate Team, it adds some great gameplay tweaks and refinements and delivers all of this with a layer of polish that has been missing from past games.
For those unfamiliar with the NHL series, the franchise has hinged on delivering a true-to-life hockey experience for the past few years. It was one of the first games to develop a control scheme that used the right analog for stick controls like dekeing and shooting, it pioneered Be A Pro where you command a single player throughout his entire career, and its online hockey leagues were some of the first of their kind. For hardcore gamers, there's the new EA Sports Ultimate Hockey League (EAUHL) which uses the Ultimate Team trading card system (each player card is a player on the ice) to deliver its team building mechanic. Players are dealt a pack of starter cards and are sent to build up their fledgling team of all-stars from there by either earning in-game currency through their play on the ice or by purchasing them with real world money. The setup is pretty dense and shouldn't be traversed by those not willing to delve into some seriously minute details, but hardcore hockey fans are going to get a kick out of it. The depth of Ultimate Team and EAUHL is exhaustive. If the community catches on, it could actually be the largest and most expansive dynasty mode ever seen in a game. Player cards are taken from the list of leagues (there are more than 10 total) that have been added to this year's game,and you'll also have to contend with managing coaching cards,
Ben 10 Alien Force: Rise of Hex is the successor to a number of previous games based on the indomitable Cartoon Network brand, Ben 10, which features Ben Tennyson as a boy who discovers an ‘Omnitrix’ device which gives him the ability to transform into a number of alternate alien forms. Sounds like a pretty good premise for a videogame, yeah? Well it seems it’s a premise that the developers, alongside their predecessors, just couldn’t get right.
For a start, graphically, its not only inconsistent, but its also a letdown. Instead of opting for either a 2D or for a purely 3D design, the Developers seem to have decided upon a mish-mash of both. Admittedly, when done well [a la Marvel vs. Capcom] this can look quite dramatic and effective, but in Rise of Hex it’s simply confusing and inconsistent. The character models and certain background elements can be fluid and visually exciting to watch, but when combined with a bland palette of either a Industrial or Jungle Temple setting [which is also an example of how generic this game is; how many jungle temples have gamers had to endure over the past 6 months alone?!] it’s contrast serves only to highlight the misgivings in terms of visual design. This same weak style carries through to the story-telling, which is conveyed only through a series of mind-boggling text bubbles and stationary drawings. People who aren’t fans of Ben 10 will have trouble piecing any form of story or intention upon the main villain, Hex’s part; this is definitely one of the game’s weakest points as people who have little to no knowledge about Ben Tennyson or his various Allies/ Enemies will be left reeling after hearing what is essentially the excuse for another Factory or Jungle Temple level.This level of Da Vinci Code mystery is carried over to the game’s boss battles, which simply require players to die numerous times in an extensive attempt to figure out just how to kill the things.