I came into Halo Wars with high hopes and dreams of a masterly crafted RTS, and I expected it to be a bit dumbed down because hey it’s a console real time strategy game. There was a lot of stigma attached to Halo Wars for that reason, and for the reason that a lot of people expected it to fail because they believed the Halo audience didn’t have the patience for Halo Wars. Halo Wars didn’t make it out as well as Halo 3 did, of course anyone could predict that. However the question remains.. is it good?

Some people will dismiss it without playing it and those people suck, if you’re going to bash a game, at least try it first. That being said, Halo Wars, believe it or not, is a good game. The missions are interesting, and even challenging, and everything just seems right. Let’s run through some of the strong points.
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Tired of killing creatures such as goblins, elves, druids, etc.? Then do I have a game for you. Fallout 2 is a game that’s totally revolutionary; with a post apocalyptic world, violence, and a lot of side quests.There’s an infinite amount of things to do in this game, which will make you want to play through it several times.
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Okami is a game you’ll either get to hate, or get to love. But for everyone, the first two or three hours of the game are spent in a neutral state of confusion. Questions like “What’s going on?” or “What the hell am I supposed to do in combat?” will pass through one’s head, as none of this is really clearly explained at the start of the game. But if you put a few hours into the game, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by this amazing gem.

There’s so much to be done in this game – so many things you’ll never notice until your second or third or fourth playthrough of the game – that you’ll never feel bored. Quite the opposite, first-time players may feel  a bit overwhelmed. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, there hasn’t been a game that really made me, at least, feel overwhelmed, since Ocarina of Time, and it’s a beautiful feeling when playing a video game. It seems like you can do everything and go everywhere. But for some people, this may seem a bit daunting. So much to do and no idea where to start? Some people may not want to muster up the effort to explore everything before them. (continue reading…)

Alundra 2 is a great action/adventure game with some RPG elements. Alundra 2 can and will disappoint fans of the first game because it doesn’t follow the first game. It’s just another sequel that uses the name of a famous franchise to sell more.

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Preface

Everyone has an opinion. There’s a rude saying that compares opinions to a part of the human anatomy that practically says one’s opinion is worthless. So why read any reviews? If you’re not a terrible cynic you may be able to pore through a handful of reviews, develop and understanding for what sort of lens the reviewer sees games with and define some sort of truth from the fluffy words of praise or harsh criticisms that would have no tangible value.

You might be thinking, “Get to the review already!” or “Stop wasting my time and give me your score!” but without a preface you may not understand the “lens” I see games through and how to get what you need from my opinions. If you really can’t stomach anymore though feel free to jump ahead and read the review.
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Having fun while raging? Possible? Yeah, that describes my childhood alright as it does now when I played Metal Warriors for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System; developed by Lucas Arts and published by Konami. In my own personal opinion, this is has got to be the best mech game for the SNES and within my top 10 of favorite games for the SNES.

The story begins in the 22nd century as you are one of the last survivors of Earth fighting against an evil axis ruled by a dictatorship. You are Lt. Stone and part of team called the Metal Warriors who fly around in mechs or “Space Armors.” You go from mission to mission to stop this evil axis, and you must do it all in one sitting because there aren’t any passwords or save points; you did it all in a single afternoon and you liked it, if not, then I don’t know why you are here – go back to playing your Bejeweled. That’s all there is to say about the story but unless you were playing a RPG, I wouldn’t think most people would care about the story for the majority of SNES games; because back then, all the story was in the manual and no one read those. You will get some story out of this in the cut scenes, but nothing too exhilarating. The cut scenes themselves though were well animated, at least for being on the SNES, so the opening one might be worth watching, while every other is just simply a mission briefing which can be skipped over. (continue reading…)

Are you ready to tread through horrible voice acting and predictable story line to get to the mech on mech action? Hope you are because Robot Alchemic Drive (RAD) for the Playstation 2 contains all the above; developed by Sandlot and published by Enix (not Square Enix you pre-teen gaming mongoloid). RAD offers something different to the mech fans out there as well to those who are nostalgic for bad anime dubbing.

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Deciding that I want eye cancer and to become obese at the same time, I played Jack Bros. by Atlus for the Virtual Boy. Jack Bros. is a very simple dungeon crawler for the Virtual Boy using original icons from Atlus, such as Jack Frost and Pyro Jack.

The story is very simplistic but it gets the job done. On Halloween all the faeries come out play with the small children to have fun and cause mischief. You play as a one of the Jack brothers, either Jack Frost, Pyro Jack (Jack Lantern in this game) or Jack Skelton (aka Jack the Ripper). Having so much fun playing with the children, you forgot you’re suppose to go home by the end of the day or else you will die because faeries don’t belong in the realm of humans. So off you go on your adventure to get back home with the aid of a small pixie that nags you at every single floor giving you the most obvious hints.

The game play itself is just as simple as the story. You go through many floors of a dungeon collecting keys and eventually get back to the faerie world. Each character plays pretty much same, the only difference is the sprites. So I decide to play through the game as Jack Frost, who in my opinion is the most lovable one of the three. The gameplay consists of running around collecting keys and shooting ice/fire/knives at enemies, and if you’re feeling feisty you can use a bomb too, which kills everything on the screen. The dungeons are small and narrow, so there’s not much room for you or the enemies. The floors are designed to be maze-like but can easily be solved by any grade school child; so it becomes hard to lose yourself on the map. There is also a radar that tells you where the keys are and where the exit is. There is no life bar, but rather a timer. The timer goes down every time you are damaged and once the time runs out its game over.

Overall the game play is just basic and repetitive. There’s nothing really much else to it besides the dungeon crawling aspect of the game. The monotony does break up when you reach the end of a dungeon to fight a boss, which changes things around as you now have an arena to fight in and it suddenly feels like I’m playing Smash TV. Each boss is unique in their own way and all of them are very fun fights. Even though the boss fights can be very exhilarating, everything in between gets a bit boring after mere minutes of playtime.

Nothing really much to say about the graphics in the game, besides staring at them for too long can cause eye problems. Shades of red aren’t really a beautiful sight to see, but it gets the job done, sort of. I would say besides the eyestrain, everything else about the graphics is just fine; everything is identifiable and you really can’t get confused between one sprite or the next. The music seems to remind me of every DOS game there is, even the NES and Gameboy had some catchy bits in their music library but the music in this really reminds me of the days of DOS music which can be either good or bad depending how you like it. Even though the music was a step backward in synthesis, it was for the most part adequate, I’ll say just above mediocre but that’s it.

The game is simple and fun for those who enjoy the dungeon crawling. If you like to kill thirty minutes, give the game a try; if you want to kill over thirty minutes, give the game a try – just go see optometrist afterwards.

It is 2006. Several years of inconsistent announcements, numerous delays and a growing association with Duke Nukem Forever indicates that an actual release of Team Fortress 2 is extremely unlikely. Then from out of the blue Gabe Newell (managing director of Valve) thrusts a teaser trailer into our faces confirming that TF2 is indeed on its way. Sporting a venturesome art style with what appeared to be innovative game play, the new look TF2 quickly soared to the top of many “most anticipated” lists. Launching in October of 2007, it became an instant favourite among reviewers, achieving a plethora of awards alongside its partner in success The Orange Box.

As an avid PC gamer, the desire for a new class based multiplayer game was immense. I desperately needed to escape the grenade spamming insta-prone aids festivity that was Battlefield 2. To my delight, and many other likeminded gamers, TF2 delivered just that. Besides the attractive stylized graphics and often comical game play, it shipped with a secret weapon, one which would inevitably be the key to TF2’s ongoing success and development.

Steam, the popular content delivery service functions as the core of TF2, supplying speedy updates and flawless content delivery. Gamer profiles and statistic pages are accessible through a simple yet faultless social network. Hell, you can even browse the web in-game using the Steam overlay. It is undoubtable TF2 would not be as popular as it is on PC today, if it was not for Steam. This is clear when we examine the unfortunate situation our console brethren currently face, which I’ll touch on a little later.

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Remember when Rare was a good developer?  Back before Kameo, before Starfox Adventures.  There was a time when Rare was a name you could trust, and seeing their logo on the box was a sign that this would be a very good, and very English game.

Among the last of those titles was Conker’s Bad Fur Day.  If you haven’t played it, you probably dismissed it as a Mature Game for Mature Gamers (such as myself), a game of nothing but tits, blood, cursing and gratuitous violence.  You were half right.

I recently received my old copy of BFD in the mail in a birthday package from my mother.  I was fucking psyched.
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