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04.16.02 by Doc @ 4:04 pm  Overall (not an average): Developer: AM2 With the demise of the Dreamcast, Sega has turned its attention to crafting games for the platforms that have to date survived the Great Console Wars. Having perhaps cornered the market on weirdness with Rez, Sega returned to its roots with Virtua Fighter 4, the third sequel to the game that started it all. The original Virtua Fighter was the first 3-D arcade fighting game ever, and the franchise has created a legion of unwaveringly devoted fans. And this new entry will be no different, in the long run, despite the proliferation of fighting franchises. The first thing one notices when playing is the eye candy. This game looks phenomenal. Incredibly detailed textures, characters composed of 10,000 polygons (compared to XBox fave DOA3, which clocks in around 8500), stunningly rendered backdrops, and environmental effects are all tuned to highest potential. Anyone that wants to argue about whether or not the PS2 can keep up in the graphics race need look no further than this one. I find it particularly amusing that they bested DOA3, who jumped to the Microsoft ship claiming that the graphics they wanted "couldn't be done" on the PS2. Virtua Fighter 4 also provides lots and lots of playing options, with a little something for most any fighting fan. The standard arcade mode, a head-to-head 2-player Versus mode, and the incredibly challenging Kumite mode are the major attractions, with some training options and the unusual A.I. mode (where you train a CPU-controlled fighter to kick ass for you) rounding things out. Of particular note is the Kumite mode, in which you select one of the 13 characters, and proceed through an unending series of opponents, increasing in rank and gaining items and additional costume options for your fighter. This is sort of the default single-player mode, where you can increase and polish your skills, all the while moving up the ranks of the fighting elite. At this point I must confess that I've never been particularly good at fighting games. I was never one of those guys in the arcade fending off challengers on Mortal Kombat or even Karate Champ. I was the sucker that jacked in a quarter and promptly found himself picking virtual teeth out of the virtual mat. But against the machine, I'm decent. I've beaten a couple of games, through all modes and all characters. But I will never enjoy that kind of success with VF4. I've seen a few other review sites that claim the learning curve is approximately 30 minutes. To which I must append "...if you happen to be possessed of the reflexes of a mongoose on several lines of premium Colombian cocaine." This game could take months to master, and even that would be no guarantee of success. This would be great, except that the learning curve isn't a nice, linear kind of progression. Basically, with any character, I found I could ascend through the first ten ranks (kyu) with relative ease. And then suddenly, as soon as I crested into the second tier (dan), pretty much every opponent of equal or greater rank mopped the floor with me. Incredibly frustrating. I'm used to games that get gradually more difficult over the course of levels, but VF4's progression goes from relatively easy to absolutely insane in one rank advancement. Now, other players better at these things might go farther, but I suspect that the same plateau exists at the third and fourth sets of ranks, meaning that sooner or later, everybody finds their level, and promptly gets stuck there for a good long while. In this, the training mode is some help, but not much. Many of the more elaborate moves available require you to be able to time button presses in a set number of animation frames. And I'm just not technically skilled enough to know when I'm three frames into a move versus when I'm five frames in. With VF4, it matters. A lot. If that kind of complexity appeals to you, or if you're a hard-core fight game player, then this is without a doubt your best option. Sega set out to make a real fighter's fighting game, and succeeded in spades, but at the cost of being terribly appealing to the casual or new player. Eye Candy: Categorized as: Games and Reviews
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04.10.02 by Doc @ 11:23 am  Overall: Developer: Ion Storm While we were all making fun of John Romero for having promised to make us "his bitches" in full-page trade ads, and then delivering a flaming bag of poo instead of the next DooM, Ion Storm's other big-shot game designer, Warren Spector, snuck Deus Ex around to the side door. Mixing first-person shooter elements with a dose of role-playing, and taking some story cues from classic console games like Metal Gear Solid, Deus Ex presented a great blend of shooting, stealth, and skill development. This gave the game more depth than Quake, more action than a typical RPG, and better replayability than most games. It was lauded fairly widely, and now it has been released for the Playstation 2. You take on the role of JC Denton, a new breed of nanotech enhanced "super agent" under the employ of a secretive UN-sanctioned anti-terrorist unit. In Denton's dystopian future, the current US president is allowing the UN (and specifically UNATCO) increasing in-roads into American politics, going so far as to turn over Liberty Island for UNATCO HQ. A plague is also sweeping through the world, killing thousands, while the rich and powerful get their monthly dose of vaccines and medication without fail. When a rogue group of terrorists steal a shipment of the valuable vaccine ("Ambrosia"), it falls to Denton and UNATCO to recover it, and put a stop to the terrorists once and for all. Gameplay will be instantly familiar to anybody that has logged a few choice hours playing FPS games. The only real tweaks to gameplay come with the addition of the nanotech augmentations and your skills. As you accomplish the various mission objectives, you receive points to spend on JC's skills, making him better at sneaking, shooting, stealing, swimming, what have you. This flexibility enables you to customize the character to your style of play. Want to blast things? Dump all those points into weapons skills. Like to sneak past the guards, picking locks and disabling security? Lockpick and multitool skills are for you. You can even jack up your computer skills and hack ATM terminals for extra green, just in case you have to haggle with the street dealer for his spare box of 10mm clips. The non-combat facets, however, don't possess the kind of depth that would make them really shine. Lockpicking is as simple as pushing a button, as is hacking, or bypassing electronic security. No attempt was made to put a gameplay mechanism in place that would be interactive or challenging. You either have enough "units" of each tool to get the job done, or you don't. No player involvement. And while the dialogue interactions with various characters are surprisingly deep (you can gain new info from some characters on a sixth or seventh consecutive Interact command), the voice-acting is really hit or miss, and a great deal of the information you can pick up is simply "flavor text," with no immediate bearing on the main plot of the game. It is interesting and well-written, though, and while some have said that Denton's monotone voice got old, I found his delivery pretty amusing in places. The graphics are good, but not great, originally based on the Unreal Tournament engine (now looking a bit dated), and the consistently oppressive and dark backgrounds and textures make many parts of the game look exactly the same. A few levels stand out from the pack, though, including missions in Paris and Hong Kong, so it's not a complete wash. The sound is generally forgettable, but not obtrusive, and the effects (weapons fire, shouts of alarm and pain, etc) are good stuff. As mentioned above, some of the voice-acting is great, and much of it is mediocre, so there's nothing stand-out in that category, either. The story is immense, far-reaching, and shows influence of rabid militia conspiracy theorists, Robert Anton Wilson, Bill Burroughs, and a host of other weirdness. The plot continually turns and twists, leaving the player wondering which side of this conflict is right, which one is wrong, and what team he should be playing for at the end of the day. And the interactions with other characters will reveal that your choices have lasting impact in how others react to you. Go in guns blazing all the time? The battle-weary supply officer will restrict your ammunition allotments to "settle you down," but the old guard cyborg commandos will laud you as a "born and bred killer." It's pretty unsettling when a random person in a Brooklyn tavern knows that you were the one responsible for the deaths of hostages because you got trigger-happy. Even once you've beaten the game, there are multiple endings available depending on your choices and actions throughout the game, so it's worthwhile to go back and try again (though the game clocks in near 30 hours to complete). Considering all the different options you have for customizing your character's skills and nanotech abilities, a few different selections here and there lead to a remarkably different gameplay experience. Eye Candy: Categorized as: Games
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01.18.02 by Ripp @ 9:43 am  Overall: Developer: Red Storm Entertainment The No. 1 complaint I hear about first-person shooter games is that they aren't realistic. People seem to want something that they can relate to more than the worlds portrayed in Doom or Serious Sam. If that's your complaint, then this is your game. Ghost Recon (referred to as GR) is a first-person shooter set in the world of Tom Clancy's novels. As the game opens in the year 2010, we learn that the Russian government has been taken over by a group of hard-line Ultra-nationalists. The Russian war machine is being readied for an invasion, with troop movements and buildups at Russia's western border. Only one force stands between the Russian front line and the former soviet republics: the Special Forces group known as the Ghosts. They've been tasked with running interference against the Russians until the bulk of the NATO force can mobilize. The game puts the Ghosts in your hands, leaving their fate (and the fate of nations) within your grasp. The rules of the GR universe are simple. There are no hit points. There are no bosses. There are no levels. You and your team of riflemen, demolition experts, snipers and heavy weapons "support" specialists are tasked with completing several goals during each mission. How you achieve these goals depends on your playing style as well as the makeup (and experience) of your squad. Game play is divided into two sections: the mission briefing/squad selection stage and the actual mission. In the briefing you are given your objectives for the mission and any relevant information about the enemy presence in the area. During squad selection you have the opportunity to select soldiers based on their specialties and their statistics in key areas of combat, like stealth and weapon use. After you have completed a mission you will also be able to use this screen to allocate more points to these stats, giving the player an incentive to play smart and keep a squad alive. Game play during the mission will be familiar to anyone that has played a FPS game before. Aiming is done with the mouse, while moving and all other functions critical to the mission are done via the keyboard. One particular aspect of gameplay worth noting is the command map function. With this tool you can see a crude map of the mission area and where your fireteams are at the moment. By utilizing a control system on the map itself you can direct your squads to separate waypoints and targets, all while leading one team yourself. Through efficient use of the command map it is possible to attack three targets at the same time, just as a real specops unit would. This gives the game a feel of realism well beyond what GR's competitors have to offer. Also adding to the feel of realism are the dynamics of the game itself. Uniforms get wet when you walk through water, and snow crunches underfoot. Enemies will respond appropriately (and differently) to the sounds of snapping twigs or gunfire. Your squad members will seek cover at all times, and won't fire unless they have a kill shot, or you ordered them to. As you run your weapon becomes harder to control, adding a degree of difficulty to the usual "point and shoot" interface. Where GR really wins is in its replay value. The game itself has several difficulty settings, as well as playing the "quick mission" option where mission objectives and details are changed. Add to this the fact any mission can be played in the multiplayer arena, and you have a game that guarantees hours and hours of additional play. I've logged over 100 hours and the game still doesn't bore me. Ghost Recon promised an accurate and exciting view into the life of a Special Forces unit, and it delivered. You should be able to find it at your local electronics superstore for around $40.00, and it's worth every penny! Minimum System Requirements:
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01.14.02 by Doc @ 2:26 pm  Overall: Developer: United Game Artists Since the earliest generation consoles, pretty much every game produced has fallen neatly into a genre, making it easy to market, easy for fans to find, and easy to review, as there are "standards" of a sort for each genre of game, be it FPS, RTS, sports, RPG, whatever. And now there's Rez. And I have to start from scratch, because, despite the fact that it's advertised and marketed as a "shooter," it's infinitely more complex than that. Rez puts you in control of a little wireframe person, zipping through what looks to be some sort of VR cyberspace computer network, full of wireframe landscapes and polygonal bad guys representing the network's defense systems. So you zip through the network "on rails" (for the uninitiated, this means that you have no control over your movement, just your aim), and you blow up security programs, with the obligatory "boss monster" at the end of each of five levels. Categorized as: Games
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01.05.02 by Doc @ 2:15 pm  Overall: Developer: Racdym The venerable Wizardry series of computer RPGs dates back to the Apple ][e, and fans of the genre have kept the franchise alive through numerous platforms and incarnations. While not always as visibly flashy or innovative as their contemporaries, the games have always provided what is essential to CRPG fans -- interesting, deep gameplay. Die-hard CRPG players will be the first to tell you that you can keep your flashy graphics and gimmicks, provided that the dungeons are deep and the character development equally so, so the series has enjoyed good success throughout the years. Wizardry: Tales of the Forsaken Land continues the franchise's long-running tradition, extending it to the Playstation 2 console. Entering into a brutal market dominated by the likes of Square's Final Fantasy X was a gutsy move for a series long-known for its minimalistic approach to gaming, but Atlus manages to present a game that is fun, long-lasting, and provides the best parallel to desktop computer gaming yet to hit the console world. The first thing likely to strike console gamers are the graphics and sound of the game. The visuals are, as typical for Wizardry, minimal, using hand-painted watercolor stills for character interaction and backgrounds, switching to 3D polygons only for actual dungeon-crawling. The creature models are quite good, and well-animated throughout, but since the game operates in a first-person mode, players will never get to see their own character, and only occasionally will they see their fellow party members, when they appear as the aforementioned watercolor paintings during party interaction. The sound, perhaps the weakest point of the game, is virtually non-existent. Mediocre music clips and no voices at all make for an instantly forgettable aural experience. The game would be better served by providing important interaction as voice, especially since the graphics are minimal enough that DVD space shouldn't be an issue. The game shines in its nuts and bolts, however. Character creation provides fairly broad (if fairly standard) options for adventurers, with a second "tier" of classes available only after a certain experience level has been reached. Standard fantasy races are all available (dwarves, elves, gnomes, and hobbits), and the core classes cover the archetypal bases (thief, sorceror, priest, warrior) of the fantasy genre. Once a solitary character has been made, the game begins, and players have the option of acquiring other characters for their party (total of 6 possible). These other characters can either be recruited at the local tavern, or the player can enter the Adventurer's Guild and make more characters, which then become available at the tavern. There are advantages to both methods, and I had my best success with a mixture of pregenerated hirelings and some I had created myself. Once you descend into the town's local dungeon (the only one you will explore during the game), the game shifts to a first-person 3-D perspective, where the player steps the entire party through the dungeon, one 10'x10' square at a time. Combat is interesting, allowing players to choose from either individual actions for all party members, or the featured "Allied Actions" that combine attacks, defenses, or assistance from multiple characters to achieve a greater effect. Not merely fluff or optional material, mastering the AA system is critical to defeating some of the more impressive enemies in the game, and one's access to the various AA options is limited by how long the party members have been together, and how well their alignments (good, neutral, or evil) match both the leader's alignment and the player's actions. Attack too many friendly creatures, and good-aligned parties will lose access to some Allied Actions. Keep 'em happy, and you steadily gain access to more and more impressive cooperative abilities. While there is only one town and one dungeon, don't be fooled into thinking the game is short. The "Labyrinth of Duhan" is incredibly deep, and each level is massive. Some are straight-forward mazes, where the only goal is to find the exit. Others involve some fairly intricate puzzle-solving skills in order to reach the next stairwell down into the depths. While replaying the game, with it's preset quests for various townspeople, might get a bit repetitive, the various character and party composition options could make for some quite different experiences the second time around. If you're a die-hard CRPG player, don't miss this one. Likewise if you've been a fan of Wizardry's previous games. If, however, you're looking for something to curb your junkie-like twitching for the next Final Fantasy game, this one might leave you a bit cold. While it doesn't deliver the pre-rendered and animated thrills of some of the other available titles, Wizardry: Tales of the Forsaken Land is a different approach to console RPGs, reminiscent more of its desktop ancestors than its flashy Japanese contemporaries. Eye Candy: Categorized as: Games
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