February 18, 2012

Co-Review: Gotham City Impostors

It’s been some time since we have heard from Mono­lith Pro­duc­tions. F.E.A.R. 2 was the last we heard from them and while the game was more var­ied than its pre­de­ces­sor, the A.I. took a large dose of stu­pid pills. They are finally back with a down­load­able title that is rather odd. Take one part Bat­man, one part Team Fortress, and one part absurd humor, shake not stir, and you come away with one humor­ous but com­pelling shooter.

Joe:

Game­play: Based on the Team Fortress/ Team Fortress 2 style game it works really well with plenty of cus­tomiza­tion allow­ing you to play this first per­son shooter how­ever you like.  The four game types are var­ied (one being a chal­lenge mode ripped right out of Bat­man Arkham City) giv­ing plenty of ver­ity to add value to the price of this DLC game. Fumi­ga­tion was my favorite game type with Psych War­fare com­ing in a close sec­ond only because it was hard find­ing matches. There is some issue with match mak­ing and bal­anc­ing that I hope get addressed in the upcom­ing patch and of course my favorite LAG! The game always states con­nect­ing to server but I think “server” is another name for “HOST” as in peer to peer gam­ing which always lags.

Rick:

The game types are var­ied but so few, though they never seem to grow stale. Fumi­ga­tion is my game mode of choice, noth­ing more than ter­ri­to­ries but the matches are nor­mally hard fought and can last a lengthy amount of time. The amount of cus­tomiza­tion is insane; every­thing from cos­tumes, to weapons, to gad­gets, to call­ing cards, and 1000 lev­els to gain. The gad­gets are the star of the game play. Using a grap­ple gun or glider pack to tra­verse the intri­cate maps is like noth­ing else. I do agree with Joe, the match­ing mak­ing is a mess. Unbal­anced games and some occa­sional lag can spoil the expe­ri­ence, though when all is going well the game’s bril­liance shines.

Joe:

Visu­als: the five maps are really detailed and incred­i­bly intri­cate almost to a fault with plenty of nooks n cran­nies to dis­cover and explore I wish the game types I like used more of the maps to play them so we could enjoy the detail that is hid­den around every cor­ner, door and on every roof! Most areas that are heavy engage­ment zones have a way to flank mak­ing attack­ing or defend­ing feel chal­leng­ing and reward­ing although there are a few spots strung across the maps that can be abused to spawn lock the oppos­ing team.

Rick: for a down­load­able game, the visu­als are great, but could be bet­ter. The maps are painstak­ingly detailed and have great vari­ety. The amounts of ver­ti­cal­ity in the maps are just as impres­sive as the detail. The char­ac­ters sport that goofy TF2 look but have a feel of their own. The cus­tomiza­tion adds more appeal to visu­als and the humor. Would you like your Bats char­ac­ter to have a card­board cowl, a rain slicker for a cape, and have them run­ning around in noth­ing but a pair of briefs? Great news, you can have it. One lit­tle gripe I have with the visu­als is the lack of mouth ani­ma­tion. There are some mem­o­rable quips, but to see the closed mouth mod­els spurt them feels archaic

Joe:

Over­all: The athe­is­tic of the game is great adding com­edy to the oth­er­wise dark gothic uni­verse of Bat­man. The visu­als are really good and the maps well layed out with plenty of options to get around from place to place. The over­all game is fun and var­ied with plenty of options to suit your gam­ing style. There are TONS of un-lockables and cus­tomiza­tion options that will keep you busy for months to come! Sound is great with hilar­i­ous voice act­ing and sound effects always mak­ing the expe­ri­ence enjoy­able. There are a few things that need work but over-all this game is well worth the price!

Rick: For $15, the game offers a sub­stan­tial amount of con­tent and excite­ment. Like Joe I enjoyed the humor, the map lay­out, the com­bat, and the cus­tomiza­tion. The game was delayed once in Jan­u­ary and it really could have used a few extra weeks to get the match­mak­ing under con­trol and deal with some of the lag issues, but Mono­lith has stated there will be a title update in March to fix these issues; but would have been nice to already have this and not poten­tially kill the com­mu­nity because of these issues. The game is worth your money and could eas­ily be the new go to shooter if the com­mu­nity and Mono­lith back the game. If you are look­ing for a TF2 expe­ri­ence con­soles and have tried the sad excuse that was on The Orange Box (no sup­port and awful com­mu­nity) than check this game out.

Pros:

~ team fortress 2 game type taken to the next level

~ Great visuals

~ Detailed map layouts

~ Char­ac­ter voices are hilarious

Cons:

~ Peer to peer host leads to laggy game play at times

~wish the game types used more o the maps to show off the detail put into them

~ Match­ing and bal­anc­ing need a lot of work

~ Heavy body type, rock­ets, and armor. You will learn to hate this.

February 3, 2012

Review: Crysis for the Xbox 360

Adapt.Engage.Survive

Video source: Game Trail­ers

Story: Ten­sions between the U.S. and North Korea have reached crit­i­cal mass as they square off on a small island located in the South China Sea. Why? A team of U.S. arche­ol­o­gists have unearthed an arti­fact of unknown ori­gin that may pre-date the exis­tence on humans on earth! North Korea moves in and takes con­trol of the dig so the U.S. dis­patches an elite Spe­cial Forces Unit out­fit­ted with the lat­est in Nanosuit Tech­nol­ogy to assess the sit­u­a­tion and try to res­cue the trapped archae­ol­o­gists. The ensu­ing bat­tles trig­ger the arti­fact to come to life releas­ing a new enemy bent on all our destruction!

Back in Octo­ber EA and Cry­tek re-released the mod­i­fied and enhanced ver­sion of the game that killed your com­puter Cry­sis. If you want more info. check out my arti­cle HERE. I down­loaded Cry­sis shortly after it was qui­etly released onto Xbox Live and started play­ing; I’m only now post­ing my review due to the glut of  Hol­i­day sea­son game releases, work and well… Skyrim delay­ing me fin­ish­ing this excel­lent campaign.

Visu­als: The first thing I noticed was that for a DLC title this games visu­ally rivals that of any newly released game that hit in the last year! Re-mastered using Cryengine3 this game looks stun­ning right down to the expres­sion on an ene­mies’ face while you gab and crush the life out of him! This trop­i­cal land­scape looks amaz­ing, and if it weren’t for the bad guys bent on my demise would be a great vaca­tion spot. When the game tran­si­tions from: trop­i­cal to “alien” and then to frozen waste­land the envi­ron­ments really come to life with stun­ning light­ing and water effects, and envi­ron­men­tal con­di­tions that change almost on the fly. But, not all is per­fect in the­land­ofCr­y­sis, watch­ing some explo­sions (BIG BOOM, yes please!) I noticed some pix­i­la­tion and blocky-ness. Also in dark or low light rooms the gamma is pre­set way to dark but this just my per­sonal opin­ion because I love to see as much detail as possible.

Sound and Musi­cal Score: The sound was re-mastered as well giv­ing com­plete sat­is­fac­tion to every pull on my RT trig­ger but­ton and toss of every grenade. Voice overs were ok but noth­ing amaz­ing the Korean sol­ders would speak some Korean but mostly Eng­lish with a generic asian accent. Musi­cal score was as epic as it should have been adding depth to the story and alert­ing you to upcom­ing large engage­ments and story progressions.

Con­trol Scheme: Con­trols are tight and well layed out for the most part. The usual but­ton apply LT aim, RT fire, Y change weapon, X reload, A is jump, B is used for menu options like inven­tory, map and quests, LB and RB are your nanosuit abil­i­ties, the BACK but­ton has dual pur­pose of weapon load­out and map, the start does it’s nor­mal fuc­tion and the D pad does as well. My only real com­plaint is that there is no way to quickly throw a grenade with­out equip­ping it first by going into your inven­tory or hold­ing Y for the popup menu ala’ por­tal and Halflife. The down side try­ing to grab fast-moving ene­mies or melee’ can be a major chore are times

Game­play: I tend to play single-player cam­paigns on harder set­tings just so I have more of a chal­lenge and, in this time of the six hour story, so the game takes longer to com­plete. My play-through clocked in some­where between 8 and 10 hours (on hard dif­fi­culty not Delta I’m not man enough of that) so, above aver­age length for the cam­paign. The game is fairly open world but you are moved in the liner fash­ion of:  receive a mis­sion, then a sec­ondary  mis­sion, engage, clear, and move on which works well for pro­gres­sion of the story. Now, you think that with all the com­plain­ing and since the game was being reworked any­way that, well, maybe Cry­tek would do some­thing with the freak­ing A.I. and they didn’t! Sadly the A.I. is just as retarded as in the orig­i­nal PC release lead­ing me to believe that the hel­mets the sol­ders wore were not to stop bul­lets but to pro­tect from walk­ing into walls…. I would shoot an explo­sive bar­rel next to a group of sol­ders and the few that sur­vived would not react and say “what was that?” or “Is any­one there?” and start skulk­ing around until I was in their line of sight. One final gripe and this is more the aging hard­ware more that the game but when there was a lot of action on-screen at once the game would drop down to less than 10 FPS it  seemed but this only hap­pened a few times.

Over­all: Cry­tek has done a awe­some job in “enhanc­ing”  Cry­sis and squeez­ing some juice out of the ole’ Xbox 360. Cryengine3 looks great and this PC port is a clas­sic that deserves some props! The A.I. maybe still the same but Cry­sis has very much to offer and for the $19.99 price tag (1600msp) it is so very worth it!

PROS:

+ looks great Cryengine3 makes this game look fresh and wor­thy of being com­pared to full retail releases

+ Sound design and music score are top notch

+ Story is inter­est­ing and compelling

+ Con­trols are tight for the most part

Cons:

- Great visu­als come at a price of some blocky-ness and pixilation

- Ho-hum voice act­ing at times

- Truly short-bus A.I.

- Would have liked eas­ier access to grenades and the grab/melee can be very frustrating

In the Grey Zone:

~ The old Xbox 360 is still breath­ing but it some­times drags this title down with its obvi­ously aging hardware

January 8, 2012

Gears of War 3: Raam’s Shadow review

Gears of War 3 had a great cam­paign, thor­oughly var­ied, yet at some points it felt dis­jointed and headed due south east into the land were Bul­let­storm and Halo 3 meet. Epic games came with a rem­edy for the cam­paign blues in the form of Raam’s Shadow, the sec­ond piece of DLC to hit the early Sep­tem­ber release. Raam’s Shadow for­gets the imul­sion bread locust, the “infec­tion” bologna, Queen Mira’s rage induc­ing rants (for the most part), and gets back to what made the first two games great; urban destruc­tion and human on locust com­bat. It may clock in at just two hours, but the two hours I had with Raam’s Shadow almost made me for­get that Gears 3 had a cam­paign, it’s that good.

Raam’s Shadow is a pre­quel of sorts; it takes place in Ilima city just as the locusts are ink­ing the city and the krill are rav­aging the remains. You take con­trol of Zeta squad which con­sist of Mihn Yong Kim from Gears of War, Tai Kaliso from Gears of War 2, Ali­cia Valera, and Michael Bar­rick form the GoW comics. Zeta squad is attempt­ing to clear the city as Raam and his forces come car­ry­ing the har­bin­ger of DOOM! The story takes both sides, so for the first time in a Gears cam­paign you play as a locust, Raam specif­i­cally or other locust if you are play­ing co-op. Raam is just too much fun to play as.

The game plays the same as GoW 3 with lit­tle vari­a­tion, there are a few tweaks here and there but noth­ing that feels like a sequel. Raam, while being awe­some, is also some­what bor­ing to play as. He has is infa­mous sword and his “krill fin­ger” which just sounds dirty. The “krill fin­ger” is just a point and instakill weapon which just feels bor­ing. The pac­ing is much bet­ter than in the main cam­paign. Five acts that clock in a lit­tle over two hours on nor­mal; raise the dif­fi­culty and it can lengthen your play time.  The envi­ron­ment shows off the power of the Unreal 3 engine with col­laps­ing build­ings and bridges, with this beau­ti­ful archi­tec­ture on the brink of chaos and decay. I loved the look of the DLC again more so than 3. GoW 2 was as var­ied as I would have like the series to have gone. Don’t get me wrong Gears 3 is gor­geous but it just didn’t grab me visu­ally like the last two entries in the series.

Raam’s Shadow, while short, is eas­ily worth the $15 price tag. After see­ing what Epic put together in this small DLC, I would not object to a pre­quel to the Gears tril­ogy. With Gear’s 2 we were given Dark Cor­ners, which felt like it was left on the cut­ting room floor. Raam’s Shadow gives us a sneak peak at some back story while finally giv­ing the locust some play­time. There is noth­ing new in terms of game play other than using the locust but I just can’t get over how much more I liked this short stint over an entire cam­paign. If you have GoW 3 pickup Raam’s Shadow, it’s short, but very enjoy­able; and you don’t have to hear Baird complain.

+ Urban set­ting is back!

+ Play­ing as Raam is awesome

+ Very com­posed and bet­ter pacing

+ is a great exam­ple that a GoW pre­quel is needed

+Story is less bonkers than GoW3

+ Every­body loves the E-holes!

- is on the short side

- Raam’s weapons are awe­some, yet bor­ing from a game play standpoint

December 26, 2011

Command & Conquer: Red Alert– an iOS Game Done Right.

Hard­core games are not hard to find on any smart­phone plat­form, Apple’s iOS included. With most of these titles, the hard­core gamer demo­graphic gen­er­ally has a uni­ver­sal com­plaint: con­trols. Shoot­ers, plat­form­ers, action games and RPGs all prove to be sub­stan­tially more chal­leng­ing and off-putting because of the lack of tac­tile feed­back from a touch­screen inter­face. One game genre, how­ever, doesn’t have this hangup: Real Time Strat­egy. As a mat­ter of fact, RTS games seem tailor-made for a touch­screen inter­face. That being said, I was skep­ti­cal when I first saw an offi­cial Com­mand and Con­quer fran­chise port to iOS– and got even more ner­vous when it turned out to be an exten­sion of one of my favorite C&C series: Red Alert. Thank God I gave it a shot.

Not often will I pay for an app of any kind, but after try­ing the free demo, I bought the full ver­sion of Red Alert the very same day, and then later bought it for a friend so we could play together. I not only bought this game, I bought it twice, and it was worth every penny. The fact of the mat­ter is that RTS is per­haps the only style of hard­core game that will ever be per­fectly exe­cuted on a touch­screen, which is an insane bar­gain for its $.99 price tag.

The first con­cern for many gamers when look­ing at a hard­core mobile game is con­trols. Rest assured, the con­trols for this game, while they have a small learn­ing curve, are com­pletely sen­si­ble. Even with group­ing dif­fer­ent units together for an attack force, the onscreen con­trols are fast and intu­itive. One draw back, how­ever, is that you only get 3 hotkey slots for these groups. As seen on the right, the Apoc­a­lypse Tanks are back. In this screen­shot, they are col­lec­tively fol­low­ing attack orders as group 1– hence the top group slot being high­lighted in red. While at first the idea of only 3 unit groups is off-putting, it really doesn’t present much of a tac­ti­cal issue. This sort of scal­ing back is fairly com­mon through­out all aspects of the game, but sort of makes sense for the smaller nature of the iOS plat­form. One would hope, though, that the game would have a much larger unit cap with bet­ter hard­ware on later iDe­vices. Per­haps if there is a sub­se­quent Com­mand & Con­quer title for iOS, we could even hope to see larger mul­ti­player func­tion­al­ity. In a per­fect world, this would include sup­port for more than two par­tic­i­pants in any given skir­mish or mul­ti­player match, and sup­port for online play. Though all in all, it’s hard to com­plain too loudly about the first attempt at an offi­cial iOS C&C.

Now, the game is good as is when you down­load it from the App Store, and well worth a buck. I will say, how­ever, that I also bought both avail­able expan­sions, which were also worth every last penny (twice). The first is the map pack. Even if you’re con­tent with only two fac­tions, two stock skir­mish maps is a lit­tle harder to defend. For an addi­tional dol­lar, you get all the maps seen on the right in addi­tion to the two the game comes with. This is a mas­sive improve­ment for only cost­ing a buck. And if you really wanna make the game seem big­ger, The Empire of the Ris­ing Sun expan­sion adds a com­plete third playable fac­tion, and its own cam­paign– all for $2.99. While the com­pounded cost may scare away a few play­ers, this is a lot of game for your money, and one with a nearly inde­struc­tible replay value. Besides, all that said, and you’re still only in it for $3.98. That’s a ridicu­lously low price for a qual­ity game. Don’t believe me? Try the free demo. If you’re a fel­low C&C fan, you’ll prob­a­bly buy it just like I did.

December 19, 2011

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Beta Review

Ah yes, good old Counter-Strike.  No other shooter series has been as pop­u­lar and com­peta­tive for as long as Counter-Strike has.  Well, as many of you know by now, Valve announced a new, long over­due, addi­tion to the Counter-Strike series, Counter-Strike:Global Offen­sive.  Imme­di­ately so many rumors came out about the game and how true to Counter-Strike it would end up being and so on.  All any­one had were a few short videos show­ing some lim­ited game­play to stare at and for­mu­late opin­ions on.  There were some details given out such as the fact that the game is being made for XBox and PS3 as well as PC, and that they want to make it con­sole friendly to draw in a new crowd.  I think this def­i­nitely scared a lot of the old school CS play­ers as so often when a PC clas­sic goes to con­sole PC gamers feel it gets dumbed down.

On a cer­tainly pos­i­tive note there is the fact that Valve is test­ing with top com­pet­i­tive play­ers to try and make the game as true to CS and as com­pet­i­tively geared as they could.  Regard­less, most of my fel­low Counter-Strike play­ers expected it to be a fur­ther bas­tardiza­tion of the series; as we all know CS play­ers are gen­er­ally a pes­simistic bunch.  Well some time passed, rumors ran ram­pant, and a closed beta was finally announced for Octo­ber 2011 with keys being given out at spe­cial events like PAX.  I was unable to attend any such events but I did weasel my way into get­ting a key via good ole’ EBay.

Octo­ber came and at the very end of the month they announced that the beta was delayed to work in input from pro play­ers alpha test­ing the game stat­ing, “They gave us a lot of feed­back on things we should get in the game before we release it, oth­er­wise we’re going to be get­ting a lot of bug reports or a lot of feed­back and it would just be redun­dant.”  They also went on to say, “The closed beta will grad­u­ally expand to include more and more play­ers, until “by the end of it, every­one will be play­ing the game. It will be the released game that you’re play­ing and then at some point we’ll say, ‘OK we’re going to offi­cially release it.’ We have no man­date from any­body of when we have to ship this. So we’re more than happy to just keep work­ing on this until it’s ready to ship.”  This can be inter­preted as good and bad.  Good in the sense they are going to put a lot of time into pol­ish­ing it to make sure it is right … Bad because if you dont have a beta key you are stuck won­der­ing, “When will the beta open up so I can play damnit?!”

Well finally, Novem­ber 30, 2011 the beta was released and as a diehard CS fan I have been all over it.  The beta cur­rently is a lim­ited build miss­ing some func­tion­al­ity, maps, and weapons.  Cur­rently the only two maps that we have to play are the clas­sic bomb defusal maps de_dust and de_dust2.  As was pre­viewed de_dust has been mod­i­fied a bit to bal­ance out the game­play such as chang­ing up the under­pass, adding a stair­case to get ontop of it, and a few other things.  De_dust2 on the other hand is pretty much the same exact lay­out.  For those of you who are not ter­ri­bly famil­iar with the Counter-Strike series Counter-Strike is a First Per­son Shooter that began over 10 years ago on PC.  The game­play is sim­ple objec­tive based Counter Ter­ror­ist vs Ter­ror­ist sce­nar­ios.  The basic and most pop­u­lar map type is bomb defusal.  The ter­ror­ist objec­tive is to get to one of two points on the map and plant a bomb and then defend it until it blows up with the Counter Ter­ror­ist try­ing to either elim­i­nate all of the Ter­ror­ist or defuse the bomb.  The other main map type are hostage res­cue maps.  The ter­ror­ists have hostages they must defend as the Counter Ter­ror­ists objec­tives are to get in and escort the hostages to res­cue points in the map.  Counter-Strike has more sim­plis­tic mechan­ics over­all than Call of Duty of Bat­tle­field.  There are no iron sights, or any zoom for that mat­ter, out­side of scoped rifles.  There is no sprint.  Run­ning is the stan­dard move speed and walk­ing is used to con­ceal ones move­ment in con­trast to many newer shoot­ers that allow you to sprint.  The sim­pler mechan­ics speed up game­play and make the game much more reac­tion based requir­ing real twitchy reflex shots and accu­racy to be suc­cess­ful rather than posi­tion­ing and shot setup which is com­mon amongst most newer con­sole shoot­ers.  They did stay true to Counter Strike and keep the mechan­ics in Global Offen­sive the same as the pre­vi­ous iter­a­tions.  Had they changed these aspects the game truly wouldn’t be Counter-Strike.

Many other game modes also exist as the CS com­mu­nity has always been big into mak­ing mods for the game and some of the mod­ded game types that were extremely pop­u­lar are sup­posed to be off­i­cal game modes in the new Global Offen­sive.  One that has been con­firmed is GunGame.  It is a team elim­i­na­tion game where the object is to get one kill with each gun in the game before any­one else in the server does.  This has been an extremely pop­u­lar mod for Counter-Strike for years and is going to receive offi­cial sup­port in Global Offensive.

- Writ­ten by Aaron R

November 28, 2011

Need for Speed: The Run Review

Its Novem­ber again, and we all know what that means for rac­ing fans; another Need for Speed. This year we got some­thing just a bit dif­fer­ent. Last year, Cri­te­rion gave us a superb game in Need for Speed: Hot Pur­suit. A sim­ple racer full of speed and cop chases that hit you pri­mal rac­ing instincts while mak­ing you smile every time you hit the turbo but­ton. EA Black Box finally gets to take the NFS reins again after the hor­rid NFS Under­cover. Could EA Black Box redeem itself with The Run or will we get some­thing more mis­er­able and bro­ken than Under­cover? The answer is yes, but not an enthu­si­as­tic yes.

Need for Speed: The Run is an unusual exper­i­ment. Mix one third action movie, one third racer, and one third action game, bake, and what you have is some­thing that is fun but feels awk­ward. When was the last time you had quick time events in a rac­ing game? I can’t think of one. What EA Black Box has done is taken the cop chases and rac­ing from Hot Pur­suit added a paper thin story, and then laid a few Bat­tle­field 3 quick time events for good mea­sure and you have a game that suf­fers from an iden­tity cri­sis. But let’s talk about what it gets right.

The Run’s rac­ing is great. The cars han­dle like they should, the mus­cle cars back ends swing out, the AWD super­cars han­dle like but­ter. The sense of speed is there, but could be bet­ter. The cop chases are fun with wild crashes involved. The visu­als are bril­liant. The game runs on Frost­bite 2, which makes the vista and canons of the good old US of A absolutely beau­ti­ful. The only com­plaint I have with the visu­als is the same that I have had with the Frost­bite engine since its incep­tion; the washed out col­ors. The orches­trated score gets the heart pound­ing and keeps the ten­sion up despite the razor thin story ele­ments. Despite the story there are some really out­stand­ing set pieces espe­cially the last leg of the race in New York. As much as it frus­trated me I must com­mend Black Box for the over­all designed. The career mode is designed like an action game. You have resets that act as lives, the police road blocks are scripted, you will deal with tad bit of QTE’s and you can only change cars at gas sta­tions spread out over the race, but still at heart it’s a rac­ing game just like any other game in the genre. The car list is impres­sive but most require a hand­ful of chal­lenges to unlock which can be a pain; and there will be pain.

The first pain to come across is the story. You take con­trol of Jack Rourke a slightly cocky douche that has a debt with some mob and you some­how get pulled into a race across the coun­try for some amount of money to do some­thing andzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, yea you see where I am going with this. In a game where it’s being sold as a racer with a story, the story shouldn’t suck; which it does. The cam­era sucks, but this is just a per­sonal gripe. I nor­mally play rac­ers with the cam­era far­thest from the car; this game doesn’t give me that option. We get two bumper cams and an out of car cam that has me eat­ing the bumper at every turn. Despite hav­ing some excit­ing set pieces half of the game con­sist of rid­ing through some foothills “mak­ing up time” which trans­fers to time tri­als or in other words, filler. Even with the filler it comes to another prob­lem, it’s short; Call of Duty short. Now this is just the story, there are chal­lenges to keep you going and unlock­ing cars, but wasn’t the game sell­ing itself on the con­cept of a story dri­ven racer? So if the length is rub­bish and the story is rub­bish what are you left with? Some great look­ing vis­tas and a good racer that has this crap­tac­u­lar story façade hang­ing over its head. The mul­ti­player could have taken some hints from Hot Pur­suit as well because The Run is about as fun as hav­ing the runs. You get into a lobby with 8 other peo­ple and race a series of point to point races; that’s it. Where are the cop chases, excit­ing one on one rac­ing from the story, and where is does all this lag come from; shoddy mul­ti­player design that’s where. There is attack heli­copters shoot­ing at you dur­ing the story, there is Porsche SUVs with gun tot­ing mob thugs hang­ing out of them dur­ing the story that shoot at you, there is the infa­mous red tint around the screen show­ing your health dur­ing these chases and none of this can be shared with any­one. One last gripe and we shall trot on is the reset sys­tem. I like the idea of a story racer where each race is designed to be a level and within that level you only have some many tries to get through it; that is what we call pro­gres­sion and I am a fan of it. What I don’t like is when after your glo­ri­ous death sequence involv­ing your super­car crush­ing itself against some $15,000 Dodge hatch­back and metal, plas­tic, and glass shards are thrown through­out the air like con­fetti, you have to wait at least 5–10 sec­onds at a black screen with a puls­ing rewind but­ton break­ing the action of your high speed metal twist­ing car­nage. You have enough time to down a 12 oz. can of Moun­tain Dew so that you won’t fall asleep at what is essen­tially a load screen because some­one at Black Box took the day off and failed to keep any sense of immersion.

Now, despite my gripes, I did really enjoy the game. The dri­ving was fun, I never had to did­dle with cus­tomiz­ing cars and mak­ing them look “pimp” (I hate pop cul­ture), and there was a real sense of excite­ment dri­ving at 150+ while heli­copters are shoot­ing at you while cops are in pur­suit only to switch to a QTE. There is gen­uine fun to be had with The Run, but the fun is dabbed into the story instead of the story bathing in it. This is worlds bet­ter and much cleaner than Black Boxes last effort but my com­plaints are out­weigh­ing the pos­i­tives. The game is worth play­ing if you can get it at a good price or even give it a few days rental. The story dri­ven racer is a unique take on a genre that really hasn’t seen inno­va­tion in quite some time. It’s a unique exper­i­ment that resulted in a stink bomb rather than a crip­pling explo­sion. With a few tweaks, a proper title update, and some worth­while DLC this could be a title I could return to in the future. It’s not a bad game by any means, it just needed less time between the excite­ment, a story that won’t be blown away by a slight breeze, and a fleshed out multiplayer.

+ QTE’s don’t get in the way of the racing

+ There are some truly excit­ing set pieces

+ The games visual pre­sen­ta­tion is top notch

+ Mix­ing a story ele­ment into an arcade racer and mak­ing it work

- Reset time is irritating

- The story is paper thin

- The main char­ac­ter is flat and annoy­ingly smug

- The main char­ac­ter wasn’t crushed at the begin­ning of the game

- Call of Duty like length

November 28, 2011

IntKeys.com Service

With our new part­ners IntKeys behind us and us behind them it seems that it is time to do some inves­tiga­tive report­ing. Well I did just this by mak­ing a pur­chase under an unknown name and got all the ser­vice that I expected and then some. When I took it upon myself to go through with what I had hoped was a good deal I looked every­where and IntKeys is still the best place to pick up keys. Let’s get into the process and how I was left very impressed.

You start out by choos­ing the game that you are want­ing to pur­chase. The details are given straight out of the box and onto the page so that you can see exactly what it is you are think­ing about pur­chas­ing. Price is given plus the retail cost that you would see any­where else.

When you get to the page that asks for a pro­mo­tional code, you can enter ours and get an addi­tional per­cent­age off the price that is listed. Just to give you an idea of how long it took from com­ple­tion of trans­ac­tion to the time I was given my key i’ll include some screen cap­tures of my e-mail inbox below.

All in all, a fast ser­vice with proof of pur­chase. If you have to do busi­ness with key ven­dors, these guys are top notch.

November 13, 2011

Sonic Generations

It’s offi­cial. After years of fum­bling around with strange top­ics and awk­ward, seem­ingly untested game­play, Sega has pulled out a truly excel­lent Sonic the Hedge­hog game. Although short, it’s a sweet ride that hope­fully will get the Spin-Dash ball rolling again.

The game fol­lows an incred­i­bly sim­ple sto­ry­line. Sonic’s friends are in the process of throw­ing him a birth­day party when a giant mon­stros­ity (which I shall hence­forth refer to as the Fly­ing Pur­ple Peo­ple Eater) appears out of nowhere and cre­ates a vor­tex which sucks in all of Sonic’s friends. Sonic chases them into what appears to be a giant white limbo. Even­tu­ally, he and the res­cued Tails note that the areas and ene­mies are sus­pi­ciously famil­iar. Upon stum­bling on ver­sions of them­selves from the past, they dis­cover that they’re trav­el­ing through time. It sounds kind of silly, but the sto­ry­line of this game isn’t the point.

The per­son really trav­el­ling through time is the player. Every level in the game comes from some Sonic game in the past, span­ning the whole his­tory of the series from the very first Sonic the Hedge­hog to the recent Sonic Col­ors. You play through each level as both Mod­ern Sonic, who han­dles like you’ve come to expect from Col­ors or Unleashed (or, if you’re unfa­mil­iar with those, Sonic Adven­tures, only with a few new pow­ers and occa­sion­ally sidescrolling) and Clas­sic Sonic, who han­dles the same way he did in the Gen­e­sis days. Each level is bril­liantly reimag­ined, rang­ing from incred­i­bly famil­iar feels with the “cor­rect” Sonic for the level to fit­ting and inter­est­ing spins with the other Sonic.

Every­thing about this game is designed to tug at the nos­tal­gia strings. The lev­els both look and feel famil­iar, with the same ene­mies and many of the same rec­og­niz­able areas as in their orig­i­nal titles. What evoked the most nos­tal­gia from me, how­ever, was the music. Each level fea­tures two takes on the orig­i­nal music for that level, rang­ing from almost-cover reper­for­mances to new and inter­est­ing remixes. I took far longer than I should have to beat the game because I prob­a­bly played my most mem­o­rable level, City Escape from Sonic Adven­ture 2, ten to twelve times before mov­ing on.

Apart from the main story arc and stages (which is, sadly, an incred­i­bly short ride that lasts under 5 hours), the game is full of chal­lenges of all sorts using por­tions of each stage. Some revolve around other char­ac­ters, such as hav­ing to use a search­light to find a cam­ou­flaged Espio, or run­ning through a level with no rings save for the ones that Cream the Rab­bit drops for you. Oth­ers involve using spe­cific items from past games to clear stages within a lim­ited time, or rac­ing a dop­pel­ganger Sonic. If you really feel like hav­ing a nos­tal­gia jour­ney (or you’re too young to have expe­ri­enced it and want to see what it was like), you’re able to play the orig­i­nal Gen­e­sis ver­sion of Sonic the Hedge­hog after buy­ing a con­troller in the item shop with points you earn by play­ing levels.

I loved this game, and with­out tak­ing any­one else into con­sid­er­a­tion, I would have given it a 10. How­ever, there are a few draw­backs to Sonic: Gen­er­a­tions. As I’ve already said, the game is rather short, but bears the weight of a $50 price tag. That’s $10 less than the usual game price, but still a rather hefty cost for the amount of time you’ll spend with it. Also, some of the dia­logue is incred­i­bly child­ish. I under­stand the need to be able to mar­ket a Rated-E game to chil­dren whether it’s nos­tal­gic or not, but a few select lines made me feel like I was watch­ing Nick Jr. or PBS Kids. Lastly, some of  the bosses took a while to beat, not due to dif­fi­culty, but due to sheer con­fu­sion. The final boss, namely, was so con­fus­ingly “sim­ple” that I had to double-check my meth­ods by look­ing on the inter­net. Yes, for a Sonic game.

Com­plaints aside, Sonic Gen­er­a­tions is an excel­lent game for all ages, but most of its effect comes from nos­tal­gic value. If you were ever a Sonic fan, you’ll def­i­nitely enjoy this game. It is a mas­sive step in the right direc­tion after Sonic Unleashed (seri­ously… a were­wolf?) and Sonic the Hedge­hog 2006 (a game so bro­ken I’ve dubbed it my biggest per­sonal gam­ing dis­ap­point­ment of all time and con­sid­ered giv­ing it an AVGN/Spoony-style Let’s Play beat­down.), and proof that Sonic is NOT dead. With Sonic cer­ti­fied “alive”, per­haps all hope is not lost for what could be the great­est Sonic game of a gen­er­a­tion, should it come to be: Sonic Adven­ture 3. Hear me, Sega? Sonic Adven­ture 3. We want it, prefer­ably with Crush 40 cre­at­ing the title theme.

Pros:

• Nos­tal­gia
• Excel­lent, solid gameplay
• Nos­tal­gia
• Qual­ity sound­track, cre­ative remixes
• Nos­tal­gia

October 22, 2011

Homefront

Home­front is a THQ brain­child that uti­lizes the Unreal Engine and shows what beau­ti­ful art and per­for­mance on lower end machines can do. I fell in love with this game being my first play-through I took my time and lis­tened to every­thing I could, read every arti­cle I could find and all. The cam­paign for Home­front is by far one of the truly epic. Although excru­ci­at­ingly short it is absolutely mind blow­ing. The video in this arti­cle is the open­ing cut scene for the game, watch it to get an idea of where you are start­ing your mission.

This game is bru­tal. If you get sick eas­ily, don’t play this as some of it is a bit grotesque for patri­ots or vets. Though the story makes for a good game it is a bit hard to not imag­ine it as pos­si­ble. The game also dis­plays ad space pur­chas­ing from TigerDirect.com in a long chap­ter where you are run­ning through their main facil­ity all you see is the name all over the place.

Graph­ics — 9

The Unreal Engine has granted THQ the abil­ity to run super high end tex­tures and graph­ics with­out the need for huge caches of video mem­ory and thus has let me play at max set­tings on my sys­tem at min­i­mum 20FPS (Sys­tem specs at the bot­tom). I, being an Unreal Edi­tor user and map cre­ator myself know from expe­ri­ence how won­der­fully you can tex­ture to make the appear­ance of three dimen­sional object with­out the need for fully three dimen­sional poly­gons, and this is what help with the ample beauty even on low end machines. THQ could not have done bet­ter com­bin­ing the Unreal Engine with Havoks’ physics engine has given them the abil­ity to out per­form and enhance oth­ers with a smaller bud­get in place for the titles.

Playa­bil­ity — 9/4

I gave two rat­ings for this for one rea­son, the dif­fer­ence in cam­paign to mul­ti­player. The cam­paign if you couldn’t tell by now has had me enam­ored. The mul­ti­player, how­ever, is lack­ing any­thing dif­fer­ent from the past few CoD releases. To call the mul­ti­player a MW2 clone would not be a far pull. It is run almost to the T exactly the same with the amount of guns/items even less then half that of CoD. I can­not accept a new release that is a car­bon copy on a more pop­u­lar game with­out some sort of com­pen­sa­tion. The fact that even had a mul­ti­player at all seemed to be more or less an after­thought. It is so weak in com­par­i­son to what was expected after play­ing through the cam­paign that I could not even get past level 5. This in turn is why I believe the com­mu­nity has fled. They would have done much bet­ter to copy a bet­ter plat­form for mul­ti­player, say.… Bat­tle­field for exam­ple. Either way, the playa­bil­ity in the cam­paign is awe­some. Even on the nor­mal dif­fi­culty I died about 50 times before fin­ish­ing it. The game is not hard to the point that you want to quit but it is also that which makes it a bit odd. I would die only to see the AI to fol­low the exact same pathing and I could play a scene 10 times and finally find where to hide, how to shoot with­out ever get­ting shot. Trial and Error.

Audio — 7

The game is all voice acted and done well with the mouth work­ing in uni­son with words. It is about as good as expected, though some of the gun sounds are a bit fil­tered or sat­u­rated. They seem to vary gun to gun and have an off queue sound to fir­ing if only by the small­est frac­tion of a sec­ond though that may be my lack of a proper sound card.

All in all the game is a great suc­cess and for the price that you would pay at our friends, IntKeys, you can’t pass up this title.  Get a bonus 5% off their already low prices by using the TGB dis­count code: 224c76cae8

I would rec­om­mend it to any FPS fan for noth­ing more than the sto­ry­line. Oth­er­wise, wait for MW3 as the mul­ti­player is a match to it with a ruined community.

October 21, 2011

Gunnar Optiks: Yellow-Tinted Gaming Glasses

While I typ­i­cally tend to ignore most of the ads on the side of my Face­book page, I occa­sion­ally find one that inter­ests me. That’s how I found out about my now-favorite game store, and it’s also how I first heard about Gun­nar Optiks. Gun­nar Optiks pro­duces glasses that reduce eye strain and enhance con­trast on screens, and are mar­keted towards both fre­quent com­puter users who suf­fer from var­i­ous eye­strain related symp­toms, and towards the pro­fes­sional gam­ing com­mu­nity. Two of the gam­ing mod­els in the Gun­nar prod­uct lineup are endorsed by MLG, and a few more bear the SteelSeries name.

When I first heard about these, I won­dered about them for only a few min­utes before I moved on. They bear a pretty hefty price tag for some­thing that may or may not actu­ally help you at all. How­ever, a full year later, curios­ity and incred­i­bly sen­si­tive, fre­quently blood­shot eyes got the best of me. I got the “PPK” model from Best Buy for about $80 on Tues­day.  My opin­ion of them has fluc­tu­ated, but after using them for a few days, I’m happy with my pur­chase. I’ll talk you through my experience.

One thing to note is that these are not “glasses” in the tra­di­tional sense; they’re designed for peo­ple with nor­mal vision and are more com­pa­ra­ble in func­tion to sun­shades. If you use glasses, I might sug­gest wear­ing con­tacts under­neath these if you truly feel you need the strain reduc­tion. How­ever, in that case, I’d rec­om­mend talk­ing to your optometrist to see if there’s a bet­ter solution.

When I first put on the Gun­nars, I was quite under­whelmed. They turn every­thing yel­low. That’s pretty much all it looks like they do. Look at a screen, and everything’s yel­lower than nor­mal. I was fairly dis­ap­pointed in them within the first hour or so, but I decided to keep them on through­out the day to see how well they worked. It should be noted that an adver­tised fea­ture of these glasses is screen glare reduc­tion. It does this mod­er­ately well, but if your screen is kind of dirty and has an enor­mous win­dow shin­ing on it like mine does, there’s only so much it can be helped.

I really began to notice a dif­fer­ence on the first night of using the Gun­nars. The pri­mary light source in my room is a giant flu­o­res­cent bulb built into my desk, less than two feet from my face when I’m using the com­puter. It’s typ­i­cally a bright, shiny punch to the eye­balls, but the Gun­nars really cut down on the strain that it gen­er­ally causes. It turns out that these glasses are far more effec­tive at com­bat­ing strain in set­tings where your pri­mary light source is flu­o­res­cent or incan­des­cent. In day­light, they’re less nec­es­sary. When I woke up the next morn­ing after first using the Gun­nars, I was incred­i­bly impressed by the lack of red­ness in my eyes. Typ­i­cally, they’re blood­shot if I use the com­puter past midnight.

After a few days of play­ing all sorts of games with these glasses on, I can attest to their per­for­mance enhanc­ing capa­bil­i­ties. How­ever, these aren’t “100 meter dash” glasses, they’re more suited to gam­ing marathons. Wear­ing them dur­ing a com­pet­i­tive match won’t really do much more than cut a bit of screen glare and pos­si­bly increase the con­trast a bit. How­ever, if you’re plan­ning on play­ing a fairly ocu­lar inten­sive game (such as a first per­son shooter or a game with a lot of small things on screen to pay atten­tion to) for hours on end, these will def­i­nitely save you a lot of headache (lit­er­ally). Play for five hours straight with a naked eye, and try again the next day with Gun­nars; you’ll def­i­nitely notice a difference.

While the Gun­nars do a pretty good job of per­form­ing their adver­tised func­tions, they also have to be judged on the same qual­i­ties as any other sort of eye­wear. They’re still, in essence, a cloth­ing arti­cle, so com­fort and style come into play. The PPKs are some of the most nar­row of the bunch, and they look nice, sleek, and pro­fes­sional. They’re com­fort­able to wear for long peri­ods of time, and the tem­ples are thin and flat so as to not inter­fere with headset-wearing. They’ve worked with every head­set I’ve tried wear­ing with them, but there could pos­si­bly be an issue with espe­cially large over-the-ear head­sets. All of the Gun­nar gam­ing mod­els are designed with headset-wearing in mind, and they come in a vari­ety of styles (espe­cially pop­u­lar are the MLG Leg­ends, which are an “Avi­a­tor” style).

All in all, I feel as though the Gun­nar Optiks PPK glasses were a good addi­tion to my set of gam­ing gear. Those of you who don’t pull long stints ingame and don’t have sen­si­tive eyes or headaches might want to give them a pass, but for me, they’re great per­for­mance enhancers. You can order Gun­nars online, or buy them at Best Buy and a num­ber of other stores. The Gun­nar Optiks web­site has a handy store locator.

Pros:

• Com­fort­able and stylish
• Good for sen­si­tive eyes, strain-induced headaches, and long gam­ing sessions
• Don’t inter­fere with head­set usage