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07.03.05 by Doc @ 6:32 am  Overall: Published by Kemco In the world of console gaming, there are genres that have just never been that well-represented. Perhaps chief among these conspicuously absent categories is turn-based strategy wargaming. In days gone by, I was a sucker for these sorts of games, from the earliest instance of Harpoon to SSI's fantastic "General" series (of which I think I played every single installment). And other than a port of Panzer General, the field for console strategy games has remained fallow. At least in the U.S. Now, one of the most venerable strategy franchises in Japan makes its debut on a current-gen console. Dai Senryaku VII ("Great Strategy," as near as I can figure) puts you in control of a wide array of contemporary military hardware in a series of scenarios designed to test one's generalship. In previous installments in the franchise, the focus was squarely on WWII, and involved serious historical re-enactment in the scenarios. This version, however, divorces the strategy from geopolitics by casting the two sides simply as the Red and Blue armies. I see why the makers might want to take this approach, as it allows them to fictionalize modern military conflict, rather than deal with uncomfortable politics. It also means that the game is free to assign your available units from any of the eight countries whose hardware is represented in the game. This provides for a ton of variety in the available forces at your disposal, though getting familiar with all the different units' capabilities steepens the learning curve a bit, as there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 different unit types, covering land, sea, and air. Categorized as: Games and Reviews
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05.04.05 by Doc @ 10:57 pm   Overall: Published by Microsoft Game Studios When BioWare dropped Knights of the Old Republic, I knew I was in trouble. Makers of some of the greatest computer RPGs of the past decade, coupled with not only the core d20/D&D ruleset but also with the Holy Grail of geek intellectual property franchises? Yes, please. Make mine a double. These bastards knew where I lived and breathed, and I was going to have to be careful lest they manage to steal every bit of disposable monthly income I had. Then, I was saved. The geniuses at Microsoft rushed them on the sequel, pushing it out the door with too many missing story bits and untied loose ends. Add that to Lucas' devaluing the whole Star Wars universe with craptacular movies, and I was breathing a little easier. Then BioWare came with the fu, and I was doomed. Categorized as: Games and Reviews
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12.07.03 by Doc @ 4:47 pm  Overall (not an average): Developer: EALA With Frontline, the Medal of Honor series returns to its console roots, once again placing you in the role of Lt. Jimmy Patterson of the U.S. Army, assigned to the invasion of Omaha Beach during Operation Overlord (D-Day, to the uninitiated). After the mad dash across the bullet-riddled and blood-soaked sands of Normandy, you're called back into service by the OSS, and sent on a series of missions deep behind enemy lines as part of the Allied press to crush the German war machine in the latter stages of WWII. From stowing away on a U-Boat to stealing an experimental Nazi jet fighter, the difficulty is high, but success means the end of tyranny in Europe. Categorized as: Games and Reviews
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12.02.02 by Doc @ 11:40 am  Overall (not an average): Developer: Digital Mayhem At first glance, Run Like Hell seems like a no-brainer blockbuster title. Combining the proven story elements of the survival horror hits like Resident Evil with some sci-fi goodness a'la Aliens, you'd just about have to try to screw it up. Remarkably enough, however, someone did just that. Despite a time-tested concept and an interesting new setting, the game's a snoozer, and feels half-done. Categorized as: Games and Reviews
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11.10.02 by Bailey @ 3:04 pm  Overall (not an average): Developer: Croteam Usually the port of a rather highly acclaimed PC game to a console is a Jekyll/Hyde scenario. I look forward to a chance to play the game that has gotten so much fanfare on the PC--I long ago gave up playing games on my PCs. Even though I sport a fairly robust desktop I've dedicated it to more "profitable" endeavors. Hey, that's why I bought an Xbox, for a dedicated gaming platform, one where I don't have to worry whether my video card and motherboard have the latest video and AGP drivers. Categorized as: Games
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05.09.02 by ScottC @ 9:00 pm  Overall: Developed by Raven Software Kyle Katarn is one of the best mercenaries in the New Republic. He used to be a Jedi, but after a too close brush with the Dark Side, he hung up his lightsaber. However, the Force has other plans for him. On a job investigating an Imperial base, he finds an unholy alliance between what's left of the Empire and a powerful Dark Jedi. Now with a multitude of weapons and the powers of the Force, he must fight alien smugglers, Imperial stormtroopers, and evil Force users to stop their nefarious plans of conquest and destruction. It's always fun to take out the stormtroopers and Rodians with your blaster rifle or thermal detonators, but it is with the lightsaber that Jedi Outcast achieves real coolness. The lightsaber combat is vastly improved over the previous game in the series. You can select several stances from defensive to aggressive, perform various attacks depending on your movements, and enjoy assorted body parts being sliced off your opponents. Another change is the game gives you new Force skills and increases their power instead of the player assigning points. This gets rid of the worry that you can't complete a level if you didn't put enough points in Force Jump, for example. And I can't begin to describe the joy of using the Force Grip power and listening to a stormtrooper's neck bones snapping. I can understand why Darth Vader used it so often. Categorized as: Games and Reviews
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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:
Eye Candy: Categorized as: Games
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01.15.02 by ScottC @ 8:26 pm 
US Release Date: November 14, 2001 On paper, The Sims doesn't sound interesting: you guide the lives of Sims (the people in the game) to furnish their houses, obtain jobs, form relationships, and go to the bathroom. But for a lot of people, it becomes addictive. You can become attached to your Sims, concerned about their well being; financial, physical, and emotional. It also helps that many of the features of The Sims are done in a tongue-in-cheek style, from the funny descriptions of the various objects around the house to the swelling music when two Sims fall in love. The newest addition to this is the Hot Date Expansion Pack. Hot Date focuses on the social aspect of the game. Your Sims have more flexibility in relating to other Sims, from how friendly a greeting can be (a wave, a handshake, a friendly hug, or a "very friendly" hug) to the subjects they can talk about (the 60's, crime, technology, or travel). How you gauge the contacts your Sims have has also changed. Replacing the status bar on the health of a relationship are two status bars, one on how things are going at the moment and another on how the relationship is going as a whole. The biggest improvement that comes with this new expansion is the Sim Downtown. Categorized as: Games and Reviews
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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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