Rabbit Hole

Waiting, as the installer zipped through Marine Sharpshooter 4, I set myself up for a serious disappointment. Groove games doesn’t have a very good track record; except for maybe Playboy Mansion which I played for probably a total of 2 hours. I always like to give games a chance, I also always like to be as positive as possible when it comes to reviewing them. A no-name franchise from a no-name game development company doesn’t give me much to hope for, but alas I did what I always do; break out a can of coke, put on my headphones and got cracking.

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After getting Silent Hill 1 to work on my PC I powered through it-refusing to put it down. I can now see why so many people obsess over this series. In a couple hours I will have my hands on Silent Hill 2 and will be ready to continue the saga. For a PSX game Silent Hill is still fairly new (the PS2 came out after a year of this games release), but still as it stands this game is an amazing example of what the PSX is fully capiable of.

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I would never call myself a Devil May Cry veteran so before I started to play through this game I decided to do my research on the devil may cry story line. I’ve played DMC2 for a short while when I first got my PS2, but I didn’t fully understand what was going on. After reading the plot synopsis and talking to a few friends I figured I was prepared to play Capcom’s newest action adventure, DMC4.

From what I can tell DMC4 takes place after the events of DMC1 so its not another prequel like DMC3. However, with all that said, DMC4 plays much like a standalone game. There isn’t much reference to the other games, except some returning characters (Lady, Trish and Dante). In DMC4 you play as a new character Nero, he is a naive character who starts out believing Dante is the “bad guy” since he killed off Sanctus, the Order leader. Your girlfriend, Kyrie, is captured and as you progress through the game you begin to understand your true power and the true motives behind the Order.

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Yes, I have already finished Propagandas new game; Turok. Upon completion my cousin asked me: “How did you like it? Was the ending good?” Allow me to share what I said to him. Turok is a like delivering a baby only to find out you have to perform a c-section. You go in hoping for a miraculous creation, following a messy incision, followed by a short lived spectacle then you are forced to close what you have started. I went into Turok expecting an awesome experience; I remember the glory days of the N64 playing this game to no end. In fact I recently bought Turok for a friend who currently owns a N64 just so I could go over to his house and play it. Sadly I was mistaken… if I wanted to play another bullshit Gears of War clone using the new Unreal Engine I would either play Gears of War or Unreal Tournament 3… not this piece of crap.

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No More Heroes - Initial Review Link
Genre: Action Sandbox
Release Date: January 22, 2008
Developer: Grasshopper Manufacture
Final Rating: 8/10

Synopsis from IGN Games: There’s only one way to the top ranks of the underground world of paid assassins and it’s going to get messy. Lucky for Travis Touchdown, he just knocked off the world’s eleventh best without breaking a sweat. The life of fame and fortune couldn’t be closer.

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No More Heroes follows the life of a newbie assassin named Travis. His ultimate goal in life is to become the number one assassin in the city he lives in, Santa Destroy. Each assassin has his or her own rank, ranks start at one (being the highest) and 11 (being the lowest); Travis starts at 11. The entire game is Grand Theft Auto style sandboxing. In order to go up a rank you must first make enough money to pay for the event, in order to make money you have to do side jobs around the city. It’s all pretty basic and easy to grasp. There is another character in the life of Travis; a hard boiled girl named Sylvia. She is the one who guides Travis through his race to the top and sets up all his matches.

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Three great first person shooters are on my scope right now. I just got my greedy little hands on Unreal Tournament 3; I had the German version the other week, but refused to play it… but now… now my friends I have the English version and I am ready to pwn. We have been seeing media for this game for as long as I can remember and I am finally ready to make decisions on my own! The game is supposed to have amazing graphics and AI, but how does it favour coming so late into the game, against I.Ps like Crysis and COD4. Either way I am ready to mark another chapter into my Unreal book.

The release of UT3 couldn’t of came at a better time. Last night I just finished Soldier of Fortune Payback. Activision decided SoF wasn’t worthy enough for a full development team and put the title under Activision “Value” development. This really grinds my gears! Soldier of Fortune was HUGE when I was a child, with all its blowing off limbs, mindless violence and infinite bots coming out of every corner you could possibly imagine. Now its a second class citizen! A cast-a-way; something only to see in the bargain bins of Walmart! But no, this game is INCREDIBLE straight hardcore action with really good graphics and of course more mindless violence and limb blowing offing. The game starts out where you left off in the previous SoF’s; you are still pissed about your partner getting killed and now you are here for… well payback. You are instantly thrown into the fray fighting Americas favourite enemy… Iraq; trying to track down some weapon dealer and then heading to Asia to fight Americas second favourite enemy, Koreans… all very stereotypical. But what do you expect from Soldier of Fortune?! With Duke Nukem forever taking… well forever games need new Bruce Willis American Heroes. There’s nothing to say about the multiplayer of SoF:PB its just like anything you could expect from any old school first person shooter, you got your regular deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag and the subsets of the two. If you are looking to spend a couple of hours in a video game Soldier of Fortune would definitly be the way to go. Soldier of Fortune Payback has all the great qualities of the Soldier of Fortunes before it, plus better graphics and even better limb gibbing.

Lastly on my list is Crysis… I’ve been playing this game on and off for the past couple of days. I am making a valient effort to beat it, but it is a very very hellishly long game! I’ll keep you dudes and dudettes updated on when i finally do beat it, but guarenteed it won’t be for a while. Unreal Tournament 3 here I COME!!!

Today we have a guest writer! Mike McMahon from the Windsor Gaming Centre… he’s here to give us a guest review on Assassins creed!! Take it away mike!

Since we got the game I played it as often as I possibly could. The game started out with twist that took me by surprise by adding a bit of present day / futuristic content to the game. The storyline parts in between the assassinations all take place here, but thats the only time that anything happens in the “real world” as it would be. Once you get into the past, you take control of a character named Altair, who is an assassin in the days of the crusades. Your in the middle of a mission that you fail, and for that, you are demoted from the best assassin, to the lowest level. After each successful assassination, you regain one of those ranks to get new items / abilities. After waiting for all the preliminary story line stuff to end and adoring the awesome graphics, I immediately started free-running around town for a good 20 minutes. A complete waste of time, wishing that I could only do that in RL (Real Life), but fun nonetheless. Since I was in my own town I really couldn’t kill anyone, so I left for my first of 9 Assassinations. I needed to ride a horse to the first town, which was pretty sweet, only because it’s something that you can’t do in most games, and it looked really good. Sneaking my way past the guards into the city, I did a bit more free-running along the rooftops of Jerusalem (I think thats where it was anyway) and started looking for the target.

To get to the assassin’s guild I needed to get at least 3 of 9 “investigations” done to gain enough information to assassinate my target. There are only 3 ways to do this; Informant’s, eavesdropping, and pickpocketing. Informants have 1 of 2 missions for you once you find them. Either free-running to pickup a series of flags then returning to the informant before time runs out, or assassinating a specific guards before the time runs out. I did all of them with at least 1 minute to spare. Eavesdropping was rather easy, just sit down on a nearby bench, target the eavesdropping target, then press Y to eavesdrop. Listen to the dialog, and the mission is done. Pickpocketing is also rather easy to do. Target the guy carrying the intel, wait for him to finish some dialog with a random NPC, then wait till he isn’t looking, walk up behind him, and swipe the intel from his backpack (its more like a satchel, but whatever).

The hardest part was finding those missions. To do that I generally had to climb to the top of a tower, look around the area, and it would point out all the missions that were nearby, afterwards jumping off and landing in a conveniently placed pile of hay. Pain in the butt sometimes, other times it looked really nice so it made up for it. One of the three cities has a cathedral in it that was a ton of fun to climb, then fall off of and die because I couldn’t find the bail of hay to jump into. That process was to be repeated 9 times. Here I’m going to stop for those of you who would like to play the game and get into the storyline of it, because if i went any further I would end up ruining it.

All in all I thought the game was fun, and it looked amazing. However there is very little replay in it, other than the free-running part, which can get boring rather quickly. My final rating for it? 8/10, for Great graphics, and good first time game play.