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

October 20, 2011

Batman: Arkham City Review

In 2009, devel­oper Rock­steady released some­thing that was unimag­in­able, a Bat­man game of our dreams. Arkham Asy­lum was not only the best Bat­man game ever made, it was also the best licensed game to date; depend­ing on who you talk to. AA would have been a feat for any devel­oper let alone a rel­a­tively unknown dev with only one game under their belt. Despite being the Bat­man game we deserved, it wasn’t the one we needed right now. AA had its share of flaws but the deep story, unmatched melee mechan­ics, and superb voice act­ing and artis­tic design took the game to new heights. Could the Dark Knight rise again and top­ple the vil­lainy in Gotham? Could Rock­steady fol­low up what could have been the shin­ing star in the devel­op­ers cat­a­log? YES, YES and more YES!

I will get this out of the way now, I love Arkham City in every way a gamer can love a game. To me, this is not just a Bat­man game, but an expe­ri­ence like no other. AC is now the clos­est thing we have to being the Dark Knight prowl­ing the streets of Gotham and beat­ing jus­tice into the thugs of the crim­i­nal under­world. Arkham City takes place 18 months after the con­clu­sion of AA. With Arkham Island in despair; the city, along with War­den Sharp and Hugo Strange cre­ate what is known as Arkham City. Arkham City is a small por­tion of old Gotham that has been trans­formed into high secu­rity cen­ter with an under­ly­ing turf war between Gotham’s top vil­lains. The story starts as Bruce Wayne is peti­tion­ing to shut down Arkham City as it was the place of his parent’s death, and in his mind, not the answer to Gotham’s prob­lems. That is as far as I am going with the story to avoid spoil­ers, but do note the story is once again penned by Paul Dini, and pushes the caped cru­sader to his phys­i­cal and moral limits.

With the set­ting being moved more towards the city of Gotham, the visu­als have been kicked up to 11. Arkham City is visu­ally strik­ing. The unique art style AA was known for is back and look­ing bet­ter than ever. Hit­ting the mid­dle between Tim Burton’s dark style and Christo­pher Nolan’s real­is­tic approach is where AC hits. With iconic places such as Ace Chem­i­cals and the Ice­berg Lounge spruce up the imag­i­na­tive cityscape. All of the char­ac­ter designs are han­dled with the up most respect; you won’t find any bat nip­ples here or tight white span­dex with ques­tion marks sewn into the crotch. The newly intro­duced char­ac­ters like Two-Face, the Pen­guin, and Mr. Freeze are brought to life like never before. AC tops the charts as one of the best look­ing games avail­able on the consoles.

Any­one that has played Arkham Asy­lum will feel at home with how Arkham City plays. The com­bat and move­ment have been retained but hold new sur­prises that make you feel even more like the Dark Knight him­self. Get­ting around the much larger world is a breeze thanks to improved glid­ing and the abil­ity to use a stronger grap­ple to launch Bat­man into the night sky with­out ever touch­ing the ground. The dive mechanic brings new moves to flight and com­bat as well. Div­ing at an oppo­nent from the rooftops enables you to grab and drag ene­mies into oth­ers with great force. The” free flow” com­bat has received a tune up allow­ing you to take down and counter up to two ene­mies for max­i­mum skull crack­ing effi­ciency. Cat­woman does have a few playable sec­tions this time around and she does han­dle a bit dif­fer­ently than the often delu­sional Dark Knight. She is quicker in com­bat and her whip and climb­ing abil­i­ties make tra­vers­ing the ter­rain a breeze.

Any­one that knows me knows I love sound­tracks and feel they are an intri­cate part of any media expe­ri­ence. Arkham City is a triple caramel sun­dae for the ears. The music is finely crafted to make your bat­man expe­ri­ence have epic movie qual­ity. In all seri­ous­ness I plan on pur­chas­ing the sound­track. The voice act­ing is in realm of its own; so few games have voice act­ing of this cal­iber. Kevin Con­roy and Mark Hamill reprise their roles as Bat­man and the Joker. As Mark Hamill’s swan song to relin­quish­ing the role of the Joker, there is no finer dis­play of his tal­ents than in this game. Some only rec­og­nize his as Luke Sky­walker, but any­one a fan of the early 90’s Bat­man the Ani­mated Series will see him as one of the best Jok­ers of all-time. Video game voice guru Nolan North (aka Nathan Drake, among many other video game char­ac­ters) makes his impres­sive DC debut as the Pen­guin, among sev­eral thugs. The inclu­sion of using radio fre­quen­cies to over­hear the thugs ban­ter was inge­nious and if you ignore the ban­ter you are miss­ing some of the game’s best lines.

Arkham City is not a per­fect game, tech­ni­cally. There are a few glitches here and there but the QA is near flaw­less. Arkham City not only defines what a Bat­man game can be but also how you take a great license and makes the most out it. Just as Uncharted 2 has shown us sequels can grow out of the shadow of their pre­de­ces­sors, Arkham City has done the same.  I have never felt so wrapped up in Gotham, the grit of the under­world, the frailty of the sym­bol, and the mor­tal­ity of the man. This is the game fans deserve, the game that will save them from the blight of mass pro­duced sequels, this game is Batman.

+ Amaz­ing visu­als and animation

+ Dark, adult story with plenty of surprises

+ The best voice act­ing in video games

+ Superb soundtrack

+ Refined con­trols make com­bat and glid­ing a great enjoyment

+ Hours of game to under­take with the story & Rid­dler challenges

+ 4X the size of its predecessor

+ ooz­ing atmos­phere out of every orifice.

-   Stu­pid things like work and sleep get­ting in the way of play­ing this amaz­ing game

? Other games have a lot to prove to con­tend with Arkham City for GOTY.

October 17, 2011

Dead Island

This title has had tons of pub­lic­ity and hype built via the inter­net and with a lot of hype comes a lot of high expec­ta­tions. Dead Island failed in no way to deliver. Dead Island brings all the fun of destroy­ing zom­bie hordes with the abil­ity to cre­ate and mod­ify your own arse­nal of weapons and skills. In this review I will be going over the pro, the cons, and the down­right awe­some­ness of this release.

Let’s start with the bad.

Graph­i­cally speak­ing, the ter­rain is some­what spec­tac­u­lar, I know that seems like a good, but where the ter­rain looks good other aspects lack. Pri­mar­ily the zom­bies them­selves and the vehi­cles are a bit sim­ple. For a game this far into the graph­i­cally amaz­ing gen­er­a­tion that we game, this point can­not be over­looked. I believe that the devel­op­ers had been using a plat­form with lack­lus­ter per­for­mance so as to make the game viable on a large array of sys­tems and the only way to keep size small they didn’t want to make a mul­ti­tude of dif­fer­ent tex­ture pack­ages for each indi­vid­ual zom­bie. More on this in the good sec­tion as it ties with a great aspect.

The bad also con­tin­ues with a bit of a bug PC ver­sion wide. The gamma adjust­ment set­ting for the game is off by a long shot mak­ing peo­ple play the game with a severely over sat­u­rated effect. Leav­ing the gamma default makes some parts of the game a bit too dark but quells the sat­u­ra­tion effect dras­ti­cally. This may be a bit of a hin­drance for PC folk, how­ever, it does not seem to affect peo­ple run­ning Dead Island on con­soles as bad.

The last bad is a bit from player error but it should not be this super­flu­ous in a per­sis­tent envi­ron­ment. When you throw a weapon at an enemy and the weapon lays on the ground after its use­ful­ness has been employed, if you die… the weapon is lost for­ever as the area “resets”. In a game where you are able to throw any and every­thing you can pick up why would you employ this fea­ture? Ok, maybe I am not think­ing within nor­mal bound­aries here but to be fair one of the Char­ac­ters is a Thrown Weapons Spe­cial­ist. If you throw a weapon you maxed out in upgrades and was a very rare find and you hap­pen to back too far away or die, you have just com­pletely lost your pri­mary hard­ware for defeat­ing ene­mies. This may not be a big deal in the early game but later it becomes a bit of a big deal as weapons can cost a lot of money.

Now on to the good, and for every bad I can name at least 10 good aspects. That is a pretty good ratio if I do say so. First and fore­most, the envi­ron­ment, I find that the world itself is beyond beau­ti­ful. There are a ton of wind­ing path­ways and back alleys. There is always at least two ways of reach­ing your des­ti­na­tion, if not more. With that being said, you need a great graph­ics proces­sor to really enjoy the vast beauty that is Dead Island. With max set­tings the game looks almost like a win­dow to the out­side and that alone is worth the invest­ment. Even on the low­est set­tings the game is graph­i­cally very impres­sive as it only drowns out some foliage and other non action ori­ented items.

With this world being as big as it is you need a vari­ety of ene­mies and with Dead Island it is deliv­ered it ways other imag­ined. In other games where the world is rather large you find that many of the ene­mies are just a recol­ored or reskinned hatch­ling of a low level mob. Not here, there are so many dif­fer­ent ene­mies that just walk­ing through the game you would think it almost a real­ity to have so many “peo­ple” run­ning around. With this aspect comes the fact that you can­not reskin each mob to reflect mul­ti­ple lev­els of graph­i­cal detail. The ren­der­ing is soft­ened by option but it leaves them look­ing a bit less than pre­mium at max due to this. Either way, this makes you as a player feel much more involved in a real world sit­u­a­tion than a repet­i­tive hack n’ slash style genre.

Weapons weapons and more weapons. Have you ever since “Shaun of the Dead” thought of the mul­ti­tude of ways to destroy a zom­bie? This game gives you that and so much more. You can pick up almost any item and use it as a weapon against the hordes of mur­der­ous brain eaters or even take some of them and give them a bit of a more lethal edge, for exam­ple tak­ing a bat and adding nails to the end. If you really don’t care for that why not jump up and drop kick your oppo­nents and then kick their face into the dirt. The abil­ity to decap­i­tate and dis­mem­ber these piles of meat via any­thing sharp makes for a fun gath­er­ing of friends by the beach. As for guns, yes there are some, why bother grab­bing those up except in the event that your sickle should break or your 2x4 piece of lum­ber snap in half and already have been thrown at the enemy? There are an array of guns though for those want­ing to snap off a few well placed shots and see heads explode into a gory mess behind their target.

Char­ac­ters, the dif­fer­ent style of play are not restricted to the cho­sen char­ac­ter though each have their spe­cialty they can wield any­thing you want them to. That being said lets have a bit of an idea of each one shall we?

• Sam B as the Tank-class of the group has the abil­ity to sus­tain heavy dam­age and han­dle numer­ous foes at the same time. His spe­cial abil­ity is “Fury,” which is achieved by fill­ing up a bar by killing zom­bies. He is also an expert in blunt weapon usage. Dur­ing a Fury attack Sam can one hit kill zom­bies with his bare hands. The three branches of his skill tree are Fury, Com­bat, and Survival.

• Xian Mei is the assas­sin of the group with a par­tic­u­lar predilec­tion toward bladed weapons. The three branches of her skill tree are Blood Rage, Com­bat, and Sur­vival. Her spe­cial abil­ity is to enter a rage mode to deal extra dam­age to oppo­nents with her knife.

• Logan Carter is the jack of all trades within the team. He spe­cial­izes in thrown weapons and some blunt weapons. His rage mode allows him to throw an infi­nite amount of knives at nearby zombies.

• Purna is the sup­port within the team, and a firearm expert. When her Rage mode is acti­vated Purna has unlim­ited ammo with her Revolver.

The RPG ele­ment is very well done. It is sim­i­lar to Bor­der­lands in that you level up and select a skill under one of three trees and progress fur­ther as you add points to a tree. You can mix and match and make your char­ac­ter com­pletely unique to the style in which you play said char­ac­ter and to me that is a huge plus. Dead Island does not let you get behind what­so­ever. When you level the ene­mies in which you encounter are as well your level and thus makes the game pro­gres­sively harder whether or not you quest or grind your way to max level.

All in all I give this game a 9. It could not go lower but no higher either as some ele­ments of bugs here or there make the game a bit non user friendly. That being said I would highly rec­om­mend get­ting this title and start your trek across this island full of insane muti­lated killer corpses. Pick up a copy for your friend or fam­ily mem­ber as the game is co-op and makes for an even fun­ner adven­ture. You can get a PC copy of the game from our friends at IntKeys.com. They are trust­wor­thy and truly top tier for online key pur­chas­ing. Use our promo code for an even higher dis­count: 224c76cae8

October 13, 2011

Forza Motorsports 4 — First Impressions

Forza Motor­sports is an Xbox exclu­sive title and that may push some peo­ple away, but per­son­ally, I believe that con­sole is where dri­ving sims belong. I have been a HUGE Forza Motor­sports fan for many years and went and bought an xbox 360 and a copy of the freshly released Forza Motor­sports 4 (rel date 10-11-2011). I will be explain­ing a first impres­sions view of the game and some of it’s recent updates.

The first thing out of the box that jumps out is the discs are almost iden­ti­cal to the pre­vi­ous release of FM3. I had to check the box again to make sure that I hadn’t bought the wrong title. Worry not weary trav­el­ers it is indeed FM4. Upon load­ing the game for the first time the open­ing video dis­plays its most notice­able new fea­ture, Auto­vista. In the Auto­vista room you can exploded view the vehi­cle and look at the inte­rior and exte­rior sim­i­lar to that of a 3d tour and spurts of infor­ma­tion shine out to tell you infor­ma­tion regard­ing the car that you are explor­ing. You can even start the engine and hear that lovely roar from inside the cock­pit while watch­ing the dash clus­ter come to life in the car of your dreams in an almost sur­real realism.

Auto­vista is not with­out it’s faults how­ever. The most notable fault is that there are only a lim­ited selec­tion of cars to auto­vista. You can­not just gen­er­ate a vehi­cle from your garage and explore it as far as I have seen thus far and that is kind of a bum­mer but it is a step in the right direc­tion. This shows the capa­bil­ity of a graph­ics sys­tem almost ten years of age.

We have in the past seen the drift­ing com­mu­nity of FM explode in pop­u­lar­ity as Forza is the pre­mier in sim­u­la­tion when it comes to sling­ing your fan­tasy around a cor­ner side­ways at obscene speeds. This com­mu­nity has asked for a lot of improve­ment in the drift­ing depart­ment and low and behold Turn 10 has brought it to us. We now have not only some of the most wanted drift­ing machines imple­mented such as, s13 Nis­san 240sx hatch­back, but also crews. You can cre­ate or join a group of folks and have a club/crew/clan and have a shared garage full of vehi­cles that are shared among the group for videos or events. This is what I have always had in mind when think­ing of clan war­fare on the bat­tle of choice and Turn 10 brought it to the fore­front of gaming.

Now the fanboy-dom is over. There is never good with­out bad and here are a few things that I have found and been annoyed with. First off, some of the pre-order free­bies were never sent out or were not avail­able to have. Places like Best Buy who had issues with the release left many cus­tomers with­out their pre­cious pre-order free­bie of a BMW 1 M series. Now, this may not seem a big deal, but peo­ple gen­er­ally pick up pre-order pack­ages purely for the free­bie offered by that place of busi­ness and this looks bad on every­ones part.

October 10, 2011

Deus Ex: Human Revolution Review

It’s finally here, eleven years later, Deus Ex: Human Rev­o­lu­tion has come and ye shall not be dis­ap­pointed.  In an age where reboots of reboots of reboots are com­mon I must say that I was skep­ti­cal and with the recent fail­ure which was Duke Nukem I was more than a lit­tle con­cerned with this game being a com­plete flop.  I’m very happy to say that this was not the case. 

Deus Ex: Human Rev­o­lu­tion is a great game but it does have a cou­ple of things that hold it back from being per­fect one.  There aren’t many things that Deus Ex: HR does wrong but if I were to pick the biggest one I would say it would have to be the fact that it feels like it forces you to play the game in a cer­tain way.   For exam­ple, you get almost three times as much expe­ri­ence play­ing the game via stealth instead of run­ning and gun­ning.  This isn’t a deal breaker by any means but I pre­fer to play using a run and gun style and I felt I almost had to play it in a stealthy man­ner (think splin­ter cell) oth­er­wise I wouldn’t get to expe­ri­ence near as many of the unlocks the game has to offer if I didn’t play the game in a stealthy way.  There is also the issue of the cutscenes, I love cutscenes, but when they don’t look as good as the game itself it kind of takes away from the immer­sion.  I’ve always been of the opin­ion that if you are going to do cutscenes use live action cutscenes or use an amped up ver­sion of the game engine to ren­der them. 

Graph­i­cally the game shines, espe­cially if you have the PC ver­sion with DX11 turned on.  Many of the com­puter con­trol rooms look sim­ply stun­ning, espe­cially rooms like David Sar­ifs office.  They sim­ply look stun­ning.  The game takes you all over the world and each of these locals looks vibrant and dif­fer­ent.  Each one feels unique and fresh and if I had any com­plaint I wish it would have taken you to some oth­ers.  There were a cou­ple of places where it felt like they just wanted to get what­ever they were doing over with.  Near the end of the game, one of the back­drops looks almost like a piece of paper with paper birds.  I felt like they could of spent a few more min­utes and taken it from ok to amaz­ing.  Back­drops can add a mas­sive wow fac­tor to a game and can really take it to the next level. 

The game sounds amaz­ing and it’s ooz­ing with it.  Hum­ming of elec­tron­ics and grind­ing of gears, peo­ple talk­ing in the street, preacher talk­ing to their crowds, city sounds, and the list goes on Deus Ex sounds spectacular.   

There is plenty of betrayal, love, hate, bit­ter­ness, revenge and hap­pi­ness to go around in DX:HR.  The plot in DX: HR cen­ters on Adam Jensen fol­lows your choices just like the pre­vi­ous titles, deci­sions you make, peo­ple you kill or peo­ple you don’t kill all add to the end­ing of the game.  The story from begin­ning to end, no mat­ter how you play, is enthralling and enjoy­able.  I’ve found myself lately with a lot of games unable to fin­ish them, and these were eas­ily ¼ the length of DX: HR and I can hon­estly say that I couldn’t put this game down.  I enjoyed it from begin­ning to end and I was sad to see it end.    

Despite its small flaws Deus Ex: Human Rev­o­lu­tion is an amaz­ing game, one that deserves to be played and mul­ti­ple times at that.  The stealth style of game­play may scare some peo­ple away, it almost did me, but I am glad that I decided to play it any­way.  If you have been on the fence about pick­ing this game up let this be the final push you need to get it. 

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